"To appraise a society,
examine its ability to be self-correcting. When grievous wrongs
are done or endemic sufferings exposed, when injustice is discovered
or opportunity denied, watch the institutions of government and
business and charity. Their response is an index of the nation's
health and of a people's strength."
-- David
Shipler, The Working Poor, 2004
The media
is overflowing with analyses and criticism of the federal government's
mind-boggling lack of preparedness and unconscionably slow response
to last week's devastation of the Gulf Coast, and there's really
not much I can add to what's already been said. There's no need
for me to comment on the inevitability of catastrophic natural disasters
(global warming or no), or how politically motivated appointments
and funding priorities at the Department of Homeland Security weakened
the operations of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And I'm
sure readers are already aware of the federal government's blasé
approach to the well-documented deterioration of New Orleans' century-old
levee system, and the world's shock and disbelief at the sudden
exposure of the humanitarian crisis that's simmered for decades
beneath the polished surface of an outwardly civilized and egalitarian
society. "We don't live like this in America," an exhausted
and bewildered flood victim told the New York Times. (1)
But it appears that "this" is precisely the
way we live: chest-deep in the foul run-off from our calculated
inattention to escalating
social problems at home and abroad. It's just that the fallout
of our indifference is rarely so brutally visible to the public
eye. By now, many Americans are waking up to the troubling reality
that race and class often determine not just who lives well and
who lives poorly in our society, but who lives and who dies.
While economists, public health experts and policy analysts have
issued repeat warnings about the human, moral, and social costs
of the staggering degree of income inequality separating the haves
from the have-nots in the United States, people in power have carried
on business as usual with remarkable impunity. With exception to
the pubic outcry over proposed privatization of Social Security,
tough-love politicians preaching small government and personal responsibility
have encountered little resistance to efforts to systematically
shrink the social safety net while pushing legislative and tax reforms
to protect the assets of corporations and the monied class.
People who think minimizing human suffering caused by widespread
poverty and social injustice is one of the hallmarks of good government
are struggling to understand why this ruthless winnowing down of
the welfare state has been allowed to continue unchecked. Is it
because the progressive movement, and the Democratic party in particular,
has failed to craft a persuasive counterargument to the radical
right's draconian
agenda? Or could it be, as Arlie Russell Hochschild suggests
in a recent essay,
that even the least well-off Americans prefer to "identify
up" with those who are richer, more famous and luckier than
they themselves will ever be? Or is it, as author David Shipler
reports in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The
Working Poor, that "after all that's been written,
discussed and left unresolved" about the root causes of poverty
in the U.S. and its potential remedies, average people of good-will
have become inured to the magnitude and urgency of the problem?
America's poor, Shipler argues, have become invisible to those with
the right resources and social capital to gain membership in mainstream
society, and their hardships are easily swept under the rug of politics
as usual. And as long as the teeming multitude of America's impoverished
and dispossessed remained conveniently out of sight and out of mind,
policymakers -- and the voting public -- weren't forced to contend
with the possibility that the American Experiment might end in cataclysmic
failure.
Of course, all that's changed now.
It may seem insensitive and opportunistic to raise this issue of
family policy when the nation is still reeling from the enormity
of events and uncertainty about what lies ahead -- for the hundreds
of thousands of individuals and families who were damaged and displaced
by Hurricane Katrina and its horrendous aftermath and for the rest
of us. But while debates about the confounding lack of family policy
in the U.S. typically focus on relieving the time squeeze for middle-class
parents in dual-earner couples or removing barriers to mothers'
career advancement, there's another side to the story.
What France, Sweden, Denmark and other countries with exemplary
family and child policies know -- and what the U.S. obstinately
refuses to consider -- is that social policies guaranteeing all
workers paid maternity and medical leave, a minimum number of paid
sick days, access to affordable quality child care, worker- and
family-friendly working time protections, and a realistic minimum
wage are also highly effective anti-poverty measures. In fact, many
nations offering policies to protect maternal employment and benefits
for family caregivers do so to reduce the incidence and social costs
of women's and children's poverty -- and it works. Throw
in universal health care, more and better unemployment coverage
for workers employed less than full-time, adequate funding for excellent
public education nationwide, and safe, affordable housing for the
low-wage workforce and we might start to see the rough outlines
of a good-enough society -- a society where the link between caring
for dependent family members and economic insecurity is finally
severed, and where children of all races and classes have equal
opportunities to thrive.
Let me be clear: I'm not proposing that if -- like almost every
other affluent nation in the world -- the U.S. had more and better
family policy in place today, the thousands of mothers and children
forced to take shelter in the New Orleans Superdome might have been
spared their nightmarish ordeal. Perhaps if the minimum wage was
closer to a living wage, or if "welfare-to-work" programs
trained and placed former TANF recipients in jobs that actually
paid enough to raise their families out of poverty, or if low-income
working parents weren't spending nearly a third of their earnings
on child care, more families might have been able to afford
private transportation or lodging in safer quarters. (As Illinois
Senator Barack
Obama comments, "whoever was in charge of planning and
preparing for the worst case scenario appeared to assume that every
American has the capacity to load up their family in an SUV, fill
it up with $100 worth of gasoline, stick some bottled water in the
trunk, and use a credit card to check in to a hotel on safe ground.")
It's impossible to know if adequate policies to support low-income
families could have averted some of the human misery we've witnessed
in the aftermath of Katrina -- and irresponsible to guess. In any
case, unless better provisions were made for their evacuation, the
disabled, the sick and dependent elderly would still have been stranded
and at risk.
But there is a common denominator between America's signature
resistance to enacting even modestly effective family policies and
the failure
of leadership that sealed the fate of Katrina's poorest and
most vulnerable victims. After three decades of systematic assault
on the concept of shared sacrifice to promote the general welfare,
our nation is now experiencing a critical shortage of common empathy
and political will. As a caring society, the U.S. has hit
rock-bottom.
When I speak to groups about the need for more and better family
policy in the U.S., people often ask why this country is such an
outlier, compared to all of Western Europe, in its lack of comprehensive
support for working families -- especially when the social costs
of not supporting children and families are so desperately
high. There are a number of cultural and economic factors that come
into play, but they all lead back to the same point of origin. I
suspect our confusion about the appropriate role of government in
providing for the common good has less to do with our diversity
and love of personal freedom (as many analysts will insist), and
more to do with our moral maturity as a nation. After all, in the
scope of world history, the United States is rather young and (at
least in theory) has a long trajectory of progress ahead. One might
compare the U.S. to a willful toddler, but with much more dangerous
toys at her disposal and global clout.
Parents of toddlers generally try to teach their children the hard
lesson that -- as much as we adore them -- they are not, after all,
the center of the universe. We remind them to share and play fair
with others -- no hitting or biting. We begin to teach them about
the importance of taking responsibility, and that both actions and
inaction can have undesirable consequences. But starting at a very
young age, we also teach our children to recognize and respect the
feelings and needs of other humans and living things, and gradually
instruct them in the basics of being caring people.
As anyone who has actually attempted this knows, guiding the rational
and moral development of toddlers is very much a touch-and-go affair,
with long periods of defiance and regression marked by stunning
breakthroughs of enlightenment. The horrifying incompetence of federal
officials -- which inevitably compounded the surplus of human suffering
left in Katrina's wake -- suggests America still hasn't figured
out what it means to be a caring society, or whether or not it wants
to be one.
Whatever direction the U.S. decides to take in the next phase of
its moral evolution, there is more at stake than the welfare of
America's most vulnerable people and families. In her introduction
to Unfinished Work: Building Equality and Democracy in an Era
of Working Families, Jody Heymann notes that "If the United
States is to continue to evolve and succeed as a democracy,
it needs to address the essential social tasks of completing work
and rearing the next generation while increasing equality of opportunity
-- not increasing disparities" (emphasis added). The recent
disaster in the Gulf Coast makes it painfully clear that we still
have a very long way to go.
No one could wish for an object lesson in social responsibility
and the value of caring as harsh and as costly -- both economically
and on the scale of human loss -- as the one Katrina swept into
our midst. But perhaps as a nation, we've entered a teachable moment.
mmo : august 2005 |
Other
Katrina commentaries of note:
Hurricane
Pundits Blow Hot Air on Single Mothers
Angela Bonavoglia, Women's
eNews, 14 Sept 05
Americans are confronting sweeping images of poverty blown wide
open by Hurricane Katrina. Angela Bonavoglia says this should be
an opportunity to look at the nation's responsibility to all its
people, including low-income single mothers.
The
Other Side of the Big Easy
Liza Featherstone, AlterNet,
12 Sept 05
Katrina has exposed decades of benign neglect, racism, and environmental
injustice that can't be prettified with crawfish étouffé.
Welcome
to the 'Third World,' America
Sarita Sarvate, AlterNet,
12 Sept 05
If there is one useful purpose this tragedy can serve, it would
be to raise American consciousness about the 'Third World' that
lies within its boundaries.
A
Moral Moment
Al Gore, AlterNet,
13 Sept 05
When the corpses of American citizens are floating in toxic floodwaters
five days after a hurricane strikes, it is time to hold the leaders
of our nation accountable for the failures that have taken place.
No
Exit From the Danger Zone
Alison Stein Wellner, AlterNet,
19Sept 05
Disaster evacuation plans throughout the U.S. assume that people
own a car. Too bad for the 23 million Americans who don't.
Katrina
Shakes Global Faith in U.S.
Pueng Vongs, AlterNet,
15 Sept 05
Journalists around the world are watching images from the hurricane's
aftermath -- and are shocked that a country so mighty could have
fallen so far.
A
'New' New Deal
William Greider, Common
Dreams, 16 Sept 05
A profound political question is suddenly on the table: Must the
country continue to give precedence to private financial gain and
market determinism over human lives and broad public values? Or
shall we now undertake a radical restoration on behalf of society
and people?
Exiles
From a City and From a Nation
Cornel West, Common
Dreams, 11 Sept 05
Originally published in the Observer/UK
It takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we
saw among the poor black people of New Orleans to get America to
focus on race and poverty.
Leave
Katrina Relief Efforts to Government
Ted Rall, Common
Dreams, 15 Sept 05
Government has been shirking its basic responsibilities since the
'80s, when Ronald Reagan sold us his belief that the sick, poor
and unlucky should no longer count on "big government"
to help them, but should rather live and die at the whim of contributors
to private charities. The Katrina disaster, whose total damage estimate
has risen from $100 to $125 billion, marks the culmination of Reagan's
privatization of despair.
Not
'Refugees,' but Americans
Connie Schultz, Common
Dreams, 12 Sept 05
Originally published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Refugee" no longer feels like a word, but a way to distance
ourselves emotionally from what we can't quite believe is happening
to citizens in our own country. To many, it sounds like an attempt
to excuse the inexcusable… Let's not start by calling them
refugees. They are Americans, and it's time we take care of our
own."
The
Inequality President
Rinku Sen, TomPaine.com,
14 Sept 05
"It is obvious now that the devastation caused by Katrina was
preventable and that New Orleanians lost out to Bush's other priorities—the
tax cut for America's upper ranks as well as the Iraq war and subsequent
occupation, costing $400 billion total. These decisions frame the
dynamics of Bush's disregard for people of color. He has gutted
the public programs that help the poor and people of color maintain
a basic standard of living, and done away with the civil rights
protections that defend our humanity."
Flushing
out the ugly truth
By Joan Walsh, Salon,
2 Sept 05
"The crisis unfolding before us -- dispossession, looting,
people shooting at rescue workers, the president's dim response,
and now, people dying in front of our eyes outside the Superdome
-– rubs our noses in so much that's wrong in our country,
it's excruciating to watch. But I'm especially struck by the inability
of our existing political discourse to describe, let alone to solve,
the intractable social problems that have come together in this
flood whose proportions and portents seem almost biblical."
A
Flood of Bad Policies
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet,
2 Sept 05
While Katrina's dead have not yet been counted, it's not too soon
to hammer home a point: government policies have real consequences
in people's lives.
The
Katrina Disaster and the Role of Government
Demos, a national, nonpartisan public policy and research organization
based in New York, is chronicling the public debate about the role
of government in the aftermath of the hurricane. A special weppage
includes links to a selection of news articles, op ed pieces, and
other materials that document or comment on the role of government
in keeping people safe and restoring them to productive and fulfilling
lives. |
