I spent considerable
time last weekend with the people I wrote about here. I know they want their
story told, particularly my friend, CL. Nonetheless, the names have been abbreviated
in some cases or avoided in others to at least partially protect their privacy
while attempting to tell as much of this story as possible.
This is for CL, who
showed more courage and strength to overcome the battles he faced than I might
have ever dreamed possible from any person. I love him like my own children,
even as I know that our history shapes us in ways that I am only now beginning
to understand.
Juanita was the
mother of my friend, CL. She died at the age of 63 on Oct-28, a day before the
superstorm Sandy devastated the area.
She was taken to Bellevue Hospital, and there owing to the power outages
and more pressing emergency concerns here body decomposed to a point that the funeral
required a closed casket. This it seems
to me was the last indignity visited upon Juanita who tried so hard to live a dignified
life. Her children, all gathered to say goodbye with dozens of family and friends,
longed to see her one last time, but were denied. They say to those whom much
is given much is expected. Juanita was
given so little, and yet she gave the full measure of what she had, more I
think than many of us could imagine. She adopted a daughter, dropped on her
doorstep by a young woman who just decided one day that she could not raise
her. Juanita was well known in the area for being vigilant of bad influences
that seemed to seep in through every street and from every avenue. CL told me
that the women that rose at the funeral to speak about this part of Juanita’s personality
was herself duplicitous, one of those people knew provided crack in the
projects. Sitting at her funeral Saturday I was reminded of my own mother who
also gave without being asked and without expectation of the notice of others.
They are both the salt of this fine Earth. I hope they are laughing together
now, resting in some quiet place, exchanging stories about the children they
loved so much.
There are many statistics about poverty, and I will consider
some of them here, but Juanita and her family are much more than that to me. I
struggled much of this past weekend to understand after a history which runs to
some 35 years what she and her family are and what they mean to me, but one
thing I know for certain, they are not statistics.
Juanita moved to New York sometime in 1966 or 1967. This was
a little more than a decade before I arrived in New York. Bobby Kennedy had yet
to declare his run for the Presidency, when he would tell America that he
believed “as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.” Around this time Martin
Luther King was already considering the transformation of the Civil Rights
crusade into a movement that would increasingly focus on economic inequality. King
was killed by a poor white man, the kind of person that threatened him since
Montgomery, but who nonetheless might have benefited from King’s plans. The
most profound menace King may have ever presented was the Poor People’s
Campaign, meant to address the concerns of poor whites, poor blacks, really the
poor of all races, in a single coalition. King was organizing this campaign,
participating in a garbage strike in Memphis, when he was assassinated. There
is some irony that King’s assassin, a man of modest means once convicted for a grocery
store hold-up which netted $120, might have been the kind of poor white that
King hoped to lift up in the last campaign of his life. He wanted to confront the
economic status quo, but the threat did not go unanswered. In the years since,
which essentially parallel Juanita’s time in New York, the safety net in some
ways has been strengthened even as the conditions which require its existence still
demand redress.
In January, 1965, at his inaugural address, a few years before
Juanita arrived in New York, Lyndon Johnson had declared a “War on
Poverty”. In 1964 poverty rates in the
US were 19%. By the end of 1973 the rate had dropped to 11%. Johnson made dramatic
progress during his administration. Despite his Southern Strategy which sought
to demonize minorities and the poor in a cynical attempt to unite whites against
the liberal establishment, Federal spending increased during Nixon’s term and
poverty continued to drop.
Around the time of the low water mark for poverty, 11% in
1973, things were changing. Somewhere around that time too many Americans just seems
to have given up in the effort to promote broad levels of equality across our
multi-colored society. When the Civil Rights
movement started to address the problems of the urban North, what seemed a
noble effort to desegregate busing in Montgomery, or to attack the entire racist
structure in Birmingham, became a pitched battle, especially around
the issue of busing. In 1973, almost twenty years after the Brown decision to desegregate
schools, more than 60% of African American children went to schools which were
predominately black. Today, racial segregation is no longer a requirement of
control for the elite power structure. Today almost the same proportion, about
60%, attend schools made up primarily of children from the same Socio-Economic background.
In America today, the issue of poverty obscures the legacy of race.
Progress in lowering the rates of poverty was made during
the Clinton Administrations and sporadically at other times. But the bottom
line is this: Since Johnson made his address there have been 20 years of
Democratic control of the White House and 28 years of Republican control. Each
party has adequate time to formulate redress for the immorality of poverty. Neither
Party has done so. In recent years the Political Parties have at best played
lip service to the issue of Poverty in America. The Middle Class suffers, so
the poor can be safely ignored.
During these 48 years the country has failed one of its
supreme moral tests. In the richest country the world has ever known we have
been unable to eliminate or really even reduce the blight of poverty in our communities.
When Johnson spoke at his inaugural one in five Americans lived below the
poverty line. Today one in seven live in poverty. That is improvement, but one
with a catastrophic edge. Children make up a disproportionate amount of the
total: Nearly one in five American children live in Poverty.
Even during the Reagan administration when the country
created 20 million jobs, and conservative rhetoric aside government spending
ballooned from 20.6% of GDP to 22.4% of GDP, the levels of those living in
poverty ended essentially unchanged at 13% of all Americans. Though there are
those that will argue about Obamas culpability for it, the four years of his
presidency have seen tragic growth in the number of poor Americans to a rate of
roughly 15%, quickly approaching 16%. Unchecked the tragedy of increasing and
unanswered need will be Obama’s legacy too. Though we could hope otherwise is
there reason to expect different? Based on the just concluded campaign which
did not address the poor or poverty at all, I think not.
In 2011 the poverty
line was established as income of $23,000 per year for a family of four. The
USDA reported in 2007 that a family of four would spend a minimum of 25% of
that amount on food. For the horrible circumstances the poverty numbers
represent there is good reason that many government programs pay benefits for
those who earn as much as 150% of the poverty level standard. In America,
especially in her urban centers, it is nearly impossible to properly feed,
cloth, and educate children in families living on $23,000 per year or less. More
than 60% of those living below the poverty line have someone in the family who
works, hence the phrase “working poor”. That phrase starts to explain the scope
of the challenge. Despite the ugly polemics, the vast majority of the poor
among us either work, or are seniors. Neither employment nor the social safety
net prevents poverty. To put it more clearly neither employment nor the social
safety net guarantees a life which is not constrained in poverty.
Taken in tandem, Medicare and Social Security protect senior
citizens somewhat from the indignity of poverty. Nearly nine in ten seniors live
with incomes above the poverty threshold, the highest of any age group, though
as in almost every measure minorities fare worse. A 2008 study from the Center
for American Progress (CAP) reported that, “Blacks make up only about 9 percent
of the elderly population in the United States, yet represent 21 percent of the
elderly population living below the poverty line.” Moreover, poverty rates do
not consider the increased costs of medical care for the elderly. The CAP report also states that reporting on
poverty levels for seniors fails to take “into account how much money people
have left to meet basic needs after paying for their medical costs. Under this
measure, the elderly poverty rate in New York City would have been 32 percent
in 2006, compared to 18 percent under the official measure.”
There is a fair argument that Americans are perhaps the most
charitable on earth. And yet, America is a country with unprecedented resources
which willfully tolerates the extremes of hunger and deprivation in her midst. It
is hard to square those two traits of the American personality. Yet it is only
with great peril to our society that we ignore those differences or cease
striving to close the gap. For all the
talk about gun violence in Chicago, the vast majority of it is blacks killing
blacks, or Latinos killing Latinos. Other than the moral burden of the violence
the white community is largely untouched. But what society anywhere can call itself
enlightened or just and live with such immoral and senseless destruction in its
midst. In Chicago a city with a
perennially liberal, supposedly progressive politics, gun violence is at
epidemic proportions. There are those
that will say this shows the deep moral the inadequacy of liberalism, if not
its complete failure. Yet conservative fixes such as rigid criminal justice
structures and incarceration have had their day too. When it pertains to poverty,
and its cruel aftermath, both conservative and liberal solutions have come to
abject failure. If the case can be made the War on Poverty despite making some
progress as in many ways come to failure, can’t the case also be made that the War
on Drugs is failure of even a more colossal level. We have incarcerated two
generations of blacks, Hispanics and poor whites. What do we have to show for
it?
At Juanita’s funeral over the weekend I learned that before
coming to New York during the decade of hope and change, the 1960’s, she picked
cotton in South Carolina for $2 a day, $10 a week. She moved to New York, in
hopes of providing a better life for herself and her family. After arriving in
New York, she moved into a two-bedroom, third-floor, apartment in the publicly
subsidized Amsterdam Houses, on West 62nd Street behind the glorious
Lincoln Center Performing Arts Center in Manhattan. Rent runs, I think, around
$500 per month. Construction on the Amsterdam Houses was started during the
great depression, delayed due to WW II, and completed in 1947/48. From the
beginning the majority of its inhabitants were African American, many of those
descendants of Southern Negroes who lived in the area since the time of the
Civil War. Juanita too was a refugee of sorts from that legacy.
Across the street at Lincoln Center, Marc Chagall’s majestic
“The Triumph of Music” faces east on the plaza, a joyous ode to a city of
immeasurable wealth and incomparable art. Juanita, her four children, her
numerous foster children and her adopted daughter, lived to the west of Lincoln
Center, across the street behind the masterpiece. For years the projects,
though prison like on the inside with dim hard fluorescent lighting, caged
windows, and slow, pre-war elevators which often malfunctioned, had a lovely
view across the Hudson to New Jersey. The terrace right outside and to the
right of the door to the 62nd Street building had a grand view. Now
that Western border is boxed in completely by the towering monstrosity of Trump
Apartments, which run for blocks along West End Avenue. Any illusion that the
place would be a safe haven of protection from the cruelty of the mean streets
is now replaced by the certainty of confinement. The mask, now removed (or
perhaps more accurately secured in place), exposes the Houses for what they
were intended to be from that start and what in fact they are: An effort to
hide something, to keep something in, rather than to protect by keeping something
out. In the shadow of “The Triumph of Music” poverty and want are kept
contained and well hidden from public view. America cannot fix what she cannot
see.
For eight years or so, I visited the Amsterdam Houses as
part of the Big Brothers/ Big Sisters mentoring program. When I started my
involvement in the Big Brother’s
program, I was just 21, new to the city and with a lot of time on my
hands. I was determined to drink in all that the city could offer. My involvement
there was a part of that. I did not realize it would become such a part of my
life. Each week, I rode the PATH train from Hoboken, and then caught the 1
train to the 66th Street station which disgorged its passengers
right below Lincoln Center. If I had time, I would head out of the East Exit,
sometimes grabbing breakfast at the Greek diner a couple blocks south on
Broadway. Walking back to pick up CL, I often spotted New York’s other Statue
of Liberty, a 43 foot replica of the green girl which peers down from atop a building
on 64th Street. Even knowing
what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to this day the neighborhood is
one of my most favorite in the city.
Together my “Little”, CL, and I went to movies, museums, the
beach, and my apartment in Hoboken. Almost all of my friends in New York and
New Jersey became surrogate big brothers/ sisters. My roommate Ben and my
brother Mark welcomed CL to our place on Washington Street dozens of times. Ben
let CL noodle around on his electric base. My boss, Ray, took CL out on his
fishing boat, then moored in Staten Island, and let him drive. Eddie and his brother
let CL go out on their Catamaran off the beach in Long Branch, a thrill even I missed.
Another friend, Jeanette, had CL and I down for many Rumson, New Jersey
weekends, some of which were filled with parties of Jay Gatsby proportions. To
all mentioned here and those that are not know this: CL remembers all of you
with fondness and great gratitude.
CL and I walked all over the city together and spent long
hours in the ever changing jewel which is Central Park. Another “Big”, Bob, and
I organized several camping trips to an outdoor site, Camp Koinonia, a couple
hours away where dozens of “Bigs” and “Littles” stayed in rustic cabins, hiked,
cut wood, and enjoyed the open fresh air. Tough boys that had seen horrible
stuff, more than most of us might ever imagine, screamed like girls at the sound
of a deer in the woods on pitch black knights. In return for what we showed our
little brothers, the “Bigs” were exposed to the vibrant, black culture of New
York. Phrases like “Oh, Snap” or “That’s
whack” became familiar. I still recall it all so vividly when I drive down the
FDR on the East Side of Manhattan and see Keith Haring’s pop-art “Crack is Wack” playground murals.
The boys let their little nappy hair down in the rolling woods at Koinonia. I
remember, one of my favorites, Eric, singing Diana Ross’ gay anthem, “I’m
Coming Out” as we chopped wood one day with his big brother, Ralph. I love that
kid’s smile. Today, god willing, he would be in his 40’s, but all I have of him
is the memory of the chipped toothed smile of a 14 year old.
I know I cannot be alone in feeling a certain relief in
taking both the boys and ourselves from the harshness of the city and the
places they lived on those trips upstate. The projects were hard, unforgiving
places. The man who lived with Juanita when I first started to see CL was a
tall, lanky frightening looking guy, who I would come to learn beat CL and his
sisters until one day Juanita had enough and told him to get out. A heavy
fragrance of wasted alcohol, urine, and intermingled violence, pervaded those
brick towers in the Amsterdam Houses. I personally never saw a gun or a knife,
but I heard so many stories. I remember
visiting one of CL’s friend’s apartments and even midday on a Saturday
alcoholic decay could be smelled the moment one crossed the threshold of the entryway.
Walking across the marble plaza of Lincoln Center after
leaving the desperation of the Amsterdam Houses I recall more than once ruminating,
the famous Springsteen lyric at the end of Jungleland: “The Poets down here
don’t write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be” playing on
endless loop in my brain. When we were
together this past weekend, CL told me how he had taken money from me to feed
his family. “My belly was full” he said, but they had to eat too. He said when
I found out I told him just to ask, and from then on he did. I don’t recall
that, but maybe he did. He also reminded
me of when I bailed him out after he was arrested tooling around in a stolen
car. It was just a dumb stunt, but drugs were already part of the equation
then. It has been so long I have forgotten, but CL tells me that I told him
that was it. He needed to straighten himself out, but it was already too late.
Whatever was before, Crack wrecked the place. Sometime in
the middle eighties, probably 1984 or 1985, Crack rolled onto the neighborhood,
destroying nearly everything in its path. I am quite sure I did not recognize
the effect it was having on the community immediately, but there were signs.
Those loitering on the fringes of the playground had an air of danger to them
that I had not felt before. Initially CL was spared, but within a year or two,
he too entered the vortex. I knew he was trapped there for a while, but only
this past weekend I found out that he spent ten years, trapped by addiction.
For years before Crack, I had a casual attitude about casual drug use. I did
not dream what we were exposing our friend too. When I first picked up the
thread of the story a couple years ago, I was filled with dread and guilt. CL
assures me that he made his own decisions, but I will forever wonder over some
of the choices I made.
Crack exposed the destruction brought on by the a failure of
the mis-named and mis-directed War On Drugs, which led to the highest
incarceration rates in the US of any industrialized nation. Six million
Americans are in prison or under the supervision of the criminal justice system
in America. Of that number more than one million are actually housed in a
prison or jail. It is estimated that over ¾ of those now in the criminal
justice system have a history of some level of drug abuse. Re-incarceration
rates are much higher for those with drug problems.
In the criminal justice system, race’s pernicious role in the
problems of poverty in America are exposed. Only now are states starting to
address the incredible variance in sentences between those handed out for
cocaine convictions (largely white) and those handed out for crack (largely
black and Hispanic). But today 39% of the prison population is black men, and
incarceration rates are six times that for white men. In New York, the
draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws initiated in 1973 were only moderately revised
in 2009. Crack still carries stiffer penalties than Cocaine, but judges at
least have more flexibility to order treatment, which is difficult, and often
unsuccessful the first time tried. Pulling oneself up by the boot straps is not
a policy. It is a slogan of deaf blindness and moral avoidance.
It is estimated that even though the vast majority,
something more than 75%, of those in the criminal justice system, would benefit
from drug treatment, perhaps as little as 10% actually get it. To be sure the
reasons for this is some cases can be traced to the addicts unwillingness to
seek treatment, but the overwhelming reason is one of limited resources devoted
to treatment, and in many cases the lack of state laws set up to direct
treatment as a first option. A for-profit system of jails and the political
muscle it can harness is a major contributing factor to the slow progress in reform.
Penal institutions in the US now “employ” over 300,000 inmates at wages of less
than $1.00 per hour contributing to an intense economic motivation to house
poor whites, Hispanics and African Americans in penal institutions. There
things can and do go bad quickly. Stories of jail being worse than the streets
are not cliché. CL told me of one friend of his that went up for a relatively
short stay that was extended into a relatively lengthy stay after a fight to
“survive” (his word, not mine) turned ugly.
Nonetheless, incarceration can cost the states $30,000 or
more per year per inmate. These exceed by a factor of between four and ten
times that of treatment. Only a society that values Old Testament retribution
and unencumbered capitalism over reform of the human beings in their charge would
authorize such obscene expenditures. This is especially true when one considers
that $30,000 per year would pay for an extraordinary college experience for the
children of the Amsterdam houses and elsewhere across America’s poor urban and decrepit
rural landscapes.
Last weekend I asked CL how he paid for his addiction during
those ten years, and he told me he sold to others. Though sheer providence CL
avoided prison. Both of his sisters were not as lucky. Both spent time in prison, one through
multiple trips. Treatment never caught up to her and it is just in the past
year, perhaps because of Juanita’s declining health she finally kicked the
habit. I will pray for her now, as she makes plans to move into her mother’s
old Amsterdam Houses Apartment, a place of great temptation and too easy access
to drugs even today. It was shocking to
hear CL speak with some authority on why Crack addiction was so much more
difficult than heroin, which at least can offer the promise of methadone for withdrawal.
Crack is cold turkey, crawling skin, sweats etc. Still he did it, and after ten
lost years, he moved away from New York and for the past 15 years he has lived
and worked in North Carolina. He has had
some martial ups and downs, but he has three kids, and he provides for them,
has been working steadily, and lives a quiet sedentary life, perhaps too much
so as recently health problems have become a concern.
CL’s only brother is still caught in addiction. Brother “J” told
me three times last Saturday that I had “saved his life”. While it is true that
I helped to bail him from jail for a minor offense that a suburban kid would
have escaped with a perp walk back to Mom and Dad’s, I did not save him from
anything. Nonetheless, each time he uttered his words of gratitude I told him
plainly I did not “save you for this”.
He is a shell of the man I knew 25 years ago. He might not make it.
While my friends and I were recreationally experimenting, in
the urban milieu of poor New York, if there was experimentation it could be
dangerously short lived. A few days of fun, could and often did lead to a
decade or more of addiction, prison, and in many cases death. That lanky guy
that beat CL, became addicted to heroin and succumbed to AIDS, the other
epidemic then sweeping New York. To this
day Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign rings as a liberal mantra devoid of humanity,
and disconnected from action or results. This is solving the drug problem the
way protected, isolated whites would like to see it solved. It bears no
resemblance to the world, certainly none to the world of Juanita’s four children,
all of whom succumbed at one time or the other. Just Say No required little
engagement on the part of the sloganeers. Real issues of poverty, deprivation, as
well as cycles of violence, fear, and isolation need not even be addressed.
Just Say No. As a moniker for a solution it enrages me.
Throughout this weekend I kept thinking about victims and
villains. We can easily see Mr. Lanky as the villain he was, but dead as he is,
is he also a victim? When he was 10, might he also been running the length of
the playground, trying furiously to burn his adolescent energy. Liberals like
me, often parade around their good works, but here in New York the most liberal
of big liberal cities we house the poor in decrepit, life draining prisons,
with pleasant names like the Amsterdam Houses. Who really gives a crap about
Mr. Lanky, gone to where he belongs many would say? Those propagating empty solutions like Just
Say No retain great pride for the rallies they attended and the chants of the children,
but their willful ignorance camouflages the urgency for real solutions. Concern
like that might actually cost them something. Who are the heroes and who are
the villains?
I told CL over the weekend when we visited that I could not
believe Juanita lived in that poorly lit apartment, with the mis-matched floor
tiles, for 40-plus years. What should be
transitional housing has become a come as you please prison for the urban
underclass. Locks are not required to retain the inmates. Most feel they cannot
escape and few try.
This leads to cascading problems in education. Neither liberal
nor conservative mantras offer much in the ways of solutions. Charter schools,
which offer “choice” are often performing no better than their pure public
counterparts in raising test scores. Recent court decisions in some states have
led to a reconciliation of financial aid available to poor districts as
compared to rich ones, but all the money in the world will not repair the
breach of a fatherless home, even worse one with a drug addicted mother. The
only thing more infuriating than non-committal liberal platitudes are conservative
vows of de-facto abandonment. Conservatives would, if allowed, cut school aid,
increase class sizes, reduce Pell grants which help those of poor and working
class backgrounds attend college. In their place they propose Charter Schools,
weakened teachers’ unions, and up from the boot straps bullshit. I am no expert,
but it seems that true as it is in districts that service poor as well as more
well off students, at minimum what schools need is a broad mandate to
experiment in pursuit of better performance.
Solutions can be found in almost every area of concern, but
legitimate news outlets are too busy wasting pixels and ink on a silly CIA sex
scandal which will garner more attention in four days than the causes, and
possible solutions to deadening chronic poverty have generated in the past four
years. Publishers of information, fed by advertisers who desire nothing more or
less than eyeballs which may consider the purchase of their products, are only
partially to blame. Americans must demand action too. In the 60-plus days since
the four Americans were killed in the American embassy in Benghazi upwards of 2,000
were touched by gun violence.
In housing, there is ample evidence that political decisions
were made in Chicago by the late Mayor Daley (See The Promised Land, by Nicholas Lehman), and New York by Robert
Moses, as well as cities large and small across the country, to carve up the
great metropolitan centers. The reasons range from benign paternalism and
neglect to overt racism. Either way, neighborhoods of the poor and working poor
fell victim to “Urban Renewal”. (This includes my Father’s parents, long gone
now, but forced from their home many years ago in Chicago). We can start to
revitalize these communities by breaking up the projects. Progressive
governments across the Northeast, specifically in several communities in Northern
New Jersey, and elsewhere have torn down the easily identified brick prison
projects, built during the great depression and for a decade or two after. In their
place dispersed low rise, mixed income housing has gone up.
Then it’s all about jobs, jobs, jobs. The Republicans
pilloried Obama for the critically high unemployment rate of 14.3% in the
African American community. Fair enough. As the two parties look for ways to
reduce the deficit, something all Americans should want, we ought to demand
that jobs programs especially for those on the lower end of the economic ladder
are built into the short term plan. Long term we ought to expect deficit
reduction. Short term we need to put America back to work.
On criminal justice, we should seek to meet a goal of
reducing the number of prison inmates, particularly those convicted of
non-violent drug crimes, by a minimum of 25% over the next ten years. This is a
national problem, but the solution must administered by states. It affects big
liberal states like New York and California as well as smaller states with deep
red conservative governance. With the massive reduction in expense which
smaller prison populations would generate states ought to commit at least one
new space in drug treatment for every proposed prison furlough, with the
balance going towards education. Every state with an expanding prison population
and inadequate drug treatment services which tries to make the case that it
must raise College tuition due to budgetary restrictions ought to be challenged
to explain their priorities, both in budgetary and human terms. Pressure needs
to be brought on state legislators and governors to reduce the warehousing of
minority men in prison labor camps.
Finally, Americans of better economic circumstance need to look
at themselves. Liberals need to acknowledge that despite the billions spent on
programs to help the poor, profound chronic poverty continues to fester in our
communities. Money alone is not an answer. Across the gamut programs which are
successful and cost effective ought to be replicated and expanded. Those with
poor track records of success ought to be dropped. Johnson unleashed a wave of state
and local level experimentation with his Great Society programs. Though more experimentation
is warranted, over time some of these programs were institutionalized with
limited results at the National level which has opened the entire effort up to
charges of cronyism, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness which were often true. Beyond
the purely cynical but ultimately effective politics of the Southern Strategy
which caused much of the anti-poverty effort to be viewed through a black-white
prism, some of the programs that did not work were protected by entrenched
interests. Experimentation can be a great thing, but liberals ought to be able
to acknowledge the danger of entrenched bureaucracies, especially of the liberal
variety, which in their essence are conservative protectors of a miserable
status quo. Liberalism looses the argument every time they refuse to
acknowledge that. Reflexive liberal reaction to any reductions in any program
do not serve the public dialogue we need to have or the citizens we claim to
want to serve. Merely making the case that the Government wastes far more in
welfare for large corporations or the rich, while true, does not raise one woman
or one child from poverty.
For the right in the current political climate of
demonization it is difficult to see a way forward for Conservatives. However,
we must acknowledge that these problems are so deep and the resolution of them
so critical to our nation that no institution, organization or person, can be
excluded from the effort. While money cannot be the only solution, for some
problems especially chronic unemployment there is no substitute for it.
Conservatives uncomfortable with government interaction in the economy ought to
propose their own solutions to train and employ the long term unemployed. This
can take the form of private partnerships or quasi-governmental Public-Private
partnerships. The only minimum requirement ought to be a commitment to action.
When I walked from CL’s apartment for the last time on
Saturday a heavy feeling settled on me. Though I had not been on those steps in
20 years, there was still some finality to that departure. Perhaps I thought I
would not be back there before, but now some permanence to that idea trailed me
through the projects. As CL told me this
weekend, “It was really rough, but it was where we lived so we made the best of
it.” On the steps heading out that door there was a younger Mom with two little
boys, perhaps six or seven, but so close in age and appearance they could have
been twins. Back in the day I would have called them nappy headed. They were
beautiful children with bright eyes and scooters of the type favored by my son.
I looked at them for moment, tapped one
on the head. I wanted to tell them good days are ahead. Keep your hope up. Work
hard. CL made it, you can too. The world is there for whatever you make it. I
know CL believes that now. Perhaps he barely got out, but he did make it. His
mother pushed a lot, and I tugged a little and one kid made it over the wall. Even
25 years later I cannot express what that means to me and the profound effect
that experience as had on my life and shaped in almost all ways who I am. Perhaps
there is reason for hope. Perhaps that is what all of us need to start
with--conservative, liberals and the poor themselves—even as we can agree that
poverty especially at the levels currently seen in the United States is immoral,
there is still reason for hope. There is
always reason for hope. Anger is good. Hope is better.
No comments:
Post a Comment