Everybody Counts
Affirming Individual Dignity & Rejecting Jerkism.
A battalion of Americans, 1,200 strong, marched across New York City last Tuesday. On a freezing night, this foot patrol covered nearly every square block of the metropolis. Their mission: count people.
Literally. To tally every person in public spaces between midnight and 4 am. Then ask them if they had a place to sleep that evening. If they did not, offer them transport to the city’s vast shelter infrastructure.
I was fortunate to be part of this battalion. I went not out of love of basic addition but love of their ethos: Everybody Counts.
I was assigned to a squad of 6 departing from PS 452 and covering the territory near the glowing white and red lights of Lincoln Center.
Lincoln Center in the small hours
The New York City Department of Homeless Services outfitted us with large amounts of snacks and a standard questionnaire.
Like many people, I am upset by homelessness[i]. It disturbs my conscience and my sense of fairness to see people who have nothing living in a vast ocean of material prosperity. To participate as a member of the American social contract a person needs: food, clothes, a basic education, relationships with other humans, a job, and arguably most importantly of all: shelter.
And we fail.
As was on display Tuesday night: beside buildings housing $20 million apartments lay human beings huddled in tattered blankets.
A pair of decaying beige boots stood guard beside one sleeping man. On the other side of him lay a rolled up black bag. City protocol required us to wake him up since it was below freezing. The city wants to prevent people from freezing to death.
“Sir?”
Pause.
“Sir?” Gently nudging his leg.
A slight stir.
Again a nudge of his calf. “Sir?”
He threw off his blanket. His eyes squinted tight as the overhead lights hit him. A beanie covered his head; he had a grey goatee, its wiry hairs sticking up.
“Sir, we’re doing a survey for the city on housing. It looks like you don’t have a place to sleep tonight? Would you like for us to arrange transport to a shelter?”
He squints tighter. His body stiffens, alert. He shakes his head.
“Okay. Would you like some hand warmers, or some snacks?”
His head shakes slightly, then he does a double take. Wait. What did they say. A smile. He says: “Uh, yeah, sure. Thank you!” A thin arm reaches up to receive the food.
“And here’s some information about where you can find shelter.” We hand him a business card filled with a dozen addresses for shelters.
We keep walking.
$10 million homes for sale. Below them, people with neither $10 nor a home
Jerkism
Since Trump was re-inaugurated things have gone much as I expected on policy: I approve of some and disapprove of others. But I had forgotten how much I dislike his ethos. I find it arrogant and dismissive. This ethos exists on both the partisan left and the partisan right. I call it Jerkism.
I feel annoyance, sadness, and shame that the country I believe in so much, has as its leader someone who acts with indifference to others’ dignity. Recent examples:
He bullies Denmark and Canada, both allies who sacrificed their children's lives at Americans’ sides in wars old and recent. He threatens Panama, Mexico, and Colombia, picking fights with countries far less powerful than America. This is cruel, rude, small-minded: Jerkism.
He failed to set the appropriate example and take responsibility for encouraging an attack on the legislature in 2021, and now pardons those who assaulted officers of the peace at his behest. An unlikable, small-minded person: Jerkism.
He makes impromptu, vague announcements to scrap federal programs beyond his power to effectuate them (recalling his Muslim ban early in his first term), and then quickly backpedals and in the process induces stress and confusion for millions of Americans. A single quick motion of short duration: Jerkism.
Trump’s acolytes, politicians and business leaders alike, seize opportunities for political power and show no qualms denigrating the dignity of their fellow man. They confuse large-scale financial success with being a successful person. Annoyingly stupid and foolish people: Jerkism.
Pericles, by contrast, died defending Athens and its freedom from Spartan invasion. His memory lives on thousands of years later because of his veneration of others’ deeds: “Heroes have the whole earth for their tomb, and in lands far from their own there is enshrined in every breast an unwritten record on others’ hearts.”[ii] The act of dying to save one’s country from foreign invasion lives on forever. It is self-sacrifice, and love of others; it is the opposite of Jerkism’s self-centeredness.
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln interceded to stop the hanging of 303 members of the Dakota nation, some of whom had perpetrated massacres and rapes against white Americans living in Minnesota. Lincoln, who was in the midst of a Civil War that was going badly, who admitted that he knew little about Indian affairs, who faced enormous pressure from a Minnesota Governor and Senator telling him to execute all 303 Dakota people or else “they will be murdered without law,” and “private revenge take the place of official judgment”; nonetheless, Lincoln insisted on reviewing every case, one by one, personally. In the end, he pardoned all except 38. As a result, Republicans fared poorly in Minnesota in the 1864 election, and the Minnesota governor told Lincoln I told you so: you should have executed them all. Lincoln replied:
“I could not afford to hang men for votes.”[iii]
Lincoln’s legacy of affirming human dignity lasts 160 years later. Deservedly, richly so.
Pericles leading Athens
The Numbers
There weren’t many homeless people on the street that Tuesday night. We counted 7. About 14,000 people live within the area we covered, which means there was about 1 person sleeping on the street for every 2,000 people living in a home.
But the homeless people you see sleeping on the street are a symptom of the far bigger problem: 1.5 million Americans (1 in 200) lack housing. The vast majority of these people experience short-term, acute, homelessness. They will get back on their feet, but are priced out of shelter. They would succeed far more easily and quickly if they had a place to live.
I view the street homeless akin to bumps on the skin, a symptom of a smallpox virus deeper within the American body. It’s insane that we fail to fix our own body. That we allow our fellow Americans to wither. And we have for fifty years since homeless numbers began to surge.
In a country that produces $29,167,000,000,000 in goods and services each year, we can’t take care of the 1 in 200 Americans without shelter? When we generate more wealth than the entire rest of the world combined except 13 countries, more than $80,000 per American per year, can we truly not build enough homes for the 0.5% of Americans who need them? It doesn’t sound hard to me. With will we could achieve it. Unfortunately, we appear to lack it. Jerkism focuses on individuals alone, so is unlikely to do anything about it, even though it may well have positive benefits in jobs and growth, which should be celebrated.
But society is far more than economic opportunity. Whether you like your neighbors or not, we live together, and one of the great gifts of American society is its core value of an Equality of Dignity.
The Love of Dignity
In 1938, Robert K. Merton, one of Sociology’s founders of wrote an enduring article “Social Structure and Anomie”[iv] in which he argued that in every society there are
Socially acceptable goals and
Socially acceptable ways to achieve those goals
Merton argued that poor social behavior is not only a function of individuals who choose to behave badly. It’s also something we can expect to emerge in a society when people are encouraged to achieve certain goals (i.e. to make a lot of money) but lack the ability to do that within the socially approved ways. Thse people will reasonably disregard those approved rules and the result will be “anomie,” a lack of ethical standards.
The saddest social situation is when people reject both the goals of society and its approved ways of getting there, what Merton labels “Retreatism.” The people who go this route — rejecting both the goals and dreams of American society and the shared cultural values of Equality of Dignity, Agency of the Free Individual, and an Effective Association — these people are not actually part of our society anymore. They “are, strictly speaking, in the society, but not of it.” They are included “within the societal population merely in fictional sense.” They may have once wanted to be, but their “continued failure to attain the goal by legitimate measures” and their unwillingness to break society’s rules, leads them to reject both “the goal and the means.” The individual is “asocialized.”
Social isolation is a punishment that if we accept it all should be reserved for the truly wicked. As David Hume wrote, echoing Aristotle and ancient thinkers, and foreshadowing modern day primatology: “A perfect solitude is perhaps, the greatest punishment [a person] can suffer.”[v] Being denied human contact is extraordinarily cruel.
In my lifetime of interactions with homeless people, I have often observed a deadness in some of their eyes, a weight of burdens and failures and disappointments. And yet, this weight gives way in an instant when they make eye contact with you and you smile. Then they smile and, if only for a brief moment, they feel the joy of human connection.
Counting Everyone
Onward we went through the streets.
At one in the morning, a woman emerged from an apartment building in sky blue pajamas with a fluffy white dog print patterned on them, and beside her came a fluffy white dog. The woman — after expressing embarrassment that she hadn’t expected anyone to be out at this hour and here she was wearing ridiculous pajamas — stopped to talk to us while her dog bounded about and jumped on and licked our squad. The woman said: “You know, I spoke to a homeless man just today. He seemed so normal, and I was so surprised when I learned he had nowhere to go. And I thought to myself, I can’t even imagine if that were me. What would I do? I guess I would go to a church somewhere, anywhere, try to find something. Thank you so much for being out here and trying to help them.”
On our patrol we also met several doormen and maintenance technicians wrapping up late shifts, hurrying to the train or waiting for a bus.
“We’re doing a survey for the city about housing, can we ask you a few questions?”
“Okay,” they said.
“Do you have a place to sleep tonight?”
“Oh yeah. I’m just on my way home.”
“Great. That’s it. We just want to make sure anyone who needs shelter has it.”
Every time the late-night worker was surprised that was the end of the interview. Several of them removed their caps and looked solemnly at our squad. Seriousness filled their voices: “Oh. That’s so good. God bless you for what you do.”
One worker went further: “You’re doing God’s work. You know that? You are. There’s a guy around the corner, on 65th. Rick. You’ll probably see him in a minute. I do what I can to take care of him. He’s out there every night. You are doing God’s work. God’s looking down on you. Thank you.”
“That’s very kind of you,” our squad leader replied. “This is the only night that we do this. There are people who do this full-time—”
“It’s God’s work,” he insisted. “What you are doing. It’s God’s work.”
The Americans that I saw that night, and that I see every day, everywhere I go, from every level of income and education, from every faith, skin color, sex, identity—all of them that I meet, they all celebrate the counting of others.
I am hopeful therefore that I and millions of others will continue to live the lives not of the jerk but of the counter.
The absence of belief in our fellow human’s dignity has allowed the right and left to antagonize each other into a poisonous culture that leads people to embrace jerk leaders.
We can choose instead to reject arrogant bullying. We can choose the values of decency. Of Respect. Of Dignity. When we do that…
Everybody counts.
[i] On terminology, I appreciate Matthew Yglesias: “If you talk about “bums,” you sound like an asshole. If you talk about “people experiencing homelessness” or “the unhoused,” you sound like a leftist academic or nonprofit worker. If you talk about “homeless people” or “the homeless,” you sound normal.”
[ii] Herodotus, History of the Pelopoennesian War, II.43
[iii] Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. Touchstone, New York, NY, 1995. p. 394-5.
[iv] Robert K. Merton, American Sociological Review, Vol. 3, No. 5 (Oct., 1938), pp. 672-682.
[v] Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, II.2 Section 5.