For What It’s Worth: Perspective in the Time of Covid

By Dr. Irwin Redlener

I’m sure I’m not the only Upper West Sider who has been frustrated by being unable to find a particular product on the shelves of Best Buy, or my favorite brand of toothpaste that was always available at the pharmacy around the corner, prior to pandemic-generated supply-chain challenges. And I know most of us have at least occasionally expressed some level of annoyance because our hold time was “really long,” waiting for an airline agent to handle a long-standing reservation to visit relatives or a favorite vacation spot.

(And I’ll tell you, Karen and I were pretty damn uncomfortable bundled up under the electric heaters outdoors at French Roast.)

But enough whining. I’ve come to fall back on a bit of perspective about all of this, including our own work with homeless and indigent families in New York City. Since 1987, when Karen and I, along with former Upper West Sider, singer-songwriter Paul Simon, started the Children’s Health Fund, we have been deeply engaged in helping struggling New York children and families get access to quality healthcare, and connect with services that help them find affordable housing, food resources and other support that every family needs.

Most of the families living on the edge actually include at least one, often two working adults. Many have more than one low-paying job, trying to make ends meet. They live with struggles that are painful and often heartbreaking. A few sets of clothes for the kids. But when the washer and dryer in the shelter isn’t working, embarrassed children go to school in dirty clothes.

Vision often had not been screened sufficiently, or results followed up appropriately. We regularly saw as many as 30% of children in elementary school classrooms in Harlem — that is, on 124th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, just 14 blocks north of the UWS’s official boundary. (Children’s Health Fund did the follow-up, getting glasses for the kids who would not succeed in school if they couldn’t see the board or read their homework.)

Remote learning last year was a problem for many of the 700,000 public school children living at or near the poverty guidelines. Even if the City provided a laptop, parents had to be at work and there was often nobody to help with lessons, and no quiet place in the apartment to study. Internet access could be absent or spotty.

The lives of children living in the great swell of urban poverty in our great city is very different from what we may understand about the lives of most UWS children.

I try to remember many of the children and families we’ve worked with. And who comes to mind as I write these words is a 15-year-old boy I met in a homeless shelter some years ago. He and his family had been moved from facility to facility for at least a decade.

The thing I recall most about Raymond is that he was a really talented artist — with aspirations to become a professional graphic designer. He had tough going — and I lost track of him once his family moved to Camden, NJ.

What moved me to tears though was not the fact that he was homeless or that he had difficult-to-control asthma. Or that he never stayed in the same school for more than a single academic year. What really bothered me was that this talented young artist, a child of NYC, had never been to a single one of our city’s glorious art museums or galleries. Never.

So, yeah, I am regularly pissed off about the annoyances and troubles that have make our UWS lives frustrating, even depressing. But we’re trying to keep it all in perspective. That much I can tell you. We’re trying.

Dr. Redlener is founding director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and co-founder of Children’s Health Fund. And he’s an on air public health analyst for MSNBC. Follow him on Twitter: @IrwinRedlenerMD