Fallibility and the Purity of Intention

               What do we expect of our heroes and our spiritual leaders? How true is our view of the world as heading rapidly to hell? Do nostalgia and fault-finding lead directly to an apathetic stance of "I can't change the nature of the world so why bother trying"? These questions have been fermenting in my head since I saw "Lincoln" a few weeks ago, which I highly recommend you go and see, whatever your political leanings or taste in films. Anyway, with the assistance of some seemingly coordinated external proddings, I find myself wanting to write about this stuff.

          The other night I was over at my in-laws' place for my brother-in-law's birthday party. Things were winding down, and the topic of conversation was the similarities and differences between the Hindu faith and Buddhism. Somehow Gandhi came up, a subject near and dear to my heart, and Jon, my brother-in-law, asked if we knew that Gandhi had slept with young girls in his bed. It was some sort of self-prescribed test of character or willpower, I guess, and he didn’t always pass. I was skeptical, we were all stunned and each denied any knowledge of the sort. Worth mentioning here, I had just seen the film “Water” which takes place in a revolutionary India and centers on a widowed girl of perhaps 7 and her eventual escape from terrible conditions to the safety of Gandhi’s care. Needless to say I wasn’t exactly eager to accept this new facet of Gandhi.

          Jon continued, “I’ve heard Mother Teresa wasn’t really all that good a person either.” What? “Apparently the conditions there are terrible, the treatment at her hospital…” and here I interrupted, as I am wont to do. “The Missionaries of Charity’s homes for the destitute and dying are more about aiding people to die in a loving environment than providing medical treatment,” I asserted. Which wasn’t news to Jon, as that wasn’t what he was talking about, which is what I was afraid of. He was talking about a seeming megalomania (my words) on Mother Teresa’s part that took the form of some Draconian rules enforced on the volunteers, absurd misuses of money that could have done real good, and actual abuse of the patients. I hope that isn’t the case, yet on reflection, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it were. Anyway the conversation continued on somewhat awkwardly, as I was militantly reluctant to acknowledge Mother Teresa’s possible shortcomings and even tried to press Jon for his sources. God help me, I am ever so tightly bound to my views on the world and my personal heroes, so much that it seems to take multiple lessons for me to grasp a point.

          You see, that morning at church, Pastor Michael’s sermon discretely alluded to Dr. Martin Luther King’s adultery, stressing that King urged his audience to view him as an ordinary man who was just as full of faults as anybody. This might’ve been tied to a passage in Luke about John the Baptist, but I can’t recall for sure how. Maybe that John appeared to be a lunatic, what with the bug-eating and the camel-skin and (I imagine) the dreads. Maybe something about his being mistaken for Christ by the crowd who sought baptism and having to rebuke them, that he knew he was nowhere near as holy as they wanted to believe he was and that only Christ could claim that. At any rate it got me thinking about how we sometimes discount the great works someone has done when we find out they are terribly broken and human after all, like my knee-jerk reaction to some of the stuff I read about JFK once I was an adult. But I didn’t manage to hold that train of thought in my grasp, I so rarely do, and it slipped away just like it had the week before, at the movies.

          When we left the theater after watching “Lincoln”, I was struck by the realization that our political system has ALWAYS been totally crooked, that the cry of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation that things in Washington used to be so much better was just so much self-deluding drivel. All systems of power are systems of manipulation and inequality, and seeing a great man accomplish great things by very unethical means made me take stock of our world anew. I’m not a convert to a “the ends justify the means” system of thought, but I am once again attuned to just how very complicated things are, how unlikely anything is to be completely black and white when considered in its entirety. Take my uncle Steve, who was once involved in the effort to build and teach at some school in Cambodia or thereabouts that was funded by Pol Pot’s wife. I don’t know the specifics, but is the school any less important or noble a cause because of its contributor’s ties? I don’t think so.

          But I have to admit to struggling with accepting even the possibility that my heroes, the people who I have decided in some small degree to pattern my life after, were terribly flawed individuals. It’s almost as if I fear the wondrous deeds they’ve accomplished, their messages of service, selflessness, and justice, would be somehow meaningless in the face of these awful potential revelations. Like my striving to emulate the noble qualities I have viewed them as possessing is somehow less relevant. Which is ridiculous. That’s like not voting at all because the candidates aren’t who you’d like, or ignoring the emotional impact of the speech in Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” because its fiction. It’s dismissing the words of our nation’s founders because they held slaves, or saying that Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” isn’t good music because of his creepy "alleged" child abuse and Mr. Potato Head face. The world is full of all sorts of people, none of them without fault and all of them capable of terrible things. If I dismiss the good in our world that’s done by the bad, what the hell am I left with?

Gentrification: Examining Racial and Class Conflicts in Renewing Neighborhoods

All across the western world’s urban areas the signs are present. The new condominiums erected where tenement housing recently stood, manicured trees and eye-catching flowers replacing yellow weeds overnight, and the opening of the neighborhood’s first Starbucks can only add up to one outcome: the middle-class white invasion is coming to oust the poor and the minorities (Kirkland, 18). At least, this is the mythic baggage summoned when the word “gentrification” is uttered. But is the narrative true? How does the reinvestment of gentrifying neighborhoods actually affect the poor and the racial minorities who call them home?
British sociologist Ruth Glass invented the term “gentrification” in 1964 as a reaction to the trend of downtrodden London properties being purchased by the upper middle-class, the “gentry” (Wharton, 0). The word was snarky and carried the full freight of Glass’ misgivings regarding the changes she saw happening to these neighborhoods and what seemed to her to be a new form of colonization. Some have dismissed her concerns as unnecessary and ignorant of the changes that inevitably come over time to every neighborhood. But Glass is not the only scholar to ever draw the comparison of this urban renewal process to earlier resettlements of territories with underutilized assets by an outside group who then manages these assets for their own gain. Professor Jonathan L. Wharton points out the similarity when he writes “both gentrification and colonialism require an economically empowered few to oversee an operation to economically and politically displace one group for another, while achieving financial gain and political power” (Wharton, 1). This simple statement quickly gets to the heart of the matter, for gentrification is all about money, power, property, and the perceived unequal redistribution thereof. How does this come about?
Wharton points to an “urban malaise” that sets in some time before gentrification, often referred to as “disinvestment” by other sources (3). This malaise is the downward spiral of inner-city factors that co-contribute to each other: the movement of the middle class and their jobs to the suburbs, the de facto segregation of urban neighborhoods by racial zoning, rising unemployment rates, and ever-dropping tax revenues to name a few (2). These lead to gangs, drugs, and the inability of cities to fund necessary programs and services for their inner cities (3). Often, cities have successfully handed these blighted districts over to the shepherding of developers and other investors (colonizers) in their attempts to pander to a new breed of resident, a resident with buying power and disposable income (the settlers). The young, urban professional, or “yuppie”, is a staple of the gentrifying neighborhood: college educated, single or at least childless, and nearly always white (4). Somewhere amid the developers’ negotiations for tax breaks and the promise to officials and investors of a heartier civic life, the needs of the original residents are put aside like those of a native populace when colonizers come to stake their claim.
At first glance, the improvements can seem to be a boon to all members of a revitalizing neighborhood. Quoting research on gentrification in Columbus, Ohio, Elizabeth Kirkland notes that increased police presence and enforcement of laws in collaboration with new residents helped to prune an area into a seemingly ideal community which, while certainly a blessing, was an opportunity not given to the original inhabitants before the “new people” (whites) came (Kirkland, 23). The author also lists several underhanded means that have been used to drive out the pre-existing community including arson, harassment, threats, even craftier capitalistic means like down-zoning in order to make property values plummet, forcing landlords to sell, and sell low (23). Usually, these gentrifying forces are seen as targeting neighborhoods and properties largely inhabited by minorities, which is the reason the term gentrification is not always welcomed by the areas to which it is applied. The influx of middle-class whites to inner-city neighborhoods is often read as the backswing of the pendulum that triggered the “White Flight” to the suburbs in the mid-twentieth century, but with the added compounding effect of displacing minority populations who are gradually priced out, lowering their quality of life (Wharton, 1-5). Many residents attempt to combat this in a number of ways, some more successfully than others.
In a report by the Urban Institute, six case studies of gentrifying communities in early, middle and late stages of the process were examined, selected for the efforts the original inhabitants of these neighborhoods had undertaken to avoid the displacement that gives gentrification such a bad reputation (Levy, 10). The methods are varied, from the actual production of new affordable housing units to infill development of vacant lots at reduced prices (10). In Bartlett Park, a “troubled” neighborhood bordered by a university, museums, and new industrial parks in St. Petersburg, Florida, the signs of an impending gentrification are already present (13). Property values are beginning to climb, and the new real estate developments are priced higher than their current residents can afford, attracting whites both young and old to this predominantly black community (12). One method of resident retention concerned civic leaders are utilizing in Bartlett Park is housing rehabilitation, simple repairs and necessary upgrades in older owner-occupied homes that raise property values, provided by federal grants and local nonprofit programs. Infill development through the city’s sale of vacant lots to nonprofits at a low price has led to over one hundred houses made available for families with low incomes through assisted purchasing, but in an area with over 3,000 vacant lots selling cheap the competition for property has already heated up to fever pitch (14).
Levy’s study also highlights the tactics used by communities where gentrification has already taken root, like the Figueroa Corridor in Los Angeles, California (Levy, 43). This rapidly changing 40 block, older Latino area is home to the Lakers and the Kings and is bordered by the University of Southern California and the Staples Center (43). Though it includes West Adams, the hot spot for the elite before there was a Beverly Hills, much of the Figueroa Corridor is in disrepair, and 43 percent of its inhabitants are considered to be in poverty by the federal government (44). As single-room occupancy hotels are replaced with lofts for USC students and other moneyed folk, the residents have organized and stated their needs plainly to developers, to impressive effect. The Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice managed to get Rupert Murdoch and Phillip Anschutz to sign the Community Benefits Agreement in 2001, a document that required the Staples Center to include local hiring practices, living wages, union jobs, and neighborhood parks in its four million square foot addition (45). Other avenues utilized by low-income residents include the Housing Trust Fund of the Los Angeles City Council for those making less than 60 percent of the area’s median income, and local rent-stabilization ordinances (45, 46).
In the Central District of Seattle, Washington, Levy showcases what struggling communities can do to keep their identity in an area that has been playing the gentrification game for quite some time (Levy, 53). Central District, while now racially mixed, still has strong black roots from a time when blacks were only allowed to settle in that area of Seattle, and the black residents who remain, about a third of the neighborhood’s population, say that it has become nearly impossible to afford living there (55). Because Seattle’s economic and population boom clashes with its stance of non-sprawl, the pressure is on for developers to get their hands on Central District’s conveniently located properties (56). The Central Area Development Association, or CADA, saw its original community-driven revitalization efforts come to fruition, but at the benefit of the white, higher-income outsiders who bought the homes residents could no longer afford (55). The CADA has now begun pursuit of affordable housing through infill development of mixed-use properties where distressed or abandoned structures are situated, but because the area is entirely built up, the number of properties available for this sort of development is limited to less than twenty (58). Seattle’s housing levy, a property tax assessment earmarked for use in affordable housing preservation efforts for seniors and special needs tenants now helps with Special Objective Areas like Central District, assisting both low-income home purchasers and renters (61).
While the above communities have recognized the potential harm gentrification can inflict and have taken steps to ensure that this harm is minimized, some studies claim the reverse is true, that gentrification is an urban legend of urban studies. In Jacob Vigdor’s voluminous study “Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?” the author argues two opposing positions, that revitalization causes damage to the well-being of economically depressed residents, and that revitalization is a byproduct of other factors damaging to urban residents’ well-being (Vigdor, 134-179). However, Vigdor claims that while gentrification does lead to dramatically higher housing and cost of living expenses, the displacement of poverty-level households is something of a red herring (138-142). In his narrative in which land in two neighborhoods with different amenities is bid on and eventually held by neighborhoods of either the “rich” or the “poor, Vigdor says he has illustrated that the move from one place of residence to another is a matter of a “preference shift” on the part of the poor that causes them to seek to live elsewhere (139). Overall, Vigdor’s study states that the poor households who have previously been labeled “displaced” are in fact simply unwilling to pay for increasing living costs, though he does not answer the original question: if that unwillingness stems from an inability to pay (172).
Some of the Canadian literature on the subject suggests that each community takes a somewhat different approach to the gentrification topic. In Ute Lehrer and Thorben Wieditz’ “Condofication in Toronto”, the authors tackle the area’s recent condominium boom and both criticize and praise the social changes it has brought about. In a reversal of expectations, Toronto chose to spend Section 37 money that could have gone to affordable housing and community centers on park and art spaces instead, focusing on strengthening Toronto’s base as a cultural powerhouse (Lehrer, 149). Like anywhere else, the new additions to this community are young, educated professionals who are forming their own insular microcosms, but in Toronto the local government is taking their side and leaving the poor to the care of non-profit organizations which have ceased to find much financial support from the government (153). However, the authors point with some hope to a study by St. Christopher House, a leading Toronto nonprofit, that suggests that these condo-dwellers, with their wealth and their free time, might be just the sort of volunteers and philanthropists the charities and dependent communities there need, which could help bridge the social gap between the two worlds (154).
In another Canadian study, this time focused on the experiences of  the purchasers of smaller-scale non-luxury infill condominium developments in inner-city Montreal, Damaris Rose collects and collates a number of interviews in an effort to find out how important social mix or diversity is to these homeowners (Rose, 278-308). While it was across the board rated as fairly unimportant, the more egalitarian in their responses expressed that they were looking for a strong feeling of community in their neighborhood when they were considering buying there, which the author felt was significant (302). In the closing statements, Rose points out that the one-sided nature of the study, being only the voices of the new residents who express their discomfort with their low-income housing neighbors but are quick to announce their approval of low-income housing, is quite telling, suggesting a psychological blind spot to their own “NIMBY” (not in my backyard) tendencies (303).
One thing all the aforementioned researchers agree on is the need for more research on the topic of gentrification. Thankfully, this does seem to be happening, as urban studies, an area devoted to the functioning of the city, has become a recognized academic field. Gentrification has only in the last 50 years become an area given much serious thought, or has perhaps only existed for that brief span, or might only be an insult levied against those fortunate enough to be leading the march of progress. In any case, the modern city is a new creature and only time and careful, considered study will prove to show whether the process of urban renewal is hazardous to its health or necessary for its survival.

Works Cited

Kirkland, Elizabeth. “What’s Race Got to Do With it? Looking for the Racial Dimensions of Gentrification.”The Western Journal of Black Studies 32.2 (2008): 18-30. Gale PowerSearch. Web. 20 Nov. 2012.
Lehrer, Ute, and Thorben Wieditz. “Condominium Development and Gentrification: The Relationship Between Policies, Building Activities and Socio-economic Development in Toronto.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 18.1 (2009): 140-161. Gale PowerSearch. Web. 20 Nov. 2012.
Levy, Diane K., Jennifer Comey, and Sandra Padilla. “In the Face of Gentrification: Case Studies of Local Efforts to Mitigate Displacement.” The Urban Institute, Urban.org, 2006. Web. 20 Nov. 2012.
Rose, Damaris. “Discourses and Experiences of Social Mix in Gentrifying Neighbourhoods: A Montreal Case Study.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 13.2 (2004): 278-316. Gale PowerSearch. Web. 20 Nov. 2012.
Vigdor, Jacob L. “Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?” Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs (2002): 133-182. Gale PowerSearch. Web. 20 Nov. 2012.
Wharton, Jonathan L. “Gentrification: The New Colonialism in the Modern Era.” Forum on Public Policy (2008): 0-11. Gale PowerSearch. Web. 20 Nov. 2012.

Gentrification: Brightening Up (and Whitening Up) the Neighborhood

No city’s assets and liabilities are equally distributed. Every urban hub has its skid row or other such spots located on the “wrong side of the tracks”. Though these bad parts of town may be an eyesore and even a menace to the people living there or those only passing through, a number of city-dwellers always hope for and work towards a better future for their blighted districts. Sometimes these seedy neighborhoods end up receiving just the sort of cultural and financial turnaround that was prayed for in a process known as gentrification, often at a high cost to the pockets and the spirits of their residents.
Ruth Glass fashioned the term gentrification in the 1960’s, scornfully applying it to the sale of properties in working class London neighborhoods to upper middle class families. The Marxist urban geographer sought to describe the displacement of the poor that occurs when low-income areas are revamped by the wealthy (Roos). Although there is no strict definition of the term nor is there agreement on whether it is a positive or negative phenomenon, the gentrification process has a universally recognizable series of states that each neighborhood experiences on the proverbial road from rags to riches. While the first state occurs before the gentrification process starts, it is absolutely essential to address it here, for gentrification can happen only after a neighborhood has undergone a period of disinvestment (Freeman, 27).
Disinvestment refers to an area’s loss of livelihood, its fall from an ordinary neighborhood to one that is avoided. This happens for many reasons, all of them tied together in an unbreakable circuit, each leading to the others. Businesses move away for one reason or another, the residents’ incomes plummet, or the infrastructure is neglected (Roos). Sometimes the neighbors themselves will move away in droves, like the former residents of Detroit, MI after the automotive industry there began to crumble. Often what are left behind are ghost towns or urban deserts where signs of life are scarce. Alternately, the neighborhood may become a ghetto for an ethnic and economic minority, thriving culturally or socially while continuing its downward financial slide. This disinvested state primes the neighborhood for the seeding of “urban pioneers” and the start of gentrification (Roos).
Urban pioneers are the newcomers who see the potential of these centrally located neighborhoods, having grown tired of the suburban sprawl that was once seen as the answer to the “problem” of city life. Eager to make a home for themselves, these pioneers settle in for the long haul with their industrial lofts, galleries, coffee shops, and hip hangouts planted as flags for their newly claimed territory (Hampson). Typically they are college-educated, white, and of an artistic bent, happy to renovate cheap, aging properties left to rot (Roos). Slowly, the neighborhood is transformed into something new and suddenly diverse with the influx of bohemian whites, a seemingly happier place that thrives (Hampson). Businesses are drawn to the trendy new growth and the job market opens up again. With this outside investment taking the lead, cities take note and try to draw more permanent interest by adding and improving schools, parks, and other public assets with the aid of their strengthening tax base (Freeman, 25). For a while at least, the benefits are universal. Then progress begins to chip away at the original character of these revitalizing areas and their residents in a number of ways.
Just as small niche boutiques were first drawn to gentrifying areas, so too are “big box” stores, assorted retail chains, and the ubiquitous Starbucks eventually found on these recently iconoclastic city blocks (Roos). What began as a movement away from the cookie-cutter middle class suburban life transplants that very same thing into the heart of the city. Not only is the newly formed funkiness lost in the corporate haze, the “flavor” these neighborhoods started with is diluted to a degree that cannot be emphasized enough. In the drive to capitalize on the opportunity these dying areas represent, consumer and corporate culture grinds their last embers underfoot.
The death knell of these original marginalized neighborhoods may perhaps be the rapid rise of property values in gentrifying areas (Roos). In low income neighborhoods the great majority of residents do not own their homes, as home ownership requires both the steady income and good credit that is often out of the reach of a disenfranchised populace. When landlords see the profit they could be making, many raise the rent on their properties exponentially or simply send out eviction notices and set to renovating in pursuit of higher income residents (Newman, Wyly, 36). There are exceptions to the rule, of course, residents who have owned their homes since long before the area went into decline or those who purchased their individual apartments in a co-op, who now find themselves with a hot property and eager buyers (Freeman, 25). Some cities have rent-controlled buildings and other protections for the poor and those on fixed incomes, like seniors and the disabled (Newman, Wyly, 37). Still, some unscrupulous landlords resort to any underhanded and illegal means of persuasion at their disposal, such as threatening unlawful evictions, refusing to perform necessary repairs or pay for needed services, and the harassment of frivolous lawsuits filed in the hope of wearing down their tenants’ will to stay put (Newman, Wyly, 39).
Factor in the other costs of living in a trendy area, like absurdly priced coffee or organic groceries, and it is easy to see just how unaffordable life can rapidly become for residents. Slowly but surely, the original inhabitants of gentrified neighborhoods move to areas they can afford and are replaced with a largely white middle class population. This has in the past been characterized as the rich usurping an undervalued area and displacing the poor (Roos). Not surprisingly, many are uncomfortable with calling this last stage in gentrification “displacement” and have decided upon another less emotionally and politically charged term; succession (Roos). Though some recent studies find that the poor move away from gentrifying areas at near the same rate as they leave other neighborhoods, one wonders; if these low income ethnic citizens remain poor and are made to do so in another locale, is calling that “succession” simply whitewashing the issue?

Works Cited

Freeman, Lance. “There Goes the ‘Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up.” Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Urban Studies. Ed. Myron A. Levine. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013. 24-31. Print.
Hampson, Rick. “Studies: Gentrification a Boost for Everyone.” USA Today. USA Today, 19 Apr. 2005. Web. 10 Nov. 2012.
Newman, Kathe, and Elvin K. Wyly. “The Right to Stay Put, Revisited: Gentrification and Resistance to Displacement in New York City.” Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Urban Studies. Ed. Myron A. Levine. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013. 32-43. Print.
Roos, Dave. “How Gentrification Works.” How Stuff Works. Discovery, n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2012.

Stymied: The Failure of Welfare and its Reform

Welfare has been hanging around in one form or another since the Great Depression, when President Franklin Roosevelt launched the series of executive orders and laws known as the New Deal. Nearly all of the federal safety nets we now have in place were birthed from the widespread financial calamity that opened the American public’s eyes to the possibility of poverty and hunger touching them personally. Over the years, the programs designed both to keep disaster from striking and provide handholds to lift people from abject poverty have changed their names, shapes, and even their functions, but they have kept a disturbing similarity all along. Our welfare programs have never functioned well enough to keep one of the most prosperous nations on earth from generating a sizable underclass too far behind the rest of the citizenry to ever hope of catching up, and each move to reform the system has effectively ensured that they never will.
Welfare currently consists of the meager Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the ticking clock of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Women, Infants and Children (WIC), and the doomed varieties of Social Security. SNAP and TANF have largely been lauded as the triumphant result of President Bill Clinton’s attempt to “end welfare as we know it”(Welfare 19) with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. Before the PRWORA the needy had Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was somewhat accurately seen as unsuccessful because families stayed on its rolls for years and rarely rose from their level of poverty. Welfare fraud was a factor too, the largely fictional luxury car driving “welfare queen” conjured by Ronald Reagan and his cronies never died in the collective mind of the American people. Actual fraud should play a role in this discussion, of course. Because AFDC benefits never came close to providing families with enough money to do much more than lessen the impact of their plight and had very strict rules, many families lied. And many of them continued to have children, which both extended the time they’d be on welfare rolls and the amount of assistance they’d receive. Perhaps sometimes this was done intentionally. It happens. But by and large, even liars and cheats weren’t walking away with overflowing pockets. These families were operating at a loss, so to speak. And they continue to do so.
Despite much smaller rolls of welfare recipients nationwide after the replacement of AFDC with TANF, the US Census Bureau reports that the number of US citizens in poverty has grown considerably. In 2009, 43.6 million people lived below the poverty line, an all-time high(Census). How is this possible? How do we tout the success of our welfare system when the figures are climbing? How do we ignore the fact that 20% of youth under 18 live in poverty, or that a quarter of both our Black and Hispanic populations do as well(Census)? Even immigrants seeking the American Dream are finding it has dissolved in their grasp: 10.8% of naturalized citizens are at poverty level, too(Census). So why are people under the mistaken impression that our welfare remix has been a smashing success? Four words: numbers, spin, and willful ignorance.
When Americans are told of the most recent welfare overhaul and its glorious impact on the lives of the nation’s poor, the figures being flashed aren’t the ones that count. Usually the number comes from the amount of people who are receiving welfare and the number of those who have successfully become employed during their welfare-to-work program(Lost Ground 4). Less than half the number of people who collected AFDC benefits are receiving TANF aid(Lost Ground 4). Pretty impressive, right? This is one of the most intentionally misleading arguments surrounding the welfare issue. TANF does not function the same way AFDC did, and it wasn’t ever meant to. First, the new time limit of five years means that there are people who have been cut from the rolls because they exceed that number, not because they are capable of supporting themselves and their families(Lost Ground 44). Also, the person getting the TANF benefits must be working within two years of the start of their claim, no matter what, which translates to single mothers spending a good chunk of their money on childcare with no change vertically in their social situation, among other inferred problems. And speaking of single mothers, the government chose to crack down on illegitimacy and single parenthood by tightening its purse to those who need the most support. Families with two parents require only one to work, regardless of the amount of benefits they collect, while single moms must find employment, no matter their circumstances. While this may sound like a great social deterrent to finding oneself in those circumstances, how is this helpful to the person already at the end of their rope? Also, TANF’s rules are much more strict than the rules of the AFDC, so many families find themselves booted from the program’s rosters for minor, unintentional infractions and oversights(Welfare 41), and where can they turn then?
Add to these problems the additional trouble of child poverty and the foster system(Welfare 62). Does anyone remember the late 1980’s and the social problem of “latchkey kids”, the children of parents whose work made them unavailable when the kids got home from school? Those tykes were ostracized and pitied, and the adults were chastised for their bad parenting. Special news reports aired about the so-called epidemic. Who talks about that now? When was the last time Diane Sawyer interviewed a second grader forced to make his own afterschool snacks? With employment now a requirement of TANF, we seem to have made peace as a busybody nation with the loss to a nurturing environment that this indicates. Even worse, our foster care system often rescues children from poverty only to deliver them to abusive homes or other material conditions worse than what they left behind. With the amount of money TANF provides even smaller than its predecessor it is unclear how we as a society expect these families to better their lot, or to provide a foundation from which to launch the next generation.
Isn’t the aim of welfare programs like TANF the betterment of the lives of the people who need this kind of support? Poverty is cyclical. Kids born poor tend to die poor after bringing up children who will themselves someday be poor too. They’ve done studies. And those studies show a host of social problems connected to this, from drug addiction to incarceration. These, along with poverty, are often dismissed or addressed as problems that arise from personal issues and fault lines in the individual psyches of the people who experience them. But the numbers indicate that there are factors that contribute greatly to these problems that are outside of these individual’s control and can only be changed by outside intervention. When does it end? If we don’t provide a way to see that it does indeed end, how can it? And if we decide that it isn’t our job to end these problems, what does that say about the character of America?
Many people get indignant, even filled with rage and rail against the subject of welfare and its recipients. Why is that? Don’t we have a responsibility to take care of the people that make up our nation? Why does our government exist if not to address our wellbeing, individually and collectively? If our country doesn’t address these needs, to whose needs is it attending? And if we plainly see that a section of our population lacks the skills and resources to pull themselves out of the ever-deepening hole they find themselves in, do we not owe it to them to assist them in their journey upward? No one is arguing for a financial free-for-all, a free ride for anyone who wants to opt-out of being a productive member of society. No one wants America to be a nation of deadbeats who have somehow conned the system into paying for their every expense. No one wants to see America become the Land of Opportunism. However, no one wants America to devolve into a spineless- yes-man for the corporate sector who views the individual citizen merely as a burden and a point of consumption, a liability to be overcome and a potential market. Do we?
The welfare system is broken. Speaking plainly, it was never all that good to begin with. But the intentions behind the creation of welfare were far more noble than the wishes of those who aim to raze all trace of publicly funded institutions designed to help the unfortunate in our society. We need to examine deeply the concept of welfare and approach the subject with fresh eyes. Most importantly, we need to be able to walk away from our handiwork with a clear conscience, with the knowledge that we have fulfilled our obligations to our fellow man. If we can’t do that in our own backyard, we have no business attempting it on the other side of the fence, and we must then learn to live with what that means about us.







Works Cited
Albelda, Randy, and Ann Withorn, eds. Lost Ground. Cambridge: South End 
Press, 2002. Print.
Haarens, Margaret, ed. Welfare. Farmington Hills: Greenhaven Press, 2012. Print
“Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009” Census.gov, US Census Bureau, September 2010. Web. 6 October 2012.

On the Timing of Chickens Counted

     If there's one thing that experience has taught me it's this: life is slapstick. Human behavior never fails to entertain in a certain disappointing way. Because we set ourselves up for it, the letdown. When I look at my life with Lucy Ricardo as reference, I am never ever surprised by the shit I manage to do to myself. 

     Filing my taxes this year, I found that a return of about a thousand dollars(hurrah for poverty and earned income tax credit) was heading in my direction! Immediately I text Jeff and we do what people do- we make plans. Tristan could do with new bedroom furniture, Jeff with more business attire. And me, well, I set my sights on a NOOK Simple Touch. I'm talking a very dedicated obsession here: research both online and at the in-store NOOK kiosk, making lists of all the free ebook titles I plan to download, daydreaming vignettes of my new life with the NOOK. Anyone who knows my tendency to hoard books will understand the allure it has for me. 

     So yesterday the mail comes(you know I was wearing down a path in front of the window waiting for my tax return to arrive) and there's an envelope from the treasury! I shred through it right there on the porch in my eagerness to get that check, that NOOK, that stuff I've decided is the thing I need to add to my life that will make everything better in the way sheeple in our consumer culture do. 

     And I find out that the money has been intercepted by a debt collection agency.

     Silly monkey.

Saint Jonah the Garbled

     Bear with me: the following is my attempt to explain some new directions my life is heading in lately to those unfamiliar to my daily doings. Namely attending church, a real honest-to-goodness church with Jesus and all the trimmings, every Sunday morning for the past few months. And studying, nay, casually leafing through my bible fairly often, taking relatively seriously what I find to be the message of… whatever the hell I’m reading about, giants or talking snakes or flying gyroscopes with animal-headed freaks at the wheel. Let me backtrack before I lose you-

     When I was a kid, I can claim that I had genuinely good intentions. I used to drop to my knees and, crying, pray next to smeared roadkill when I'd come across it. I wasn't appealing for some weird ex post facto conversion to Christianity on behalf of what looks like might have been a possum, but for God to make sure whatever it was knew that it was loved, that it's death was noticed, and mourned. I was the kind of kid who probably wouldn’t have stuck up for himself anyway but actively turned the other cheek when his inherent queerness or obvious fatness caught the negative attentions of the current rulers of cool. I knew how to share, and liked the experience. Kindness seemed second nature to me. I believe all these things are, to some degree or another, a result of practicing what I thought Christianity was and what I did in a gleeful attempt to fulfill my obligations as a believer in the faith I was raised in.

     Obviously a lot has changed between then and now. But I can’t say I’m thrilled with all of those shifts in myself and the way I scornfully look at the world. I know that attending church again, even my very liberal one, isn’t going to change the way I act or view things. But the language it speaks in is HARDWIRED into me, something I tried to exorcise for a very long time, and I desperately long to be close to the divine again. I want to feel the presence of God like I did when I was a kid. And the other faiths I’ve tried on haven’t fit because their brand of nonsense wasn’t the special brand of nonsense I’d long ago made my own. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking Christianity or any other religion. In fact I think spirituality is one of the most beautiful, most human traits, for me essentially so. But I also think buying into the “my way or the highway-to hell” with any faith is just… bonkers. And missing the point entirely.

     Anyway it’s all about the person I want to be, and taking all the steps I believe will lead me there. My church is a beautiful place that accepts people I snicker and hiss at, and I want to be that kind of beautiful. I know that it isn’t necessary, but it’s what I find grace in and what I choose, which is what I think the whole point really is.