David Ambroz grew up homeless in New York City. His childhood was violent, hungry and terrifying. He wrote about it all in a 2022 memoir, “A Place Called Home,” which was gorgeous and brave and heartbreaking.
“As a child, if I died and my family died, no one would care,” Ambroz told me at the time. “We were invisible. We were in front of you with our hands out, covered in sores, covered in filth, starving. And you, America, chose not to see us.”
I thought about him when the news broke that President Donald Trump moved to freeze trillions of dollars in federal spending, throwing Meals on Wheels, school lunches, Head Start, SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and other programs that support millions of Americans into chaos. The White House then rescinded the order, which had already been blocked by a federal judge, offering an early glimpse at what the next four years may entail.
As confusion reigned and agencies scrambled and state officials found themselves frozen out of the portals to access Medicaid funds, the White House Office of Management and Budget released a memo:
“If agencies are concerned that these programs may implicate the President’s Executive Orders, they should consult OMB to begin to unwind these objectionable policies without a pause in the payments.”
Just consult OMB to unwind the objectionable policies! Easy peasy!
My mind flew to Ambroz explaining, patiently, at one of his 2022 book talks why his mother didn’t simply access some of the many programs available to help lift her and her family out of poverty.
Have you ever called the cable company, he wondered, and gotten bounced around and increasingly frustrated and eventually given up when the third or fourth person still hadn’t solved your outage/scheduled your installation/fixed your issue?
Of course we all had.
Now imagine you were making that call from a pay phone. At a homeless shelter. With a line of people waiting. And your hungry, scared children were crying next to you. Only you weren’t calling about cable.
I fear we’re entering a chapter where the notion of rugged individualism, however flawed and inconsistent, rules the day — shaping policies and practices and public discourse to a degree we haven’t yet experienced. Where the assumption is we’re all born with bootstraps and the ability to pull ourselves up by them. Where needing help is for losers and providing it is for suckers. Where every man is an island, or at least plans to own one with the money he’ll save once the estate tax is eliminated.
Where America, in other words, chooses not to see families like Ambroz’s — except as an example of what happens when you don’t make good decisions or fill out the right paperwork.
All of which ignores the unbelievable luck and privilege of being born into a functional family with a safe place to live and plenty to eat. All of which disconnects and divides us into us versus them. All of which absolves our leaders of taking care of those of us with the least, as long as they’re currying the favor of those of us with the most.
All of which robs us of the possibility and potential of a country where we nurture and support and feed and heal as many humans as possible, knowing we’ll all benefit from the resulting bounty of talents, ideas, contributions, minds, hearts. Knowing that being fed is a human right.
And all of which arrives at a time when we are already so isolated. So many of the places and ways we used to gather in community are shrinking. Attendance has declined dramatically across religious services. Formal volunteering and organizational membership has been falling steadily every year across states. Americans spend less time with other people than in any other period going back to 1965, according to a recent Atlantic piece.
All of which makes us easier to divide.
I don’t think that’s how we’re designed. Humans are social beings. All beings are — at least the ones that endure.
I have parents who taught me from an early age to tune into nature for cues on how to coexist. Trees are a wonderful example, and I found myself returning this week to a 2018 Smithsonian magazine profile of German forester Peter Wohlleben for a refresher. (Stay with me.)
“Since Darwin,” the writer, Richard Grant, explained, “we have generally thought of trees as striving, disconnected loners, competing for water, nutrients and sunlight, with the winners shading out the losers and sucking them dry. The timber industry in particular sees forests as wood-producing systems and battlegrounds for survival of the fittest.”
But science, Grant wrote, shows us something different: Tree species that form alliances with other tree species. Forests that operate like communities, using their root systems to share intelligence and sustenance and survival tips.
“Some are calling it the ‘wood-wide web,’” Wohlleben told Grant. “All the trees here, and in every forest that is not too damaged, are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.”
I think that’s important. I think that’s how we work best. Not as lonely, merciless strivers. But as members of an ecosystem that’s larger than any one of us, but also relies — heavily, beautifully — on our cooperation and concern and care for each and every one of us.
Join the Heidi Stevens Balancing Act Facebook group, where she continues the conversation around her columns and hosts occasional live chats.
Twitter @heidistevens13
