By Kirk Ross
One late night a few years back in a then-smoky club, a friend of mine who worked at a local social service agency was describing the difficulties faced by those who advocate for the homeless.
The conversation drifted around to the way so many people seem to prefer expressing compassion with a kind of detachment, how it’s easier to send off a check to some worthwhile cause than to rub elbows with some unfortunate, unkempt human being walking the streets where you live.
“They’re not dolphins, Kirk,†my friend said. “If they were homeless dolphins, this town would be all over it.â€
I don’t know if any of you have been really poor, wondered where your next meal was coming from, lived in a squat, a car or an abandoned house, but I have. I don’t enjoy talking about those days and can’t help but remember them. Life was hard. People were kind to me. Grace is real. To this day, the experience, as they say up at the university, informs my thinking. I could laugh at my friend’s comment because, for a while, I swam among the not-dolphins. It’s not a pretty life, but I can attest that everyone I met was an honest-to-God human being, and no matter what demons they were battling, somewhere inside every last one was a person who wanted a better life.
As important as it is to talk about the awful state of income disparity, I dread the results it has engendered among those defending greed and the myth of heroic self-reliance. It’s hard to stay connected without every day hearing some blowhard disparaging the poor and unemployed as lazy deadbeats living off the rest of us. It’s such easy politics, easy us-versus-them stuff.
Ronald “Morning in America†Reagan, who was president during the last great economic downturn, was a master at this. Tales of welfare fraud were among the red meat he tossed about in his first run for the presidency in 1976. In a country where most of the people receiving government support belonged to white, working poor families, he made the black, Cadillac-driving welfare queen public enemy number one.
In the race to the rhetorical bottom that seems to mark political discourse these days, candidates and commentators have moved beyond Reagan’s infamous welfare royalty to those grubby little poor kids who think they’re entitled to a decent meal at school.
I checked and, actually, they are, and have been since the passage of the National School Lunch Act in 1946. And get this: Disadvantaged children are also entitled to a have a “fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education.†So entitled, in fact, that the law spelling that out is even called Title I. It was passed in 1965.
Both of these laws were passed during times of deep partisan division by people who managed to rise above their disagreements to do the right thing. How we got to where such things seem impossible and beating up on poor kids is politically advantageous is beyond me.
After a decade in which millions more children have fallen into poverty, using their misfortune to win a few votes is a particularly contemptible tactic. Instead of addressing the cause – an economy that is enriching the few while the many slip farther behind – it’s easier to build a straw man, to quibble over the definition of poverty, to point out that poor people have cell phones and televisions or suggest that maybe those poor kids in neighborhoods with sky-high unemployment rates ought to just get a job.
Maybe once the primary season is over the rhetoric will move a little closer to reality, but don’t hold your breath.
Meanwhile, there’s a daunting task ahead of us in the delivery of compassion to those who need it most.
Nearly half of the 2.3 million children in this state are in low-income families, with nearly one-quarter in families that make below the federal poverty level of about $22,000 a year for a family of four. That’s 15 bucks a day or less per person for everything – food, rent, clothes, transportation, hopes, dreams and so on.
Today was another morning in America in which a lot of people woke up hungry, cold or both. Many are little kids. It’s all they’ve known, and it’s not their fault. You should do something about that.
It’s the season of giving. Please give a lot. The dolphins will love you for it.
Thank you Kirk! As always, an incredibly thought provoking and well written piece.