After reflection on the problems facing our nation and considerable soul-searching, I have decided we should declare war! Enough pussy-footing around! The enemy has been with us for a long time. This adversary has been slowly, but surely, sapping our national energy and eroding our patriotic resolve. We can no longer tolerate its insidious warping of our morale.
We have delayed acting long enough. It is time to act decisively or the enemy will eat away our freedom and justice. Averting our eyes will no longer work. We must mobilize the national energy, recruit more volunteers and address the foe head on!
This war calls for sacrifice and will not be won quickly or easily. It will be long and costly. This is a war unlike any others we have fought. The enemy is furtive - lives among us. It is time we made this war our top national priority!
We should declare war against - poverty - for surely if we can mobilize our energies and resources to track down and bring Osama bin Laden and his evil network to justice at a cost of one billion dollars a month, we can muster the same resolve to end poverty in the midst of plenty.
But whom am I kidding? Today's exuberant patriotism will support military action when the nation has been attacked by terrorists, but it will not support the day-to-day work of ending the shame of domestic hunger and homelessness. Today's patriotism says there is no sacrifice too great to bring the terrorists to justice, but takes little notice of economic injustice. Today's patriotism says the war on terrorism is the top national priority, but fails to acknowledge a system in which there are "dinners without appetites at one end of the table and appetites without dinners at the other."[1]
My conversion to this new war came at a recent meeting of our Church Council. I reminded the group that the annual Interfaith Thanksgiving service this year is at our church, and that the offering on that occasion would be divided between Foodlink, our local food cupboard storehouse, and the Twin Towers Fund, which provides for families of uniformed service workers in New York City who lost so much. A board member asked me if that fund also provided help for families of the non-uniformed workers - the janitors and maids, the cleaners and maintenance workers - the lowest paid people who also lost much on September 11. I didn't know and still don't know, though I hope to find out.
That question, however, reminded me of a column by AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.[2] I heard Sweeney a few years ago at a conference in Albany. He is a short, stocky Irishman in a pin-striped suit who could have passed for a Wall Street broker until I heard him speak. He wrote that "America's Workers Can't Spend Praise," noting that since 9 - 1 - 1 many political leaders have been wearing ball caps emblazoned with "FDNY" and "NYPD." Respect for government workers is up. "And why not?" he asked, "It makes us feel good about our country and ourselves to pay homage to our heroes and the sturdy working family values they live and died for. And believe me, it makes those workers feel good to get some recognition for the contributions they make, 24-7-365."
Sweeney noted that while more than 500,000 workers are losing their jobs in the aftermath of September 11 - 150,000 in the aviation industry and 120,000 in the hospitality and tourism industries alone, and the federal government is providing $15 billion for airline company bailouts, Congress defeated a proposal for $2.5 billion in extended unemployment benefits, job training and health care for those workers whose livelihoods were obliterated. Even the new $75 billion terrorism-related economic stimulus package puts workers on notice they will be served "last and least at the table of economic recovery." What is more, the program "dips into two wholly inadequate existing programs, one of which is supposed to serve poor children - to give unemployed adults health coverage."
Sweeney argues that direct aid to workers where and when they need it is the best stimulus package, because that money will be pumped directly back into the economy. Ironically, he noted this was the staple of the anti-recessionary packages signed by President George H. W. Bush in the early 90's. Current proposals tilt heavily in favor of corporations and the wealthy. As Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has pointed out, "only 18% of this year's tax rebates translated into actual spending." Sweeney concludes: "For America's working class heroes, praise alone won't pay the rent. And neither will it revive our nation's economy."
You may or may not agree with Sweeney's economic analysis or prescription, but there is a haunting sense of hypocrisy in lauding the every day heroes of 9-1-1, but giving precious little support for those heroes when public service contracts are let or when extended unemployment benefits are proposed.
In our own community we have equal cause for concern. At a Susan B. Anthony Center symposium on "The Roots of Women's Poverty," the major theme was that "The most sacrosanct job in the world - motherhood - is responsible for plunging millions of American women into poverty." One speaker challenged the logic of forcing women on welfare to leave young children for jobs that don't pay a living wage, unlike European nations which see raising children as a national contribution. "What we call welfare, they call child welfare allowance." Another speaker was "nervous for the 50,000 New Yorkers - 97% of them women - who will lose public assistance in December. "There are no more federal entitlements, there's a recession, and there were huge tax cuts even before September 11." [3]
A recent report from Foodlink notes that "the face of hunger in Rochester is more likely to be that of a single working mother. Nearly half of the recipients of this food live in suburban and rural areas, a third of these homes include at least one employed adult. In our area 60,000 people get assistance from food banks; 3 million in New York State and 23 million nation-wide. George Wiedemer, a Republican county legislator, noted that he was struck by the number of people surveyed who reported having to choose between paying for food and paying for utilities or heating fuel.[4]
But this is only the factual side of the equation. There is a moral and spiritual issue here as well. One preacher gave a particularly stinging critique of our society and its predominant attitude toward "the least of these": "The poverty of our century is not as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed on the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied but written off as trash. "The . . . consumer economy has produced the first culture for which the beggar is a reminder of nothing."[5] At the turn of the 20th century psychologist and philosopher Williams James asserted that humanity needed a "moral equivalent to war." For all its potential evil, war does bring out many of the best traits in us: a strong love of country, a sense of working together in common cause, a feeling of great urgency, and participation in a mission that transcends merely personal interests. Much of this we see in our declared "war on terrorism."
But we apparently are not able to muster equivalent fervor for the war against poverty. The last time we advocated that kind of war, we quit before it was finished. And now, thanks to the campaign pledge of former President Bill Clinton, we have "ended welfare as we know it." Unfortunately, we have not yet ended poverty as we know it.
Welfare rolls have declined precipitously since the law went into effect in 1997, but poverty has dipped only slightly to about 32 million, due in part to a booming economy and in part to the partial success of welfare reform itself. Now that we are in a recession - underway before September 11 - it is likely poverty will increase, even as welfare rolls may continue to decline. After all, when welfare reform is due for reauthorization in the fall of 2002, many welfare recipients will have used up their lifetime 5-year eligibility and will be on their own no matter how bad the economy is.
At its worst the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act was called "legislative child abuse," mean-spirited, ideologically driven and draconian. It was said that this "prune and punish" philosophy had compromised our nation's commitment to the poor. In America it was women and children last. I shared those sentiments then, and, while I have moderated my view somewhat, I continue to be deeply troubled by this policy.
Current evaluations of welfare reform are preliminary and decidedly mixed. A rough summary would be that the worst predictions of its critics have not been realized, nor have the highest hopes of its supporters. New York State has witnessed a 30% drop in welfare roles, but The Empire State has the highest rate of child poverty in the nation. Among the states we have the largest gap between the rich and poor, and between rich and the middle class. Our best hope, as the Sword of Damocles hovers over the heads of New Yorkers who will lose eligibility, is Article 17 of the State Constitution which mandates the state to "aid, care for and support the needy."
Our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee has launched a welfare reform monitoring project and has found many problems, including * lack of knowledge of the new rules by state officials and condescending attitudes toward clients, * pressure to reduce roles rather than improve the lives of people, * closing cases on technicalities, * depriving clients of educational opportunities because of zeal to get them into any kind of jobs no matter what the pay and benefits, * and punitive enforcement of family caps in some states.
Where there has been increased public support, with adequate child care, job training, transportation and health care, many poor families have moved out of poverty. However, other poor families lose important benefits when they go to work; they were better off on welfare before than they are in the work force now. Evaluation data is sketchy, partly because Congress rejected an amendment to the legislation that would have provided for regular review. Don't confuse the Congress with facts; its mind is made up!
UUSC recommends elimination of the five-year time limit and a more flexible exemption policy; increasing the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation; rewarding states for helping recipients achieve self-sufficiency rather than reducing welfare roles; and involving recipients in welfare design and evaluation.
While I concur, my remedy is more radical. I begin with the premise that people are not cost effective. Try as we might, people just won't be - and should not be - reduced to some budgetary bottom line. Some people will never be able to make it on their own. There but for the grace of God go any one of us. But many will be able to make it through a combination of public assistance and work if the incentives are there. And upon us falls the responsibility to help it happen for more people more of the time. We are the foot soldiers in this new kind of war.
I propose a citizen's wage with an income floor under which no one would be allowed to fall - an entitlement - also supported by the conservative economist Milton Friedman. The Universalist Church of America way back in 1917 advocated "An Economic Order which shall give to every human being an equal share in the common gifts of God, and in addition all that (they) shall earn by (their) own labor."
People can build on that floor by working, keeping the lion's share of their earnings. Working would always leave one better off than not working, like the federal Earned Income Tax Credit or the state Earned Income Disregard or Child Assistance Program. As earnings rise, people would be taxed at progressive levels. The goal would be a Self-Sufficiency Standard, a goal well above the minimum and even the Living wage.
Naturally, as is typical of many of my social justice pronouncements, I am a voice crying in the wilderness. You may have noticed an excerpt from my book How Much Do We Deserve? An Inquiry in Distributive Justice in the November-December issue of the UU World. I have begun to field replies to that article - some sharply critical. I have not yet had to hire a secretary to respond to the current volume, but I live in high hopes.
And then one day last week, a fellow Unitarian Universalist from Cape Cod called to label my article in the World - "outrageous." I steeled myself for the onslaught - another UU angry at my unconventional views on economic justice. But then he went on to say he agreed with me: how could we effect some of those reforms. Music to my ears.
I admit my prescription for the war against poverty is perhaps outrageous, but the existence of poverty in the midst of plenty is far, far more outrageous.
We enter the Thanksgiving season sobered and chastened. It is tempting to withdraw into our cocoons and count our own blessings. And so now it is all the more important we remember that the poor are still with us, and with an economy in recession and a war going on, their number will grow.
How then, return thanks, when our own nation has been buffeted by terrorism and the people of Afghanistan face an uncertain future? Giving gratitude is so much easier in good times than in bad. Thankful we must be, but I want to suggest singing our gratitude in a new key. Thanksgiving is a deeply spiritual time in which we recognize all those blessings that are ours - many of which come to us as grace bestowed by creation. But Thanksgiving is also a deeply ethical time in which we realize that those blessings should overflow into deeds of love and justice. Unless we transform thanksgiving into thanksliving, we have missed the deeper meaning of this holy day.
One way to engage in that thanksliving is to enlist today in the war against poverty - stocking food cupboards, staffing shelters, tutoring children, and participating in the political work of compassionate welfare reform. Many of us are already serving - our support of the SEM Food Cupboard and our work with School 22 in the Saturday Academy are just two examples. We should be thankful that so many are so committed.
This commitment embodies the words with which we conclude every service - "the light of truth, the warmth of community and the fire of commitment." We need to supplement that direct address to poverty with effective political action for which UUSC has called, and I urge you to become informed and active in influencing public opinion.
And so, elaborating on the theme of our first hymn, I say,
Thanks be for these:
thanks be for "truth tellers and angry prophets;"
thanks be for those who labor quietly to serve humanity;
thanks be for the opportunity to take from our abundance and share with those in want;
thanks be for the spirit of generosity and justice that is in us this day;
thanks be for all that which we have already accomplished;
and thanks be for all those things yet undone.
Thanks be for these. Amen
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