The rage to live
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy THE RAGE TO LIVE CAN WE AFFORD THE REAGAN BUDGET CUTS? THE POOR will not suffer - that is what they keep saying as they cut welfare and assistance programs. But...
...The walls I remember as painted a depressing peculiar shade of green but I may be imagining that...
...On an annual basis that is $2200 below the poverty level...
...I remember the bare unpainted floorboards scantily covered here and there with cracked, worn linoleum rugs, the long common tables covered with oil cloth and reset after every meal with thick crockery...
...Every quarter or so the county paper would publish their names and what it cost to feed and clothe them...
...Can one doubt that the numbers of the hungry and the hopeless will increase there and in other states...
...Why is the administration so set on cutting the programs for the poor...
...On the face of it these are the helpless people: children under working age, women heads of household, the elderly, and the disabled...
...But how do they measure suffering...
...Most of the people there were too old and sick to work...
...Who remembers poorhouses...
...But I do not imagine the smell - of lye and cooked cabbage and that of the old, uncared for...
...Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., has pointed out that a trademark of the present president's governing technique is to try to shift burdens to lower units of government...
...Unfortunately, any close look indicates that their people might not want to...
...The people of today are different...
...It was only on our once or twice a year visits with the Girl Scouts to sing Christmas carols or present a 4th of July program that we saw the dreary interior...
...More than a generation has passed...
...The average adult in our town lived all his or her life in fear of it...
...One can only conjecture what the cut in food stamps alone will mean to them, but many of them do not receive even that help now...
...People who worked to put in effect the first social programs of the Roosevelt era tell of the touching, grateful letters they received...
...In the case of the poor, sick, elderly, and children, the shift would now have to be to the states...
...It is not so kind to the poor...
...They would have been seated in uncertain rows on hard kitchen chairs, urged into their places by the brisk, not unkind custodian, and we would sing and recite, insolent in our youth and sure of our good intentions...
...the rage to live and to live fully grows stronger every day all over the world...
...Thoughtful police administrators are beginning to warn that the great increase in crime comes not just from faulty, inadequate deterrents, but also from the fact that great shifting blocks of our population, from the gangs of the South Bronx to the rural poor, have no place in our changing industrial society...
...Abigail McCarthy Abigail McCarthy...
...Today there are more than one million people in Florida living at or below the poverty level, sixty percent of whom receive no cash welfare payments...
...A family of four with no outside income would receive $230 (aid to families with dependent children) and $209 in food stamps...
...In our county it was a large red brick farmhouse back from the graveled road between the county seat and the next town...
...Crop failures, small scrimped-out savings finally used up, getting too sick or too old for the mill or the button factory, these things sent them there - no matter how hard you worked, bad luck could send you to the poorhouse...
...Social security, welfare, school lunch programs - they have been imperfect, but, even at the worst, they have been better than what preceded them...
...The American people are neither as generous nor as compassionate as we would like to think - therein lies the reason for the popularity of the president's welfare rhetoric...
...Those of us who taught then can remember how some children huddled over their lunch bags, and ate furtively so that the more affluent could not see the single piece of black bread smeared with lard or the slab of cold, cooked cereal...
...They would try very hard not to watch "the rich kids" eating...
...They do not accept easily the idea that they should be the waste of a society unable to incorporate them...
...Some brought no lunches at all and pretended that they wanted to spend lunch hour shooting baskets, or studying...
...At best they have guarded human dignity, and been an assurance that every person has value in the eyes of the nation...
...Its government lures the wealthy retired with one of the most generous tax programs in the country...
...Every county used to have one...
...Or what people can endure...
...The question the administration should be asking is whether the country, foundering in economic stagnation, facing multiplying international crises, challenged by the Third World, can afford a growing number of the hungry and the hopeless...
...Then they would go back to their endless sitting...
...In the days before school lunch programs school children who lived too far from school to go home at lunch time ate at their desks in study hall or sitting on the bleacher benches in the school gymnasium...
...From a distance it looked pleasant enough...
...It may well be that the poor will not suffer...
...The poor of the great Depression, the poor of the poorhouses and empty lunch boxes tended to feel that their plight stemmed from some deficiency in themselves...
...But they are not all helpless, even these...
...Driving by you could see men and women sitting on the porch looking at the road - sometimes a few working in the garden or coming from the hen houses...
...According to a recent study made by the Florida Catholic Conference, the state spends only seven percent of its tax dollar on welfare programs...
...The state of Florida is a case in point...
...Unhappily we must conclude that its proposals are a justification of years of exaggerated rhetoric on the part of Reagan as the voice of the conservatives - the "welfare queen" rhetoric which so many of us failed to take seriously but which served him so well...
...Few states can pick up the slack...
...Perhaps over the years in my imagination that sickly color has become a symbol of the final hopelessness and defeat I saw there but did not recognize...
Vol. 108 • April 1981 • No. 7
