But so far, when the government does get down to the streets, its impact as often as not is destructive. The stories of poverty program ineffectiveness, of inconsistent funding practices, and of unfulfilled promises are as true for New York as for any other large city. In addition, Lindsay's prestige received a major blow this summer when the city had to return over $10 million in unspent poverty funds to the federal government at the end of the fiscal year. The Mayor further embarrassed himself by denying the loss for several days.

Also, community leaders in poverty areas are fast learning the rules of the funding game. And the number one rule is that violence brings results. Well-known ghettos such as Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant and the Lower East Side continue to get the lion's share of the anti-poverty pie. As leaders in competing ghettos see it, they get money because they have an "in," because they are well organized, and because they act ferocious.

Countless forgotten ghettos--Williamsberg, Coney Island, Morrisania, the South Bronx, the Upper West Side --are learning that to get anything from a high school to a recreation program, a community must be organized and must show that it can be a trouble maker if it is not well cared for. "I can't exactly tell people to get out in the streets,"' explained one Board of Education leader in the South Bronx, "but that's what they'll have to do to get schools."

There are many signs that by going into the anti-poverty business, the government has begun to generate thousands of dissatisfied customers who will soon know the ropes as well as the downtown bureaucrats. A welfare case worker described the change: "People are beginning to act as if help from the government is a right instead of a privilege. They know what they are entitled to." Early in August, welfare recipients from New York and other large cities proved the point by holding a convention in Chicago to plan strategy for demanding their rights.

Another sign of the mushrooming self-consciousness of the poor is the sprouting of a Black Power movement in New York. Shortly before he was assassinated, Malcolm X, the organizer of New York's black nationalists, wrote that:

The cornerstone of this country's operation are economic and political strength and power. The black man doesn't have the economic strength--and it will take time for him to build it. But right now the American black man has the political strength and power to change his destiny overnight.

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee seems to have taken those words as its battle hymn in organizing a Black Panther Party in Harlem this summer, similar to the one it has fathered in Lowndes County, Alabama.

Haryou-Act, Harlem's much publicized anti-poverty agency, is also expanding its already firm power base through block-by-block organization. In recent months, each block in the neighborhood has elected a representative and these representatives expect to be a powerful political pressure group.

Lindsay's next three-and-a-half years will see these forces converging. Charisma and promises are the glories of a new mayor. So far, Lindsay's idealism has been both his major source of energy and his biggest curse. His commissioners also have big ideas, but bigger, tradition-bound bureaucracies. Results will be the final measuring rod, and a year or two from now the mayor will need more than that sign in his office that reminds him to SMILE