Urban Nations Update: Welcome to My World

I trust you’ll Allow me the therapy afforded by an article which is not about our ministry per se, but about the context in which the ministry occurs. Thank you. First I’ll give you the geographic, then the graphic contexts. America. Its 70 square miles are home to two and a half million people.

Description

The streets of southern Brooklyn (not to be confused with the neighborhood called South Brooklyn, which is north of here), my stomping grounds, are easy to navigate. Unlike our eastern neighbor, Queens, our streets are laid out more or less grid-like, and are (for the most part) predictably named. Learn the exceptions and you’ve learned the rules. Ocean Parkway is E. 5th Street, Coney Island Avenue is E. 10th Street, Ocean Avenue is E. 20th Street, and so on.

At the westernmost tip of the southern tier is the municipally-created slum called Coney Island (which Coney Island Avenue does not intersect, by the way), capped by a private, fenced-in, out-of-place, middle-class, peninsula community called Seagate. in Coney, the avenues are seaworthy: Neptune, Mermaid and Surf.

Moving east the language heard on the streets is everything but English, yet the streets themselves are easily navigated by native or immigrant. Brighton Beach Avenue runs through the length of the neighborhood from which it takes its name (and after which Neil Simon titled his memoirs). Half of it lies in the dark shadows of the elevated D train. Brighton Beach Avenue is intersected along its mile stretch by tiny streets in numerical order, each prefaced by “Brighton”: Brighton 1st, Brighton 2nd, etc.

East of Brighton is upscale Manhattan Beach, where the streets are all British-sounding (except the main drag, Oriental Boulevard), and all in alphabetical order: Amherst, Beaumont, Coleridge, Dover, Exeter, and so on down to Pembroke. There are no stores and no apartment buildings. Instead, million-dollar homes lead you to believe you are definitely in suburbia.

Sheepshead Bay is an Atlantic Ocean inlet named after a fish long gone from the local murky waters. It is also, by extension, the name of the neighborhood just above the bay. Sheepshead Bay, the inlet, divides la-di-da Manhattan Beach from Sheepshead Bay, the multicultural neighborhood to its north. Sheepshead Bay is where the main action is for Urban Nations.

Though it’s easy to navigate southern Brooklyn’s streets, it isn’t as easy to understand what happens on them. To be fair, and all things considered, ours is a decent neighborhood. The houses are generally well-kept, the streets are somewhat clean (by New York standards), and the graffiti is not as bad as in some other areas. There are few violent crimes (though it doesn’t take many to unsettle you).

But violence isn’t the only concern. Wanna know what makes it tough to live here? I’ll tell you—in a moment.

I know the streets of Brooklyn. They are mine, or should I say “were.” I was born and raised on them. But something has happened. There’ve been some big-time changes. I suppose there’s always been enough lawlessness and provocation here in new York to make a theonomist out of any sane soul. But at one time you had to keep your sin hidden; now, it has spilled out onto the streets in the daylight and it seems there’s no getting it back into the dark, its natural element.

Debauchery

There is something profoundly disturbing about public debauchery, especially unreproved, unchecked and apparently unstoppable public debauchery. At Avenue Z and East 14th Street, Sheepshead Bay Road cuts in on a southeast course, continuing to E. 16th Street, where it turns south (right). The offices of Urban Nations, Messiah’s Congregation and Meantime (our ministry helping women who were sexually abused as children) are located above Citibank right at the junction where Sheepshead Bay Road makes that turn.

In search of catharsis, let me tell you what we encounter daily. Exit the office and turn left. Forty yards ahead you’ll see the D train el. Before you get there you’ll pass several stores, among them two separate newspaper stands which feature racks of disgusting pornography of every description, including transvestite and homosexual specialties.

In front of a closed-up shoe store, several drunks take up most of the sidewalk, a couple of them half-nude. As long as their booze is concealed by a bag, however, they remain unmolested by the police, though they themselves molest and strike terror into the hearts of kids, older people and other passersby.

Under the el, across the street, several more drunks congregate, and there are more around the corner, still more on Jerome Avenue, and another group on Voorhies. Sheepshead Bay must be featured in Wino Magazine as the new Mecca.

Law-abiders here are compelled to give way to, and subsidize, these sleazy denizens of the streets, the new protected class, previously known as bums, now called “homeless.” This new, mendacious, victim-title has resulted in the biggest quality-of-life change in New York City in my lifetime. You cannot escape the state-supported (literally) stinking, abusive bums on the streets. They used to be confined to the Bowery and other infamous areas, where their status as scummy rejects made ministry to them possible, often fruitful. Now, thanks to the ACLU, they are distributed everywhere, a species better protected than spotted owls, and contemptuous of any help which approaches them as responsible creatures. “Welfare only, please.”

The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.

One of the “regulars” around here, a menacing, psychotic-variety bum, often hangs out smack-dab in front of our office entrance. On one occasion he chased a Meantime staff member and her client up E. l6th Street, terrorizing them. The police did nothing.

When we exploited a political connection to try to get action, we were later informed of what had been done to address the problem of the bums on Sheepshead Bay Road: a social worker was sent down to make them aware of the benefits to which they were entitled! I kid you not. They offered them money and programs!

If you exit our office and cross the street, you’ll run into a line of young people waiting to mutilate their bodies in the body-piercing shop upstairs. If you exit the office and go to the right, just outside another porno supported news stand, you will find the local drug dealers. These guys are older, in their 50s and 60s. They are so uncouth in their transactions that you would need to have a serious vision problem not to see what’s going down. Everybody knows it.

... Just as everybody knows where the (illegal)gambling houses are. It is open and known to all where the illegal activity is, that it is protected, and that it is futile to try to do anything about it. It’s just the way it is. And we live with it, dealing with it by adding another sigh in heaven’s direction, asking for protection for us and our children (which sigh He hears, praise His Name).

But what gets us the most, what proves very nearly unbearable for us is this: in the midst of this squalor, the pornography, the piercing, the drugs, the open drunkenness, the urinating bums—in the midst of this we find the most ubiquitous, diligent, uncompromising, merciless branch of law enforcement in New York: the agents of the Parking Violations Bureau, which includes uniformed policemen.

Like locusts on Egypt, the ticket issuers are all over motorists in Sheepshead Bay. The lowest penalty, for an expired meter, is $45. And you’ll be hard pressed to meet a New Yorker who hasn’t interrupted the agent who is in the process of writing a ticket, only to be told, “It’s too late—I started writing.”

There is no mercy, Lo-Ruhama (Hosea 1:6), for parking ordinance violators. Could it be because the Parking Violations Bureau nets the city $350 million dollars a year in revenue? Hmmm.

The message in new York City is abundantly clear to those of us who have lived here all our lives: you can mutilate your body, you can pee in the street, you can fall down in a drunken stupor and block the sidewalk, you can accost passersby and beg for booze money, you can deal pornography with impunity, you can deal drugs with immunity, you can operate police-protected gambling halls—- but don’t, don’t, whatever you do, DON’T park amiss. They need the money to subsidize the bums, in and out of office.

Ahh. Now I feel better. Thank you for the session. Now I can get back to doing God’s ministry. Maybe next time I’ll tell you about the provocation of welfare fraud.