Soup, there it is.

Right after Hurricane Sandy, Slate published an article called "Can the Cans" that encouraged people to forgo food drives and donate money to organizations that specialize in obtaining and distributing food to the people who need it.

Basically, you will get the biggest bang for your buck -- help the most people possible -- by writing a $10 check to the Food Bank for New York City or City Harvest instead of buying $10 worth of canned food. $10 might get you eight cans at Key Food, but those organizations will use the $10 to buy many pounds of food at wholesale prices:

All across America, charitable organizations and the food industry have set up mechanisms through which emergency food providers can get their hands on surplus food for a nominal handling charge. Katherina Rosqueta, executive director of the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania, explains that food providers can get what they need for “pennies on the dollar.” She estimates that they pay about 10 cents a pound for food that would cost you $2 per pound retail. You’d be doing dramatically more good, in basic dollars and cents terms, by eating that tuna yourself and forking over a check for half the price of a single can of Chicken of the Sea.

I run a food pantry for tenants in my supportive residence and each month I stock all kinds of canned chicken, mac and cheeses and salty noodles. There's a few stacks of Top Ramen in one box, a pile of Cup Noodles in another. Tenants no doubt appreciate this stuff, but it seems like a waste of donors' money.

Contributing tangible food packages feels good. It's gratifying to think that, later this month, some poor person who used up their food stamps too soon will go to a food pantry and actually eat the thing you donated! Yet, we have to spend our limited money wisely. That means we should identify and donate to effective organizations that will stretch your dollar and purchase giant cases of chicken and 10 lb. bags of rice.

As for the cans collecting dust on your shelves? Donate them already!

My pantry is mostly filled with soup, pinto beans and heavily salted corn, but I also find a bunch of exotic delights hidden among the WWI trench rations.

I imagine someone got a basket of biscuits and confusing spreads for Christmas one year but never found a way to use the organic honey. (Free-range bee vomit is way healthier and environmentally conscious. Duh.) They donated it instead of throwing it away. That's awesome!

People have to swallow their pride before they dip into a food pantry. They don't want to toil on a fixed income and have to eat second-hand food. I think it's great to offer some classy, foodie fare. For example, here's freaking foie gras.

In this case, someone read one of those generic animal rights action pamphlets and learned exactly how we get that duck's liver so plump and delicious. After retching, they donated all their canned poultry parts. 

Finally, East meets West over in my pantry. We recently received a few bags of panko bread crumbs, probably from a new carb-counter who purged their cabinet of all grains. Meanwhile, someone else donated about fifty bags of Nutrisystem meals. Maybe the two donors should have just swapped cupboards.

People shouldn't feel like they have to subsist off the crap no one else wants when they visit a food bank or pantry. I encourage you to donate all that interesting cuisine you'll probably never open.

3a. When gun violence barely matters (stray bullets)

After three days of searching for info online and speaking with a few area cops (who knew nothing about the shooting), I found this bit about Monday night's shooting deep within a Daily News article:

On Monday, a 57-year-old woman was wounded by a stray bullet during a shootout by youths at 116th St. and Fifth Ave. Less than an hour later, a 17-year-old boy was shot in the face at E. 109th St. and Second Ave.
 

And here's the Post's brief account:

A woman was struck in the back by stray bullet yesterday in East Harlem, cops said.The 57-year-old victim was wounded at around 5 p.m. on East 116th Street near Fifth Avenue.
“I heard one shot, then two shots,” a witness said.
“People were screaming and everyone was running on the street."
 

Bullets bouncing around the sidewalk right when most workers head home for the day. How do you prepare for that shit?

The Daily News' article describes a recent survey of 1,100 East Harlem residents conducted by Hunter College's Silberman School of Social Work and the Union Settlement Association, in which 77% of those surveyed listed "crime reduction" as "extremely important." Residents cited the rising crime rate more than any other issue affecting El Barrio.

This morning, I went online and saw this headline: "2-year old girl watching cartoons is hit by stray bullet in Tennessee."

The Year of the Gun continues.

We do not accept it in suburban areas. We should not expect it in urban areas.

3. When gun violence doesn't matter

Malcolm X's Mosque No. 7 at 116th St. and Lenox Ave

116th St. is an artery pumping energy through Harlem from Morningside Park to the East River. It's a hundred-foot wide multicultural belt across the island.

I like walking along 116th St. I like watching men and women in ornate dashikis head to evening prayers in 'Le Petit Senegal,' I like reading the celebrity sandwich names in Amy Ruth's and checking out the glow-in-the-dark dunks at the sneakerhead shops. I like passing the Mexican tiendas and the lady making elote out of a shop window. There's a Target inside a giant shopping complex on the East River at East 117th St so I walked on 116th to get there last night.

Who's that little dashiki in the window?

When I got to 116th and Madison, I noticed a platoon of cops surrounded a yellow-tape corral that stretched from a check cashing site (more about that scourge of the low-income neighborhoods in future posts) in the middle of the block to the MetroNorth overpass above Park Ave. I approached and saw reporters scribbling notes, police officers interviewing shop-owners and passersby rubber-necking from the street. I asked one cop what was going on.

"There's been a shooting," he responded.

I cautiously continued to Target, now much less interested in the eastern transition from African Muslim to Latino Roman Catholic culture. At 2nd Ave, I ran into one of my tenants waiting to cross the street. He told me he always takes 116th to get to his mother's, even though she lives a few blocks north, because the street is lined with lively businesses. The other nearby streets are secluded and, therefore, dangerous

I told him about the shooting I had just passed.

"Aw. Shit. This was supposed to be the safe street," he lamented.

On Friday, a lunatic murdered children in a Connecticut elementary school. A week before, a businessman was shot dead in Columbus Circle and a Kansas City Chief killed his girlfriend then himself. Gun Summer 2012 featured a massacre at a movie theater, a shooting outside the Empire State Building and a terrorist attack at a Sikh temple. Finally, as Americans' support for logical gun control grows, every respectable news outlet is flashing FUCK GUNS across its website or broadcast.

Despite the rundown of shootings that the Huffington Post featured on Saturday and the Newtown/gun control coverage that dominates WNYC and The Daily News, I found nothing about the crime scene I passed on 116th St./Park Ave. except for these three sentences. And that information is wrong!

But this was just another shooting uptown, right? Couple of gangstas with beef and anger? We expect that shit and don't even pay attention to it, even in the midst of anti-gun fervor.

Let's care about guns and violence more consistently.

2. EDP vs. NYPD

EDP stands for Emotionally Disturbed Person. When you call 911 and say someone is EDP, the emergency responders take that shit seriously.

Helen came to the social service office in hysterics and screamed she couldn’t take “the dirty bitch upstairs any more!.” Helen was not EDP. Just fed up with her quadmate Claudia who kept slamming her door, pacing the apartment and ranting that God was sending her messages through the news anchor on 1010 WINS. Claudia was EDP.

The other case manager (CM) in our office called 911 and NYPD arrived five minutes later. They clammed up when they heard that Claudia is EDP and waited until EMS arrived.

Brief interlude: While we waited in the lobby, Benjamin, the biggest drug user in the building, stormed through the front door with a long cut on his temple and dried blood on his chin. It was late-December and he was wearing one shoe. There is a scene at the beginning of Earl Sweatshirt’s EARL video where the Odd Future collective pours cough syrup, weed, pills, beer and other drugs into a blender, turns it on and chugs the cocktail. They get FUBAR’d then have seizures, bleed from face holes and pull off their finger nails. It’s disturbing, but that’s basically a day in the shitty life for Benjamin. He has serious addictions and if he ever stops getting high he will be left with nothing but that life, which would suck to live in.

I asked him what had happened. He continued to limp-sprint through the lobby but shouted that he was attacked yesterday and spent the night at the hospital. He couldn’t talk right now, he said, because he had to get to his methadone program before it closed. For the record, that’s the methadone program that continues to give him methadone, replacement for heroin, even when he comes to the clinic high as hell. He came back from his room and paused long enough to tell me he lost the shoe while running away from his assailants whom he claimed stole his wallet, money and drugs in the projects. Benjamin is white in a dark-skinned neighborhood. He's from South Carolina and he’s a white trash racist. He told me the thieves were black and they robbed him because he’s not.

Actually, they probably robbed him because his torso is like a Ziploc bag full of wet oatmeal, he was fumbling with cash and he was already high.

I didn't say that though -- that's bad social work -- and, anyway, Benjamin was dangerously close to missing his methadone. He limped away and we tabled deeper discussion for whenever he was coherent enough to chat.

Back to Claudia. EMS arrived and we all proceeded with caution to her apartment
Claudia is diagnosed with schizophrenia, which she does not manage. A nurse injects her with Haldol, an anti-psychotic drug, every two weeks (when she does not avoid him). Even at baseline, Claudia is very sick, but she is never sick enough to welcome the cops into her home. She pretended to sleep when we arrived and a gruff lady cop threatened to bust open the door if she did not open it. This bothered me. Why goad someone with a mental illness?

Meanwhile, I stood in the living room with an EMS worker. You’re not a New Yorker, are you?” he asked.

I told him I was not raised in New York City and asked how he could tell.

“You’re too nice for this shit." 

That was before "this shit" had even started.

My coworker confidently coaxed Claudia out and she emerged from her lair with six bags strapped to her shoulders. After a life spent on the streets and in shelters, she does not feel comfortable in her own home. She moved in ten months earlier, but her closets and drawers remained empty. Her possessions were still crammed in woven plastic bags.

The forceful lady cop told Claudia to drop the bags so she and her partner could inspect them before they took her to the psychiatric unit of a local hospital. Claudia refused.
Again, the cop told her to lose the bag. Again, Claudia refused.

The cop approached and told her a third time to drop the bags. Claudia called her a “prejudiced bitch” and spit in her face.

The cop grabbed Claudia and shoved her into a chair. She choked Claudia with her right forearm and held Claudia's face against a windowsill with her left hand.

“She spit on the wrong fucking person!” the cop screamed and turned to the EMS workers. “Get a mask on this bitch because if she spits on me again I’ll kick her ass.”

The other cop helped his partner restrain Claudia by holding her arm behind her back and grinding her chest into the chair. EMS clamped a mask on her like she was an anxious animal at the vet’s office. The mask muffled Claudia's screams. 

“You’ll all burn in hell with Satan!”

My EMS buddy met her furious eyes. “Burn in hell?” he asked. “Save me a seat.”

She called him an Uncle Tom as they shoved her on a stretcher and took her out of the room.

* * *

That was one of the worst, most conflicting moments of my life. It was like the cop was looking for a reason to act aggressively, to blow off some steam.

What should the cop have done the moment Claudia spit in her face? Why did she provoke that response from Claudia? Why did she escalate the tension by first threatening to kick in Claudia's door then confronting her in the living room? Did the cop use excessive force when she slammed Claudia into the wall and threatened her? Or was that a reasonable, understandable response to being spit on? 

On a broader scale, the incident highlighted the fraught, adversarial relationship between the police and poor people. Would the cop have behaved so aggressively from the start if she was responding to an EDP at an Upper East Side penthouse just a few blocks south?

What do you think?

1. The triangular schism

Let's begin with this unoriginal observation: American society, any society, is a triangular hierarchy with a few people on top and a lot more below.

But too many ‘conversations’ addressing our bottomed out social structure are burnt toast. There are so many problems with so many solutions, so many individual examples of suffering and achievement, but all we get are stale references to the 99%, the shrinking middle class, Main St. vs. Wall St, the achievement gap, food stamp statistics, jobless rates, blah blah blah. You click on an interesting headline, skim the thesis, realize you just read the same sentence three times and open a new tab.

The image of society as a mountain is pretty well documented, too. It’s a mountain in three segments and it’s hard to jump from tier to tier.

The tiny tip is snow-capped white. Beneath the peak is a schism separating it from a small, slightly darker midsection. That parallelogram is partitioned by an even deeper, at times impassable, ravine. And below this schism is a widening gradient scale that darkens as it bottoms out. It's getting wider every day.

Instead of rehashing tales from the Trite-wing Media, I want to learn about and try to understand the experiences of real people on the bad-luck side of the wide triangular schism.

* * *

I belong to the middle section of the triangle. I am fortunate. I was raised by a middle-class, married, college-educated, mother and father. I went to a respected northeastern university, I have no college loans and I have a job.

I work as a case manager at a supportive residence in Harlem. Each of our tenants moved into our building after sleeping in alleys and then navigating New York City’s vast shelter system. Before this, I worked in another supportive residence in East Harlem. Each of those tenants had a mental illness and most had a mental illness and chemical addiction (MICA -- there's an acronym for everything). Many subsist on $166/month public assistance. Some survive without health insurance. Others work part-time, minimum wage jobs but somehow manage to pay their rent on time and budget for groceries. The consumers I serve are securely anchored to the bottom of the mountain with little realistic opportunity to cross either schism.

Meanwhile, some of my best friends stand firmly at the peak. I easily bound the schisms when I visit their vacation homes, drink beer in their stadium suites and sit shotgun in their luxury cars. I’m really lucky.

I will never pretend that my life is difficult, that I am of a certain strata because I work with heroin addicts and ex-Latin Kings or hang out with executives’ sons. I am an eyewitness to the various tiers of our national mountain. I’m learning about society and here’s what I have seen. No boilerplate. No bull shit.