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.

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.