My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #13, September, 1996

MEAN AND STUPID

You know that Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times"? Well, we're living in interesting times, all right, and a lot of Americans are running scared. The world we were taught to live in is changing on us, and many of us feel pretty insecure about our own futures, let alone the futures of our kids. That desperate screeching sound you hear is a lot of guys hanging on by their fingernails as those fingernails start to lose their grip.

You don't have to follow our economic indicators or read all the headlines about stagnating wages to know this about us. All you have to do is listen to our political rhetoric--especially talk show rhetoric, and Republican rhetoric. Because when we get scared, we get mean and stupid. We push people out of our way so we can climb into the lifeboats. And once we're there, we start hitting the survivors in the water with an oar, to keep them from getting in with us and overloading the boat. Survival is a scarce good, and we save it for ourselves and our families--the rest of the world can go hang.

The first thing we do is start excluding. First the illegal immigrants--we don't want to pay for their children's health care, or education. Then the legal immigrants--we don't want them to come over here and immediately start claiming social security and Medicare and Medicaid benefits. Then it's the gays. We don't want them living promiscuously, contracting AIDS and costing us big medical bills. (Of course, we don't want to let them get married, either. Go figure.)

Then it's the people in the cities. We don't want to pay for their schools, and their police, and their sewers and streets and parks. So the cities become unlivable for the hardworking poor who have been left behind.

The heartbreaking thing is that we then begin to exclude children. All of them, except our own. Other people's children scare us. They travel in packs, radiating energy, power, hostility. We fear being in a subway car or bus with them--listening to their angry music, hearing their loud, curse-laden conversations. We fear that at any moment, they could overwhelm us, demanding our money, even our lives. We don't want to support other people's children. We don't want to pay money to provide a safe place for them to grow up. We don't want to pay for their schools or school lunches or food stamps or health care. But we ARE willing to pay to put them in prison.

There's nothing new about this meanness. It's always happened when we were frightened about our future. We were nervous and hostile about the large wave of Irish immigrants--they were too Catholic, too poor, too fecund, too subject to the dictates of an old man in Rome. (The Republicans of that era made the political mistake of calling the Democrats the party of "rum, Romanism and rebellion.") We were even more nervous about the enormous numbers of eastern European Jews who came between 1880 and 1920--they wore strange clothes and strange beards, spoke strange tongues, went to church on the wrong day, lived in filthy tenements, and spawned huge numbers of children. Every time, we changed the immigration laws, skewing the numbers so that the people we let in would be whiter, more Protestant, more middle class, more, well, just-like-us.

It's kind of amazing, when you stop to think about it, that we ever passed the great civil rights legislation, isn't it? But that legislation passed in the 1960's, in a time of astonishing economic growth and economic optimism. The G.I. Bill had moved large numbers of people into the middle class, and the historical accident of being a country physically untouched by the world war had made our economy take off like a rocket. It was a time when there seemed to be enough to go around, a time when we could afford to share the opportunities.

What IS new, I think, is that our meanness has made us stupid. Listen to our political rhetoric. It has become a parody of masculine toughness. It's all about punishing people--for being criminal, for being dependent on drugs, for being poor, for being born into dysfunctional families. It's all about fending for yourself, going it alone, with nobody but your family for support. When Hillary Clinton said something eminently reasonable, and universally true--"It takes a village to raise a child"--the Republicans started yelling at her, claiming she was arguing that the government, not families, should raise children.

That's silly beyond words. They knew perfectly well what Hillary was saying, because they themselves are asking the government to help families raise their children. They want government, in the form of public schools, to help teach religion, and values, and drug awareness. They want government to give tax dollars to families so they can place their children in religious schools. They want government to prevent young girls from getting abortions, or even birth control information, without their parents' consent. They want government to protect their children from violence and sex and predators on television and on the internet. They are asking this because they know that a family cannot pass on its values when the society surrounding them undermines them.

The problem with the punitive approach to problems is that it never solves them. Indeed, it resolutely ignores the advice and experience of experts and of history. If you ask law enforcement people how to deal with violent young offenders, they all say, pay attention to them when they're young and malleable. Educate them. Coach them and direct them in sports and other activities. Give them a sense that they are worthwhile, that the world cares about them, and that they have a chance to succeed. Children who think they have a future don't need to get their money and self-esteem from babies, welfare, or crime.

But we ARE putting more and more people in jail, for longer and longer periods of time. This costs us billions of dollars in building jails, paying guards, and supporting prisoners--money that might more usefully have been spent on keeping them from committing crime in the first place. It also means that we have ensnared an astounding percentage of our young black men in the criminal justice system.

Of course, when they're in jail, we don't want to provide "country club" environments--no, we want them to suffer. So we don't want to pay for their education or counseling or drug treatment. Which means that, when they do get out (and they WILL get out), they will be even more unemployable than when they went in, and they will hate society a lot more. Does this sound to you like a prescription for turning young offenders into peaceful citizens?

We're offended by the number of young unmarried women having children out of wedlock, and raising them on welfare. And the way we deal with this is not with sex education, or making contraception information or counseling, or going after the adult men who are in most cases the fathers of those babies. Instead we punish the mothers, and worse, the children, by taking away money for food and rent and health care. We think we can terrorize young girls into not having babies. Had anyone asked experts, they would have been reminded that teenagers are not real strong on long-term thinking, or impulse control, or planning ahead.

We want to get people off welfare, and get them working. In order to encourage them to do this, work should, ideally, pay more money than welfare. But the same people who want to stop paying for welfare don't want to raise the minimum wage. They're also the people who just cut back the Earned Income Tax Credit [the program that gives back a fair amount of earned income to the working poor]. And they reduced Medicaid for their children, so that if their children need medical care, the parents must go on welfare to get it. And they won't let their kids get free or reduced cost school lunches, or food stamps.

So, here's the deal, young woman. We want you to leave your kids and go to work, so what we'll do is: pay you less money than you get on welfare, give you no help finding or paying for child care, AND we will not help pay for your kids' medical expenses, AND we'll cut back on food stamps AND we'll take more of your paycheck in taxes. Now, how could you pass up a deal like that?

We don't want to pay for schooling or health care for illegal aliens. But that doesn't necessarily mean they go away. It just means that they will harbor and spread communicable diseases unchecked, and that their children will be on the streets instead of in school or in jail. Such a bargain.

You know, I can understand wanting to cut the cost of government. I can understand wanting to balance the budget. I just can't fathom how anybody can think that being mean and stupid is going to accomplish that. It comes down to a choice: do you want to spend your tax dollars on helping people become healthy and productive, or do you want to spend it on keeping people in jail or letting them die? And I refuse to believe that Americans, if they understood that this was the choice they were making, would choose jail and death. If I didn't believe we were nicer people than that, I'd be shopping for a new country to live in along about now.

I'll be voting for Clinton in November. Not with a great deal of enthusiasm--there are things he's done that have appalled me. But he is the man who, by nature and by years of practice, helps other people get into the lifeboat with him. Whether with guaranteed health care, or school-to-work programs, an increased minimum wage, an increased Earned Income Tax Credit, AmeriCorps, increased scholarship and college money, or child care assistance for mothers so they can move off welfare, he's proposed and done all the right things to give people some of the same chances he had in life. He's the American Dream kid. He believes that everybody has something to contribute, and he hates to see that go to waste.

So do I.

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