Monday, July 23, 2007

The problem of being half-assed

The problem with poor people, and poor states, is they're a pain in the ass.

Oftentimes, the poor -- both the people and the political entities thereof -- are that way through nobody's fault but theirs. Yes, sometimes poverty is due to bad breaks and real injustices. But I'd bet at least 70 percent of it is because folks aren't that bright, never were taught any better or just don't give a damn.

Maybe all of the above. Though there certainly are many who would fit the sentimental stereotype of "the noble poor," many, many more are just damn pains in the gluteus maximus. They're uneducated, uncouth, unmotivated . . . and you wouldn't dare take them to a nice restaurant.

Some are strung out on something illegal most of the time. Others (oftentimes living examples of poverty and deviant social structures perpetuating and intensifying themselves) are just plain menaces to human life and public order.

Sometimes, ignorance and being no damn good can combine to provide unwitting amusement for the rest of us -- like the woman I once spied in the courthouse loudly complaining to a friend about her recent misdemeanor citation.

"What they mean nude conduct?" she asked, incredulous. "They charge me with nude conduct!"

I think the young woman -- who, I suspect, was no lady -- meant she had been cited for lewd conduct, although it may well have involved at least partial or maybe even substantial nudity.

SEEING WHY some are poor -- understandably if not rightly -- causes many to throw up their hands and adopt the fatalistic position that nothing's to be done apart from locking them up, walling them off or trying to forget they exist.

I got to thinking about this after a chance restaurant encounter with a Louisiana couple visiting Omaha from a town not far from Baton Rouge, my hometown.

We got to talking, and -- as these conversations tend to do the past couple of years -- we end up talking about the aftermath of Katrina and the iffy prospects of New Orleans being worth a damn ever again. Being a good Southern liberal, at least in the manner that would have defined Southern liberality a generation ago, I said what was needed was a WPA-style program that would have dealt with the unemployable, poverty-stricken hordes that streamed out of New Orleans and into cities like Houston, Atlanta and Baton Rouge après le déluge.

No, the husband said, those people just don't want to work. You'd better look at the news from home again, advised the wife.

I tried to argue that if, indeed, "those people" didn't want to avail themselves of an opportunity to better their education, learn a skill and go to work rebuilding their ruined city themselves, they at least ought to have the opportunity to self-select as being shiftless. In other words, they at least deserved the offer of a hand up . . . the chance to strive toward "The American Dream."

And the key word here is "strive." To be given, to use the vocabulary of faith, the grace of a second chance to remedy a third-rate education. The grace of a chance to chart a new course away from despair and toward hope. The grace of learning marketable skills, and the grace of becoming a stakeholder in their ruined communities by virtue of hard work rebuilding those communities.

Particularly New Orleans.

NAW, IT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN. Those people don't want to work, came the all-knowing reply. After Katrina, their small town ended up sheltering 65 men from the New Orleans 'hood, the couple reported, and those 65 were nothing but miscreants who pretty much held the place hostage, threatening people and stealing the Wal-Mart blind.

I have no real reason to doubt that those 65 men were, as the couple said, less than upright citizens. But to take the obvious problem that a lot of no-damn-good people emerged from an inundated Crescent City and parlay it into a given that every poor, black New Orleanian is worthless is not only racist but utterly devoid of the virtue of hope.

Such toxic fatalism denies that the dissolute can reform and the shiftless become productive. It mocks grace and denies hope its due.

Ironically, fatalism is the one thing that binds indignant middle-class, white Louisianians to the poor, black objects of their derision. Destitute minorities in the Lower 9 and Central City look at their plight, conclude it's hopeless and say "Why try harder?"

Working-class, middle-class and upper-class white folks from every nook and cranny of the Bayou State look at the struggling poor, lousy public schools, a stagnant economy and crooked politicians gaming the system, conclude it's hopeless and say "Why try harder?"

Fatalism is the haywire chromosome that worked its way into the DNA of a colonial backwater as it bounced back and forth between the French and the Spanish. The phrase "That's Louisiana for you" is the telltale symptom of the deadly defect, and it's well-learned by Louisianians about the same time they're able to use the words boudin, gumbo, jambalaya and LSU football in coherent sentences.

And les Amèricains haven't found a cure for it in 204 years. Not that they've been trying particularly hard.

See, to the rest of the United States, the perception of Third World hopelessness encompasses not only da slums a Noo Orluns but the rest of Louisiana as well. Including the nice couple in the Omaha restaurant decrying the pathetic masses Katrina expelled from the fever swamps of a dying city.

IN A COUNTRY where most people think "God helps those who help themselves" is in the Bible --somewhere in the back -- no one remembers who in that book received the most grace from Christ, then ran with it.

It was the woman at the well, a floozy if ever there was one.

It was the woman condemned to death for adultery.

It was the low-life tax collector and the untouchable lepers.

It was a bunch of uncouth and uncultured fishermen.

It was a particularly bumbling fisherman who went on to deny Him three times . . . but ended up becoming the first pope.

It was a petty street criminal being executed on the cross next to Jesus.

IN SUCH A COUNTRY -- in such a basket-case state as Louisiana -- where no one remembers any of the real losers Christ seemed to favor so, the most dangerous words in all of Christendom are "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."

Now that Katrina's floodwaters have washed away our illusions -- and delusions -- all our trespasses have been laid bare. The personal trespasses of a dysfunctional -- and often downright deviant -- underclass. The corporate trespasses born of societal and political neglect.

The self-righteous trespasses of those who decide "those people" are all alike and irredeemable, thereby rejecting grace as futile.

What goes around, comes around. And Judgment Day is nigh.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The dream of a WPA-style program is not entirely dead. See solvingpoverty.com for some info on the Gulf Coast Civic Work Program.