Rude Awakenings
White, Richard W. Jr.
corpses, "gashed with knives and scorched with fire, floated down on the pure waters of the Detroit, whose fish came up to nibble at the clotted blood that clung to their ghastly faces." Other...
...These facts are universally known to—and acknowledged by—people who work with the homeless...
...An old woman slashes open a corpse and quaffs its blood "with a ferocious ecstasy," and an English soldier writes of one mangled victim that "the Indians wip'd his Heart about the Faces of our Prisoners...
...Fearing that government-funded homeless programs would lose their legitimacy if the unpalatable truth were known, advocates like Hayes and Mitch Snyder chose, in White's trenchant phrase, to "lie for justice...
...I had [already] developed strong reservations about the effectiveness of many government policies and programs for the poor...
...One soldier, having deserted to the Indians years before, was pardoned when he returned with five scalps—including his wife's...
...Jobs isn't the issue...
...But even they ultimately took defensive measures...
...country have been institutionalized at one time or another—in a mental hospital, detoxification center, jail five days or more, or prison...
...In Rude Awakenings, Richard White refutes these assumptions, and shatters other myths as well: • The late Mitch Snyder, for years the best-known homeless advocate in America, admitted in 1984 that the widely accepted figure of three million homeless was a fiction: "We got on the phone, we made lots of calls, we talked to lots of people, and we said 'Okay, here are some numbers.' They have no meaning, no value...
...The effects of governmental action usually take longer than a few months to manifest themselves, so I was skeptical...
...Until homeless advocates start telling the truth, it is highly unlikely that any more "solutions" to the homeless problem requiring the expenditure of tax dollars will pass muster with the American people...
...In fact, reliable estimates suggest that no more than 300,000 Americans are homeless at any given time...
...171 that most homeless people are, among other things, chronic substance abusers, and that their addictions are in large part responsible for the fact that they are homeless...
...Pennsylvania offered a bounty for scalps of "enemy" Indian males and females above the age of ten...
...The professional advocates' lies have actually worsened the lot of the unhappy men and women they seek to help...
...But most people believe, instinctively and by the evidence of their own eyes, that the homeless are not like you and me, and have come to distrust all "solutions" to the homeless problem based on that patently false assumption...
...a dying frontiersman, giving his gun to a boy, urged: "Whenever you see an Indian, kill him with it, and then I shall be satisfied...
...Few "Indian" horrors can equal his account of how, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the infamous "Paxton boys" slaughtered fourteen peaceful Indians—whose long-buried bones, he tells us without comment, were ultimately disinterred "in preparing the foundation for a railroad...
...Others were remarkably uncowed by the "terror of the tomahawk," their reasons ranging from raw courage to an inability to recognize their peril...
...In the angry words of Boona Cheema, a disaffected member of the National Coalition for the Homeless who runs a large homeless program in Berkeley, California, "It's very difficult when the coalition paints the homeless as 'safe, sane, and sober' and the programs are overwhelmed with the opposite...
...WHAT THE HOMELESS CRISIS TELLS US Richard W. White, Jr...
...According to White, Hayes and his colleagues deliberately exaggerated and oversimplified the homelessness problem, which arose from a variety of destructive forces—notably the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and the emergence of an urban underclass—and which was exacerbated by government policies that have "taken social responsibility away from families, cumulatively eroding their ability to fulfill society's most important task: nurturing children and raising them to be responsible adults...
...One woman slew her own child lest its cries reveal her hiding place, while a contemporary notes how an express rider saw a freshly scalped woman lying in the road, "her Brains hanging over her Skull...
...descriptions, and his prissy Victorian omissions on grounds of "good taste"—no one can accuse him of minimizing white beastliness, or the price exacted from the red men by Progress...
...ichard White graduated from Berkeley in 1960 and spent the ext quarter-century working in federal anti-poverty programs...
...Slightly more than 50 percent have spent some time in jail, 24 percent in prison...
...Advocates like Robert M. Hayes say that they have shied away from discussing the problem of addiction in the past, in part because they feared that the public would lose its sympathy for the homeless...
...These suspicions led White to examine homelessness in depth, conducting over a hundred interviews with "social service workers, program administrators, homeless individuals, journalists, policyanalysts, professors, and others with firsthand observations...
...And while many refugees remained paralyzed by fear, others found every faculty "absorbed by the burning thirst for vengeance, and mortal hatred against the whole Indian race...
...Other victims were eaten by the Indians, though Parkman assures us they were not "habitual cannibals...
...Housing is not the issue," one Los Angeles social worker told White...
...What he found was a conspiracy to deceive the American public...
...The Hayes-Snyder line, endlessly parroted by the media, has become the conventional wisdom on homelessness...
...White outlines a more realistic way of addressing the problem, one bearing a strong family resemblance to the "new paradigm" approach to welfare policy for which the Bush White House has such mysterious disdain: We should structure our programs so that the "invisible hand" that has been so productive in generating economic wealth for us can work socially as well...
...For Hayes, founder of the National Coalition for the Homeless, had spent the better part of a decade lying about what he and every other homeless "advocate" knew Terry Teachout is the author of City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy (Poseidon Press...
...The problem with lying for justice is that people eventually stop believing you...
...But White, unlike his fellow activists, knew a fact when he saw one: I first noticed stories of "millions" of Americans without homes in the early months of Ronald Reagan's presidency, stories that often ascribed the problem to his policies...
...ude Awakenings is not the sort of R pop policy book that Jonathan Cohen, writing recently in Freedom Review, correctly described as "self-actualization for the politically disaffected...
...Self-governance depends on the health of our natural institutions, those face-to-face arrangements that arise spontaneously out of our nature as social beings...
...Had this story run in one of New York's tabloids, the headline might have read: HOMELESS SPOKESMAN: I'M A LIAR...
...0 The American Spectator December 1992 69...
...Such programs should not simply let citizens sink or swim—we do not do that in the business sector, either—but instead help them to govern their own lives...
...There is nothing glossy about White's ideas, or the way he has packaged them, which is straightforward to the point of occasional naïveté: "I am not afraid to advance ideas that will cost money because I am confident that when we are reasonably certain that the ideas will work, we will spend the money, federal deficit or no...
...Robert Hayes used to say, "It is no exaggeration to say that there is a three-word solution to homelessness: housing, housing, housing...
...Taxes and other public policies need to be evaluated and revised to ensure that they reward work over the choice not to work, family over individual, neighborhood and community over mere propinquity...
...But he rode off...
...Many Quakers, justly renowned for their kindness toward the Indians, initially acted as apologists in denying or downplaying accounts of the bloodletting (striking a strangely modern note for those familiar with liberation theology...
...But "the bottom line," he said, "is that we have to tell the truth...
...Most of the homeless today, as in the past, are single adults, and . . . the typical homeless family is a never-married mother staying with her children in an inner-city homeless shelter...
...And much of what is generally reported and believed about such diverse issues as homelessness, poverty, AIDS, race relations, and the environment is simply the lengthened shadow of false statements made by well-meaning people...
...Seven out of ten homeless adults RUDE AWAKENINGS...
...White views the homeless problem as emblematic of a deeper disorder: "America is a place where the pursuit of social injustice is serious and ongoing...
...At Berkeley," he says, "I had been a political activist: a card-carrying member of the Socialist party of Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington...
...But White's central insight, while simple, is anything but naive: Public policy advocates must tell the truth...
...But Hayes's belated confession has had little effect on media coverage, which is still dominated by two assumptions: (1) There are around three million homeless people in America, including many homeless nuclear families, and (2) most of them are just like you and me...
...Indeed it is...
...Some embraced a war of extermination...
...I had come to suspect that many criticisms of such programs were on the mark—that most were not working, and that some were doing more harm than good...
...his Companions made a Proposal to knock her on the head, to put an End to her Agony...
...ICS Press / 333 pages/$24.95 reviewed by TERRY TEACHOUT 68 The American Spectator December 1992 across the...
...Such "unquenchable and indiscriminate hatred" was, Parkman conceded, not easy for those "living in the tranquility of polished life" to understand...
...If you got one of these dudes a house, he wouldn't last in it any longer than four months...
...Parkman's moralistic index reference begins: "Owen, David, diabolically kills and scalps his own Indian wife and several of her relations . . .") Intent on "reducing the Indians to reason," General Amherst considered giving them smallpox-infected blankets, while another Briton predicted sadly that "instead of Colours and Cannon, our Trophies will be stinking scalps," in a war "conducted by a spirit of Murder . . ." Whatever Parkman's flaws—his consistent misuse of "rifle" when muskets are meant, his suspiciously novelistic On May 22, 1989, the New York Times ran a front-page story with this uncharacteristically soft-spoken lead: Drug and alcohol abuse have emerged as a major reason for the homelessness of men, women and families, complicating the search for solutions, advocates for the homeless say...
...The massacre of a teacher and his young pupils, standing out even in this "horrible monotony of blood and havoc," incurs the wrath of older warriors, who rebuke the killers with the ultimate charge of cowardice...
...He is at work on a biography of H L. Mencken...
...The fear planted by the threat of such horrors bore ugly fruit...
...As I see it, we may have more lying than we have injustice, and it is crippling our public life...
Vol. 25 • December 1992 • No. 12
