Excerpted from my chapter "What's Just about the Rich Getting Richer and the Poor Getting Poorer?" in Deep Justice in a Broken World.
Is there a city anywhere in America, or for that matter anywhere in the world, where the rich do not get richer as the poor get poorer?
If there is, I don't know of it.
In my own City of New York - the “Capital of the World” and home to some of this planet's greatest financial institutions –the gap between the rich and poor grows greater and greater every year. During Christmas of 1999, the depth of the chasm became real for me. I had been involved in inner city ministry for seventeen years, since I was eight years old, and five years earlier, I had co-founded a storefront youth group with mostly poor teenagers in the housing projects of Manhattan's Lower East Side.
That year, we wanted to do classic Christmas in New York stuff – Rockefeller Center, the Lord and Taylor windows, ice-skating in Central Park – so a couple dozen of us took the subway 2.5 miles to 49th Street. We might as well have traveled across the country.
My wife and I took half the group for a walk towards Central Park along the priciest real estate in the world, Fifth Avenue, and ended up gawking in the lobby of the famed Plaza Hotel. The Plaza, legendary for it luxurious décor and clientele, was hosting a holiday party of some sort, with Manhattan's upper crust decked out in tuxedos and evening gowns, and limos lined up for blocks outside. After five or ten minutes, one of our kids, Vanessa, turned to my wife and with a far-away gaze in her eyes, said wistfully, "I could never imagine myself at an event like this."
Two weeks later, I found myself back at the Plaza, this time for a New Year's party, wearing a tuxedo and gorging myself on yellowtail sashimi and filet mignon. The open bar was flowing, and my inebriated colleagues from my law firm were celebrating record bonuses and the still blazing Internet economic bubble.
My head was spinning. As a first year attorney at a major New York firm, tent-making to support inner city youth ministry, I knew functions like this went with the territory. But could it really be that some would feel so affirmed in this setting, while others, like Vanessa so excluded?
Yet this bizarre duality between the very rich and the very poor exists everyday in Manhattan. As 2006 drew to a close, Goldman Sachs executives enjoyed $16 billion in year-end bonuses, with the highest earners receiving $100 million each. At the same time, gentrification in Manhattan, and increasingly the outer boroughs, displaces the middle class and renders upward mobility for the poor virtually impossible in their own neighborhoods. New York City also spends over $14 billion educating 1.2 million public school students (by themselves, the tenth largest city in America), with another $1.9 billion of state aid on the way, yet statistically, 60% of fourth graders can't read at grade level and 70% fail statewide math exams.
Whether in New York or your own town, whether upper class or lower class, whether rich or poor, none of us chooses the family that births us, the class we are raised in, or the community that surrounds us.
But we as youth ministries Now do have a choice. What is our Kingdom response to the growing canyon between the rich and the poor? Unfortunately, we Now tend to fall into Either/Or extremes that keep us from offering deep justice to all, regardless of class.
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