Opening Words, "To Those Born After," by Bertolt Brecht (Trans. unclear)
Truly I live in dark times!
Frank speech is naïve. A smooth forehead
Suggests insensitivity. The one who laughs
Has simply not yet heard
The terrible news.
What kind of times are these, when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
When the man over there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?
It’s true that I still earn my daily bread
But, believe me, that’s only an accident. Nothing
I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I've been spared. (If my luck breaks, I'm lost.)
They say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat
From the starving
And my glass of water belongs to someone dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.[...]
Truly, I live in dark times.
[…]
But you, [who come from the future …] when [your] time comes at last
When one person is truly helper to another
Think of [those of us who came before]
With forbearance.
At the beginning of the
summer I drove out to [--], Michigan on my way to General Assembly, to
help celebrate my grandfather’s 90th birthday. To occupy myself
along the way I downloaded an audiobook of Robert Putnam’s recent sociological
bestseller, Our Kids: The American Dream
in Crisis. Putnam, whom you may recall from his classic treatise Bowling Alone, has made a name for
himself over the past twenty years by crying doom about the decline of “social
capital” in this country. What he means by this is what he sees as the fraying
of all the small ways in which we encounter one another in this society across
class and racial lines, in the form of communities and collective efforts that
aren’t defined just by force or economic necessity. In one book after another
he has charted the decline of public libraries and schools and churches and
civic groups and even bowling leagues (hence the title) – and the rise in their
place of the opioid crisis and the prison-industrial complex. Our Kids picks up this same theme,
applying it now to what has happened to the real life chances of children in
this country over the last several generations, as ours has become a society that
is now more stratified and segregated by class than it has been for nearly a
century.
From the perspective of a
Sunday morning here in leafy-green [New England town], all this can perhaps sound like a
bit of a Jeremiad, an out of touch exaggeration of social peril. [New England town] reminds me a great deal of the kind of suburban towns I grew up in, and in
which most of our UU churches nationwide can be found, and doesn’t give me
cause to worry about the dissolution of community. The Boy and Girl Scouts are
still here, the public education system appears to be flourishing, we have a
Chief of Police and School Superintendent whom everyone seems to know by name –
it all fits not only with my notions about how things are supposed to be, but
with what I on some level still think of as “average America”. Look around here
and you won’t think that our “social capital” has deserted us, or even
diminished much over the past few decades.
Driving through the interior
of this country with Robert Putnam going on the speakers, however, I am
reminded over again of how little of today’s America is what I and many other
privileged people consider to be “average America.” Our “average America” has
been built to scale on a model of what we thought that America was supposed to
be-- something like Disney Land's "Main Street USA"-- but this has become the realm of an ever smaller subset of the country. It
occurs to me how much of my life has been spent flying from one [New England town] to
another – and how much that is not [New England town] I pass unseen along the way. I am
reminded of a time when I was living in Chicago and a friend from high school
was visiting me. The two of us were walking through the heart of downtown
Chicago’s shopping district on our way to Water Tower Place when we literally
came face to face with two other members of our 75-person graduating class from
a small private school in Florida. We were all stunned by the coincidence, but
I see now that we shouldn’t have been. Chicago’s Michigan Avenue is one of
these many [New England town]s – a socio-economic bubble frequented by people who still
think of themselves as “average” and “middle class” but who are becoming less
and less that, and in which they are likely to run into only people who are
very much like them. This is what happens in class societies, and should only
surprise us if we still want to believe that ours is not a class society. Old
Etonians aren’t surprised to run into each other at Monte Carlo each season –
why should we have felt any differently? What would have been surprising is if
we had seen each other on 62nd street, or Cermak, or any of the
other places in Chicago where some people live, grow up, and go to school-- and
other people are warned never to go.
Several forces work against
our fully realizing the extent to which we have become a divided society. One,
paradoxically, is the very extent and pervasiveness of the class segregation
itself. We are so hermetically sealed from one another that we never even see
people who live differently than we do, so we assume there is no segregation at
all – it must just be that all Americans now have Macbooks and iPhones and
advanced degrees.
The second is the fact that
it all happened so fast. Those of us who grew up in the different world of
yesterday, or who inherited from our parents the expectation that America was a
country without social classes, where everyone got a fair shot and an equal
chance, have all been blind-sided by what has happened to this country in a
matter of a few years. Robert Putnam tells this story in part through personal
stories such as that of David [Read earlier in the service]; but he also wields a wealth statistics and
sociological detail that add up to a devastating indictment of the turn our
country has taken.
As recently as half a century
ago, the United States enjoyed a high water mark of social and economic
equality – a mutual prosperity that was distributed, if not quite evenly, then
at least relatively broadly across America’s social classes. Strong labor
unions and collective bargaining rights, robust redistributive taxation, and
the new post-war social welfare programs all contributed to make ours into a
substantially middle class society.
It should come as no surprise
to us that these equalizing social programs were layered on top of profound disparities
in the way people were treated on the basis of race, gender, and sexual
orientation. And we are wise to remember that many of these programs were implemented
in so deeply uneven a fashion that they may actually have entrenched the
economic supremacy of particular groups. As Debby Irving put it when she spoke
to [us] last year, the G.I. Bill was if anything a form of “affirmative
action for white people.”
As discriminatory as the postwar welfare state may
have been, however, its decline has only deepened the inequalities of race and
class in this country and has shattered many poor, working class, black and
Hispanic communities.
Over the past fifty years,
middle class Euro-Americans have always been the first to benefit from public
spending – social security for instance – and the last to feel the sting when it
is withdrawn. In the 1980s and 1990s, when inner city black and Latino
communities were already experiencing the massive hemorrhaging of manufacturing
jobs and other sources of support, the government pursued a policy of actively divesting
from these communities. As the government de-institutionalized the mental
health care system, flat-lined funding for Head Start and other social
programs, and “ended welfare as we know it,” millions were left to fend for
themselves. The epidemic of crack cocaine use was born from this social nightmare,
as people turned to the drug as a means of relief from despair or as a form of
self-medication after affordable public mental health care had been withdrawn.
From
following the public discourse of these years coming from America’s pundits and
politicians, however, you’d never guess that this is what was going on. Instead,
the media in those decades was full of discussions about the quote-unquote
“culture of the ghettoes.” A host of potential culprits were identified – baggy pants,
backward hats, bad manners or bad genes – everything but the loss of jobs, the deliberate withdrawal of
public investment, or the fact, say, that black neighborhoods had been
systematically ignored in lead clearance efforts and other public efforts to
remove lethal toxins from our homes and waterways.
The government’s only
response to the crack epidemic, meanwhile, was not to prioritize addiction
counseling or substance abuse treatment, but to incarcerate ever more people
for decades of their lives for nonviolent offenses. Which is to say that the
U.S. did pour money into one publically-funded social program in these years –
namely, the prison system – and the police force that fills it. The result is
that today the only interface with public authorities that people now have in
many communities is with officers whose only mandate is to uphold of the law
through force. The only time when people suffering from mental illness
encounter social workers is after they had been taken down to the station as
criminals. As Black Lives Matter activist Alicia Garza has put it, we could
have been a “care state,” but we chose instead to become a “police state.”[1]
Again, so long as it was
primarily minority communities that were experiencing the effects of these
changes, however, we heard them discussed only in terms of “crime” and
“culture” in the inner cities—in other words, in terms of things which these
communities, presumably, had done to themselves, rather than things that had
been done to them by decades of
public policy.
This indifference that so many of us displayed as Euro-Americans
is coming home to roost now, however, as substance abuse, addiction, job loss
and community breakdown are plaguing white communities to an extent never seen
before. The problems of the inner city are all our problems now; and the public
discourse has changed accordingly. Our political and pundit classes are now no
longer rooting around for the sources of the trouble in our so-called “culture”
– they are seeing that the problem is in our economy and politics – the
deliberate choices we have made as voters that have had the foreseeable
consequence of turning us into an ever more stratified, unequal, and unraveling
society.
To give only one example of
the choices we have made, we can look to the 1996 welfare reform bill. Many of
us here will have a clearer memory than I do of when this legislation was
passed, and the justifications that were given for it at the time. The intent
of the bill was to “end welfare as we know it,” and was informed by a belief
that cash assistance to families in need was actually deepening the hold of
poverty in many parts of the country, by trapping people in the so-called
“cycle of dependence.” The goal of the bill therefore was to reduce the number
of people whose only source of income was the welfare check, and on its own
terms, it was relatively successful. Across the country after 1996, welfare
rolls shrank state-by-state. This was taken as a sign of progress. People must
be finding jobs and building new lives, if they are getting themselves off the
rolls.
To assume this, however, is a
bit like assuming that the closure of a hospital must mean that there are no
more sick people. We know enough now from seeing the 20-year impact of the
reform bill to know that people weren’t all leaving the welfare rolls because they’d
found better opportunities – they were leaving because the state-run welfare
programs were downsizing. As the older Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC) program was eliminated with the 1996 reform bill, poor families were left
with a much narrower range of support. The food stamp program, WIC, Medicaid,
Section 8 and other programs continue to provide in-kind benefits of various
kinds, but they offer no cash assistance for the sorts of routine household
expenses that any family needs to survive – clothing, new shoes, school
supplies, furniture or appliances. The result, as the Center for Budget and
Policy Priorities now estimates, is that the number of families living on two
dollars a day or less of actual liquid cash has doubled in the 20 years since
welfare reform.[2]
While the Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program that replaced AFDC offers some cash
benefits for a defined window of time, the program funds are allotted in block
grants to the states, who decide how to use them. Each of the states is required,
in theory, to direct these TANF funds toward the alleviation of poverty, but
the 1996 reform bill defines this goal in such vague terms that there is no
guarantee the money will ever reach families who actually need it. A recent
report[3]
by an NPR podcast The Uncertain Hour, tried
to follow up, state-by-state, on just who was getting the welfare money and
where it was going. They found states where TANF funds were being devoted to
marital counseling sessions for middle class couples, where they were urged to
compare their “love styles” in order to become more compatible. They found
TANF-funded pregnancy crisis centers that served primarily to steer women away
from abortion services. And they found TANF-funded scholarships to higher
education that were going primarily to children from upper-middle-class
families whose parents were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
The
reporters on the podcast interviewed some of these well-heeled families to ask
how they felt about receiving funds that had originally been designated for
people living in extreme poverty. One scholarship recipient whose family makes
$200,000 replied that she hoped there were still enough funds left over for
needy families after she received her tuition assistance.
Your child needs a new jacket, and it’s winter time
then by all means I hope that there’s enough money […]
[But] I [also] know that I’m going to take my
education and use it wisely and get a great job and hopefully I can buy a
jacket for Christmas for one of those other kids that needs to stay warm.
Here is the response her
parents gave:
I personally think it’s terrific because just because
a kid grows up in a home that might have a little bit more money than the next,
[it] doesn’t mean that they’re not entitled to some help from the government
for college. I mean, it doesn’t matter how much money you make, you’re still
forking over $30,000 a year for college is a hardship.
[…]the welfare money is supporting the kids, to go to
college and if this is something that can help, make an experience better for
them, they’re going to pay taxes and contribute to the society in the long run.
I won’t necessarily think of it as a welfare gift to the family, I would think
of it as a welfare gift to the kid.
Plainly, it is not hard for
privileged Euro-Americans to understand the advantages of public investment in
children and families when we are benefitting from it ourselves. We believe in
the virtuous circle such investment creates, whereby one person is granted a
helping hand and is thereby empowered in turn to help another, when it is our
kids who are getting the help. But so soon as other social groups are on the
receiving end we start to talk about “dependence” and waste.
Thus, even as the impact of
rising inequality is beginning to be felt across racial lines, and even as the
relatively well-off are beginning to see that none of us can go it alone – that
we all occasionally need help along the way from the larger community – I am
worried that this is not leading us in the direction of the “care state” to
which Black Lives Matter activists refer, but to a scare state – to a world in
which each group – precisely because we
have finally realized what we’ve turned our society into – will try to clutch its
advantages even closer to the chest than it did before.
From the vantage point of the
summer of 2016, at any rate, it does not appear that the devastation that many
white rural and rust belt communities are experiencing is leading us to act in
a spirit of solidarity with black and Latino communities who are suffering
under the same economic forces. Rather, we are hearing ever more rhetoric that
blames our problems on immigrants and “crime” – often a code word in American
politics for racial others. This is an old pattern in American life, a tried
and true method for keeping people apart from one another who should have a
community of interest – a Southern Strategy for the twenty-first century. Never
before in recent history, though, has it taken on such exaggerated and alarming
forms.
Toward the end of Our Kids, Putnam offers the following
prognosis. “An inert and atomized mass of alienated and estranged citizens,” he
writes, “might under normal circumstances pose only a minimal threat to
political stability[….] But under severe economic or international pressures
[…] that ‘inert’ mass might suddenly prove highly volatile and open to
manipulation by anti-democratic demagogues at the ideological extremes. […]
Without succumbing to political nightmares, we might ponder whether the bleak,
socially estranged future facing poor kids in American today could have
unanticipated political consequences tomorrow.”
Putnam’s book was published in
its final form only last year. I don’t think he could have imagined while
writing it how very quickly this dark prophecy would burst into reality.
It is not only Donald Trump
and his followers, however, who are trying to hoard what privileges they have
in our increasingly polarized society. Each of us, no matter how apparently
secure our own economic future, becomes less generous, more afraid, more
miserly the more unequal our society becomes.
This is one of the ways in
which inequality is a terribly self-reinforcing problem. The worse life
becomes “on the other side,” the more dangerous and over-policed the other
folks’ neighborhoods, the worse their school system, the more the bonds of
community and social support are attenuated across the tracks, the more we
cling to our own advantages so that we never have to go there. As one well-off
parent – the beneficiary of a flourishing suburban public school district --
told Robert Putnam and the other researchers in Our Kids: “If my kids are going to be successful, I don’t think
they should have to pay other people who are sitting around doing nothing for
their success.” This quality – or inequality – of American life – this fevered race
for advantage and devil-take-the-hindmost attitude -- is not only distorting our
personalities and our values – it also, as Bertolt Brecht once wrote – has the
potential to make life in this country positively infernal, and not just for
the poor.
Even the houses in Hell are not all ugly, Brecht writes.
But concern about being thrown into the street
Consumes the inhabitants of the villas no less
Than the inhabitants of the slums.
This is the means by which we
become prisoners of our privileges as much as of our disadvantages. In the very
effort to get ahead of the curve in a stratified world so that we no longer
have to be afraid, we end up making ourselves captive to fear.
By contrast, a sharing
society, a helping society, one that invests in all its people, regardless of
race or class, would liberate the rich as well as the poor, Euro-Americans as
well as black Americans. We would be empowered to help others more generously
when we are able to trust that our larger national community will be there for
us too, when we need help. This is what the Black Lives Matter movement means
when it speaks of building the care state, and putting to rest at last the
police state we have reared in its place.
The alternative course is to
compartmentalize, to try to exclude the world outside our bubbles from the
range of our conscious awareness, to warn one another not to go past 60th
street in Chicago or into Dorchester on the Red Line, or perhaps to tell
ourselves that it could not be otherwise, anyways -- that some will have and
others will lack and that is the way of the world. To think this way, however,
is not only to deny the full humanity of others, it is to deny our own. We can
never be complete so long as we exclude from our minds and hearts those parts
of ourselves that belong to others, and that yearn – whatever we sometimes say
to the contrary – to live in a different kind of world. I am reminded of the
words of Robert Burns:
If [one is] design’d [another’s serf],
By Nature’s
law design’d,
Why was an independent wish
E[v]er planted
in my mind?
Sometimes the problems can
seem so great as to be overwhelming and impossible to solve. I take comfort,
though, from some of very things that make this problem so frightening.
I said
toward the beginning that we have been blindsided by our crisis of inequality
and it’s true—it happened alarmingly fast. But we know that something that
happened in so short a time can be remade just as quickly. We know from our own
pasts or from the pasts of our parents that it does not have to be this way.
Our own society was not this way even forty or fifty years ago. We have a
different model, and better way, before us. We have seen time and again in our
country’s history how much we all lose when we erode our institutions of
helping, and how much we all stand to gain from building them up.
Please join me in singing our
final hymn, # 149, Lift Every Voice and Sing
Closing Words from Amos 5 (Adapted):
It is an evil time. The poor are turned away at the
gate. The rich impose a heavy rent upon them, and exact a tribute of grain.
Therefore thus says the LORD,
“I hate, I reject your festivals,
Nor
do I delight in your solemn assemblies.
“Even though you offer up to Me burnt offerings and
your grain offerings,
I
will not accept them;
And
I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings.
“Take away from
Me the noise of your songs;
I
will not even listen to the sound of your harps.
“But let
justice roll down like waters
And
righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
I enjoyed this post as usual, but would also love to get your thoughts on this critique of Putnam by an orthodox Catholic socialist:
ReplyDeletehttp://democracyjournal.org/magazine/38/lost-opportunity/