Bring Back “Bums”…and Then Kick the Bums Out

“And we very much do need to start telling ourselves and these street people the hard (but ultimately more humanizing and compassionate) truth again: We need to call the bums by their rightful name.”

As a white-collar professional living and working in New York City, I am, as you might well imagine, acquainted with the usual contingent of wealthy urban white liberal professionals. Knowing—or sometimes just sensing—that I am not entirely one of their tribe, they have asked me, on more than a few occasions, a question akin to the following: “So do you know what things are like on the subway nowadays? I must say I haven’t been on since Covid.” Like you were ever really on it even before Covid, I would think to myself, smiling with polite bemusement, as I prepare to describe to them the city in which they supposedly live.

Most people are lazy and stick pretty close to home, both physically and intellectually. The poor and working class, at least, usually have to commute to work and run errands that they cannot outsource to a courier and are also more likely to socialize and play outdoors due to the more confined nature of their living quarters. In contrast to the working class’s generally more unmediated experience of life, rich liberal elites typically live an insulated existence in which their interactions with their surroundings are mediated by doormen, nannies, delivery boys, cleaning ladies, dog-walkers, waiters, drivers, and other lackeys and intermediaries. They stay largely confined to the few square blocks in their vicinity in which they might walk their dogs when they do not have someone else do it for them, and when they undertake longer journeys, they have parking attendants summon their hibernating vehicles up from their garages and make a beeline straight for the nearest highway leading to their country getaways in the Hamptons and beyond. On account of these differences, poor and working class people are far more likely to have a realistic apprehension of what the nooks and crannies of their neighborhoods and their cities are actually like, both during the day and at night, whereas our typical wealthy urban liberals are completely dependent upon rumor mills comprised of their like-minded friends and acquaintances and, even worse than that, what they might be told by the insular media streams they tend to consume.

“Do you mean how are things on the subway as far as Covid or as far as crime and general mayhem?” I respond.