[Vision2020] Controversial, but worth considering

Thu Feb 9 10:18:56 PST 2012

Much to think about, and I suspect I would disagree with a great deal in the book, while also being encouraged and enlightened.  Thanks, Deco.  

I will say that references to imitating the pattern of "poorer black families" is what happens when poverty encroaches among any group, and not because the societal dysfunction often seen in poverty-bound Black families is part-and-parcel of being Black.  It's poverty, which, in its insidious and relentless pursuit of decay, envelopes all caught in its grasp.  That, and a horrific coarsening of the culture -- where dissolutes and thugs like Kid Rock, Eminem, and Jay-Z are celebrated for their F-bombs and 'ho-talk, and the idiocy of a Toby Keith, Donald Trump, or P.Diddy, nee' Puff Daddy/Diddy, are celebrated as examples of patriotism and industry.  

When kids of any race are raised largely on their own because parents are either tweaked or imprisoned,  and kids leave school and cruise around blasting music that denigrates fidelity, chastity, industry and respect, what else might we expect?  

I say this with some first-hand knowledge of working with the poorest of the poor here -- undocumented immigrants -- as well as being quite close to two men, both about my age, who have been caught up in the world of meth and who've lost everything.  The people I ministered among for 12 years came here poor and, within a generation, were reasonably economically secure -- because faith, fidelity, and hard work were the raison d'etre (or razon de ser!) of their families' lives and livelihoods.  My friend Bob, on the other hand, was released last year from prison after serving 5 1/2 years on a meth charge and has few prospects for economic success, although, thankfully, his innate good character resulted in a son who has broken the cycle of both poverty and drug addiction.

And then there's my cousin, raised in that part of the family the rest of us clucked our tongues over, who is in and out of prison -- at this writing, back in again -- because of meth addiction and an insatiable need to steal from others, including me.  His daughter and granddaughter are dirt-poor, addicted, and as hopeless as hopeless can be, all because of the poverty foisted upon them by Danny when theft and drugs became more important to him, following the pattern of his father, than being a decent man.  I love and pray for him, but any recovery on his part would be miraculous.

Poverty -- real poverty, not just the 99 Percent/1 Percent division, as real as that is -- is the most dangerous and complex problem this country faces, and I believe much of it is the result of societal contempt for the poor, reductions in effective federal spending for programs that help people to lift people up, and a War on Drugs that's taken far too many casualties with no real objective and no idea of what "victory" would look like.

Keely
www.keely-prevailingwinds.com

Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 07:49:32 -0800
From: art.deco.studios at gmail.com
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] Controversial, but worth considering

New York Times OP/ED

February 8, 2012

The White Underclass
    By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Persistent poverty is America’s great moral challenge, but it’s far more than that.        

As a practical matter, we can’t solve educational problems, health care 
costs, government spending or economic competitiveness so long as a 
chunk of our population is locked in an underclass. Historically, 
“underclass” has often been considered to be a euphemism for race, but 
increasingly it includes elements of the white working class as well.   

That’s the backdrop for the uproar over Charles Murray’s latest book, 
“Coming Apart.” Murray critically examines family breakdown among 
working-class whites and the decline in what he sees as traditional 
values of diligence.        

Liberals have mostly denounced the book, and I, too, disagree with 
important parts of it. But he’s right to highlight social dimensions of 
the crisis among low-skilled white workers.        

My touchstone is my beloved hometown of Yamhill, Ore., population about 
925 on a good day. We Americans think of our rural American heartland as
 a lovely pastoral backdrop, but these days some marginally employed 
white families in places like Yamhill seem to be replicating the 
pathologies that have devastated many African-American families over the
 last generation or two.        

One scourge has been drug abuse. In rural America, it’s not heroin but 
methamphetamine; it has shattered lives in Yamhill and left many with 
criminal records that make it harder to find good jobs. With parents in 
jail, kids are raised on the fly.        

Then there’s the eclipse of traditional family patterns. Among white 
American women with only a high school education, 44 percent of births 
are out of wedlock, up from 6 percent in 1970, according to Murray.     

Liberals sometimes feel that it is narrow-minded to favor traditional 
marriage. Over time, my reporting on poverty has led me to disagree: 
Solid marriages have a huge beneficial impact on the lives of the poor 
(more so than in the lives of the middle class, who have more cushion 
when things go wrong).        

One study of low-income delinquent young men in Boston found that one of
 the factors that had the greatest impact in turning them away from 
crime was marrying women they cared about. As Steven Pinker
 notes in his recent book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”: “The idea 
that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as 
Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern 
criminology.”        

Jobs are also critical as a pathway out of poverty, and Murray is 
correct in noting that it is troubling that growing numbers of 
working-class men drop out of the labor force. The proportion of men of 
prime working age with only a high school education who say they are 
“out of the labor force” has quadrupled since 1968, to 12 percent.      

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan released a famous report
 warning of a crisis in African-American family structures, and many 
liberals at the time accused him of something close to racism. In 
retrospect, Moynihan was right to sound the alarms.        

Today, I fear we’re facing a crisis in which a chunk of working-class 
America risks being calcified into an underclass, marked by drugs, 
despair, family decline, high incarceration rates and a diminishing role
 of jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility. We need a 
national conversation about these dimensions of poverty, and maybe 
Murray can help trigger it. I fear that liberals are too quick to think 
of inequality as basically about taxes. Yes, our tax system is a 
disgrace, but poverty is so much deeper and more complex than that.     

Where Murray is profoundly wrong, I think, is to blame liberal social 
policies for the pathologies he examines. Yes, I’ve seen disability 
programs encourage some people to drop out of the labor force. But there
 were far greater forces at work, such as the decline in good union 
jobs.        

Eighty percent of the people in my high school cohort dropped out or 
didn’t pursue college because it used to be possible to earn a solid 
living at the steel mill, the glove factory or sawmill. That’s what 
their parents had done. But the glove factory closed, working-class jobs
 collapsed and unskilled laborers found themselves competing with 
immigrants.        

There aren’t ideal solutions, but some evidence suggests that we need 
more social policy, not less. Early childhood education can support kids
 being raised by struggling single parents. Treating drug offenders is 
far cheaper than incarcerating them.        

A new study
 finds that a jobs program for newly released prison inmates left them 
22 percent less likely to be convicted of another crime. This 
initiative, by the Center for Employment Opportunities, more than paid for itself: each $1 brought up to $3.85 in benefits.        

So let’s get real. A crisis is developing in the white working class, a byproduct of growing income inequality
 in America. The pathologies are achingly real. But the solution isn’t 
finger-wagging, or averting our eyes — but opportunity.        

•
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com

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