(For "texture" on this post you may want to read what I posted on Monday, September 19.)
Stay with me here.
I'm still stuck in my experience on a recent Sunday.
What I cannot get out of my mind are the questions that came from the class after my presentation.
The class invited me to talk about our work at Central Dallas Ministries. I was glad to do so. In fact, I have visited with this group on several occasions.
I gave a brief report on most of the initiatives that we have underway. I concluded by updating them on our efforts to address housing needs among the very poor in Dallas, many of whom live on our streets or in shelters. The group seemed eager to hear about our single room occupancy (SRO) projects.
When the Q & A portion of our time arrived, several hands went up. All of the questions were provocative and important. I enjoyed the conversation.
Some of the questions stuck with me.
They remain with me.
"How do you screen these people? How do you make sure that you aren't helping drunks and winos?" a rather stern looking gentleman asked.
I explained that to understand our process one really needed to visit and sit in our Resource Center and observe the people. I went over our interview process. I pointed out that since 99.9% of our volunteers are low-income people from the community, we have no trouble at all sniffing out "cons" and identifying "game."
Another man told of a good friend who owned a business downtown. He rehearsed in some detail the "clean up" process that occurred every morning after the "street bums" had spent the night in front of his building.
"How do you plan to deal with that in what you are suggesting?" he asked--come to think of it, he seemed stern as well.
I asked the class not to give me a show of hands, but to think about how many alcoholics they had in their families. I went on to describe a plan that includes treatment, housing and strong accountability.
"Tell me, Larry, what do you think about this FEMA policy of issuing $2,000 cash payments to every Katrina victim? I've heard that some of the debit card expenditures are ending up in all sorts of places, including 'strip clubs' and the like. Is this good policy?" another not so stern fellow asked.
After making a few comments about how "strip clubs" aren't staying in business on the limited income of the poor, I went on to explain that it was my strong belief that the vast majority of the emergency dollars were being spent as intended.
The problems with the emergency situation has more to do with the untenable plight of the poor before the storm that led to such disaster for so many during and after the storm.
I'm not sure I satisfied everyone, but the group remained polite and supportive.
In retrospect though, I find the conversation unnerving.
Nowhere in the texts of the Christian faith (we were in a Sunday School class with adults who have been reading the Bible a long time) do I find interview criteria for working with the poor, the homeless or the weak. No text in all of the Bible, that I can recall, questions the poor about their poverty so as to eliminate or exclude them from the works of compassion or justice.
Someone will pipe up just here with Paul's words "if a man will not work, neither shall he eat." That text was written to a specific Christian community so completely convinced that the second coming was emanate that work was no longer necessary, so it does not apply to the poor.
On the other hand, there are countless texts that challenge the rich and the well-off to stand with the poor, speak up for the poor and defend the poor against those forces that help make and keep them poor. Hundreds of passages speak to compassion for the poor. I could go on and on here.
The questions asked in class Sunday were fine.
Considering the extreme affluence of this church , it is the questions that were not asked that really bother now that I think about it.
7 comments:
Hi Larry,
It's been a while. I only just came across your BLOG addy when you were quoted in Edward Fudge's GracEmail. As per your entry about... I'll call them ignorant questions, below is a little bit I included in my own church bulletin just this week, including your own quote. Thanks. Dan
The Poor You Have With You
I really get tired of hearing it. Crotchety old men sitting around complaining about how poor people do nothing but sit around, expecting hand-outs and having an undue “sense of entitlement.” Ok, it’s not just crotchety old men, it’s lots of people of various ages and genders who, because they see abuses of the system on the evening news, or encounter people who have “attitudes” about their lot in life, presume a lot of negatives about the poor in general. Such generalizations simply do not fit the facts. But, I’ll let my friend Larry James express it better than I ever could. –Pastor Dan
"Most poor people -- the vast majority of the poor -- work. They do not earn enough to make a decent living, but they do work. They don't usually receive benefits, like health insurance, paid vacations, professional training for advancement or retirement plans, but they do work. Anyone who wants to get into the reality of economic and day-to-day family life at or near the bottom needs to comprehend this basic fact of life among the poor. . . . Some poor people, as is the case with some rich people, are lazy and don't want to work. But this is not the major problem we face today in our cities. . . . It is clear to me that since the market will not provide adequate wages for these hard-working fellow citizens, the collective expression of the nation's heart must. Government initiatives that reward work need to be beefed up. Work must be a requirement--no hand outs to able-bodied Americans. But the promise of the nation has always been that if one works hard and plays by the rules, a decent, dignified life would be the result. My faith tells me that we must not settle for less than this. The poor work. We must insure that their work pays off." -- Larry James, President and CEO, Central Dallas Ministries
We have been on this topic lately in Sunday school as well. I'm not sure that conventional wisdom of the poor is the answer. There is some excellent reading by Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Theodore Dalrymple and others write extensively about chronic poverty. Charles Murray makes a distinction between the poor and the underclass in this article http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.23273/pub_detail.asp
The standard approaches to dealing with the poor have obviously failed to have much impact except to possibly exacerbate the problem. This is an area that needs a lot of thinking outside the box.
Kyle, I am actually not sure that the "standard approaches" haven't had an impact. The problem has been that, since the Reagan Administration (if not earlier), there have been incredible cuts in these standard approaches. As Larry has mentioned several times, poverty levels were actually decreasing at amazing rates during previous administrations.
But to your point, we might want to consider some alternative solutions. However, these are not necessarily "out of the box." In fact, many are very simple:
1. The unemployed need jobs.
2. The uninsured need medical care.
3. The homeless need homes.
Interesting, that in a world as complicated as ours, that such obvious solutions are actually "out of the box" of regular thinking.
FYI, "there is no empirical support for the practice of requiring individuals to participate in psychiatric treatment or attain sobriety before being housed" (Tsemberis, S., Gulcur, L., & Nakae, M. (2004) Housing First. American Journal of Public Health).
This study, along with a 2003 study from the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, both indicate that the housing-first model actually has BETTER success than a model that requires participation in treatement services. When compared to populations that were forced to undergo treatment prior to housing, individuals who were offered independent access to housing spent significantly less time homeless, less time in psychiatric hospitals and incurred fewer costs than their peers in the control group who were forced into treatment. Their hospitalization and homelessness declined faster, as well.
These are real results. They are not only powerful, they are empowering.
By simply putting faith in the poor and the homeless (i.e. putting faith in God's people), we empower them to make the changes they need. When considering "out of the box" ideas, we should possibly consider some "out of our hands" ideas, as well.
In a poverty class I took recently we came back again and again to the problem of "getting scammed." It seems we are so worried about getting scammed (providing help to someone who doesn't "deserve" it) that we are willing to let people go hungry and homeless. What would happen if we decided to err on the side of occasionally getting scammed, but knowing we're not letting anyone go hungry or homeless?
I tried to post a response earlier but it didn't make it. I've been out of town since. I think you miss my point. I sincerely want to help, but I think the current government policies and the way we sometimes approach things from the church actually make things worse. From a previous response...
1. The unemployed need jobs.
If you want a job I can find you one in my community the employers can't find enough workers (but we still have unemployed people)
2. The uninsured need medical care.
They may be uninsured but no one in our country really has to go without medical care. There are free clinics in every city I've lived in. If not, you cannot be refused service in an emergency room. Its not efficient, but its there.
3. The homeless need homes.
I'm not even sure how to address this one. There are dozens of programs to provide low income housing to people. And plenty of people to help you fill out the neccesary forms.
In response to the comment about drasticly reduced spending on poverty.... The US currently has a 2.2 Trillion dollar budget, 1.4 trillion of that consists of manditory spending (which is all of the entitlement programs) If that is not enough, there will never be enough.
We have had many people come to us for help at the church saying they are unable to find work, when one of our members offers them a job, or a lead on a job they typically never show up.
This may not relate to the situations you see, but it is reality where I live.
So the question is, how do you help someone who is unwilling to help themselves?
If anyone doubts that welfarism is not morally hazardous read Tocqueville's Memoirs On Pauperism from 1835. This sends out a clear warning. Public charity is to be avoided. Even large scale private charities exhibit similar difficulties, as identified by Chalmers. We are not learning the lessons of course. How few of us are arguing for a minimal tax, if at all for the poor (this is not morally hazardous). Likewise, a tax incentive for marriage is both morally and practically sound. Yet the British Government saw it fit to remove the allowance in 2001. This is madness; the equivalent in engineering would be to propose a bridge built from spaghetti. Any system of relief needs to be local, provisional, fiercely contested, and promote strong moral ties between giver and receiver. If you want to damage the poor, destroy the family, and create maximum chaos at the bottom rungs of society, continue to ignore Tocqueville, Murray and Dalrymple.
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