Bodies On The Line

Bear Witness. Then Keep Making Choices.

Image Credit: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York

Creative Commons BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

I'm thinking about one of those days, not long before the killing of Jordan Neely, when — on the same northbound F train line — a disheveled homeless man who had been sprawled out in the middle of my subway car sat up wild-eyed and began ROARING, cursing and glaring. One rider moved to another car, while the rest of us sat and kept our distance in stoic silence. Eventually the man stopped his screaming tirade, stood up as quietly as the rest of us, and shuffled off the train at the next station.

In order to "do no harm," we each need to do what we can. Sometimes, that means sitting in discomfort without escalating a crisis. For some, it means moving to another subway car. For others, it means offering money or food. At our best, "do no harm" involves bearing witness to understand — and then resist — the deadening, deadly process of dehumanization. 

"I didn’t kill Neely. But I didn’t do much to save him, either."
— Issac Bailey, CNN

While I generally don't give money to people begging and don't usually have extra food available, I always try to offer simple human acknowledgement and eye contact — unless I sense that this would not be safe or helpful (as with the man above, whom I simply monitored out of the corner of my eye while he roared).

And nearly 40 years ago, I spent my first of many overnights in faith-based respite shelters for individual homeless people. In the shadows of Jordan Neely's death, I began to sign up for overnights again. Sadly, Neely himself would not have passed the necessary screening for these shelters, given his acute needs and arrest history. Yet respite bed programs can support many others who have not — or not yet — been pushed to the same extremes of trauma and despair. 

Image Credit: Brooklyn Heights Synagogue (bhsbrooklyn.org/homeless-shelter)

A neighborhood-based organization provides single-mattress cots with linen service and blankets to participating houses of worship. Volunteer coordinators schedule and support other volunteers to cook and serve dinner, or to stay overnight on cots in another room and then offer snacks, leftovers or breakfast in the morning. A drop-in center screens and busses 8-10 unhoused fellow human beings to each site in the evening, and picks them up again in the early morning.

It may not be the most convenient or comfortable way to spend the night, but it's one of the most safe, accessible and REhumanizing ways I've found to put my own body on the line. We bear witness — beyond finger-pointing — to our tangled tragedies of homelessness in a way that, however incremental and small, is part of a real solution for real people. Simply by sleeping on a basement cot for one or two nights a year, I become a small but essential part of a greater solidarity network — one that can and does advocate for broader policy changes. Meanwhile, individual homeless people get a decent night’s sleep — which prevents the debilitating foot swelling that comes from sitting up all night in a chair, and increases the chances of moving into permanent housing.

350 Lafayette Street, 1914. Image Credit: Flickr Commons Project, 2011

Another way to bear witness is to to walk up a block or two from the subway station where Jordan Neely was left dead. There stands a building formerly known as 350 Lafayette Street, originally constructed in 1914 as the first free animal hospital in the United States. By the time the crises of NYC homelessness began to attract (affluent) public attention in the early 1980s, the animal hospital had become a central municipal shelter for homeless women. In 1988 the private nonprofit CUCS (now the Center for Urban Community Services) began to operate the site.

The best-practices success of CUCS at 350 Lafayette Street over the next 27 years involved placing more than 1,500 homeless women into affordable housing, working with an average of 55 women annually. That was not enough to prevent their eviction in 2015, when the landmarked building was sold to a major developer of luxury retail stores. For awhile, "upgraded" as 11 Bond Street, the building featured SHOWFIELDS NoHo: "a multi-level store highlighting unique, direct-to-consumer brands in wellness, home & design." Showfields ultimately filed for bankruptcy, and 11 Bond is seeking new upscale retail tenants.

SO HOW ARE WE MOVING OUR MONEY?