The caretakers
Amidei, Nancy
Social activism today THE CARETAKERS NO GREAT AMERICAN SELLOUT I'VE HEARD IT; you've heard it; everybody knows it. In the 1980s, everybody cares only about themselves. We've all sold out for...
...We've all sold out for greed...
...It certainly isn't true of students...
...Think for a minute about what happened after Congress required reviews of everyone getting Disability Insurance benefits, and the Reagan administration got them underway with rather more haste than good judgment in 1981...
...All together they may not add up to anything that one could call a "system," and no one would claim they are meeting all the need, but they are there, staffed by a combination of volunteers and under-paid serfs, on shoe-string budgets in frequently terrible working conditions, day after day, week after week, in the 1980s...
...Instead of drawing thousands, each draws hundreds or dozens, so they — and we — never get that sense of critical mass...
...There are emergency shelters for abused and battered women and children...
...It was a Dallas student who carried out that city's hunger survey...
...Today, if you were to add up all the students engaged in some activist effort, I suspect you'd come to the same 10-20 percent, but they'd be scattered over thirty or forty issues: acid rain, women's rights, South Africa, Central America, animal rights, the nuclear threat, abortion (pro and con), defenserelated research, and a couple dozen more...
...Nor does it reflect an acceptance of the idea that government no longer has a role to play in meeting the needs of the people in crisis...
...Before long, they and their allies had succeeded in getting governors, judges, state legislators, and attorneys general in nearly half the states to agree that they would not carry out the law because it was harmful to disabled people...
...There are social work students in Michigan working to locate affordable housing for people, while others in the school of public health have designed a survey to determine the extent of stunted growth and malnutrition among low-income children...
...There are shelters for the homeless, and hotlines for people in crisis...
...farmers have stormed state capitols Commonweal: 694 across the Midwest while back in their rural, conservative communities mental health and other social services have sprung up...
...But student activism in the 1960s tended to focus on one or two issues: civil rights, and U.S...
...Meanwhile, the real news in social activism is being made off-campus, in some of the most established institutions of our society...
...and, two welfare grant increases in as many years...
...And while] skeptical that much can be done in the future...
...That city's public colleges now offer five free credit hours to public aid recipients to help them get back on their feet...
...In Texas, a broad range of groups and individuals came together over the past few years to win passage of several dramatic social welfare victories, including: a new Indigent Health Care bill that provides an additional $145 million (half of it federal) and requires for the first time that county hospitals treat poor people...
...Poor people are among those helping poor people in the 1980s...
...For the record, many of the people making up the bags of emergency groceries or cleaning the soup kitchen after the meals are people who've eaten those meals or had to depend on emergency groceries...
...Uncaring...
...Much of the new social activism has (or quickly acquires) a distinctly political focus...
...Churches and congregations have been declaring themselves sanctuaries to protect political refugees from Central America...
...What we're seeing instead is a variant on what former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson once said about the civil rights movement: "We aren't in the streets, we're in office...
...The country has become a bastion of self-centered, egomaniacal yuppies...
...Among those commenting on the poll and its findings were fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, who noted: Americans . . . believe that it is proper and necessary for the federal government to take action to help the poor, even if its record in this area is not encouraging...
...That was an extraordinary example of civil disobedience on a massive scale, occurring among Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and on behalf of a group of social welfare clients in a program governed by public policies and tax revenues...
...and for over a year mayors, senators, and countless others have been offering themselves for arrest outside the embassy of South Africa and its consulates across the country to protest apartheid, while a growing list of universities, professional associations (including the American Bar Association) and pension funds have voted to divest their holdings in South Africa even if it means taking a financial loss...
...But activism, risk-taking on behalf of others, commitment to causes and issues on behalf of vulnerable people are hardly dead...
...Their counterparts from the medical school are working with the city's homeless, many of whom live on the streets near their classrooms...
...they do not feel this justifies abandoning the effort...
...involvement in Vietnam...
...NANCY AMIQB* 20 December 1985:695...
...At Christmastime, 1985, this may be the best present the newest generation of social activists has to offer our fellow citizens in trouble: hope that someone still cares...
...At the same time, our supposedly passive, sold-out, greedy contemporaries are staffing soup kitchens, food pantries, and food banks, in towns and cities of every size...
...In Massachusetts and New York state funds are being used to alert unemployed families that they may be eligible for food stamps, and in Washington and Iowa twoparent families may once again get welfare and Medicaid...
...Even then, only 10-20 percent of students could have been described as "activists...
...Hardly...
...no matter how popular a cause, you would never expect to find most of any group among the activists...
...Tennessee's legislature was persuaded to take the sales tax off food, and raise its very low welfare benefits, and social activists nationwide have won new state laws for the protection of abused and battered women and children...
...That's hardly evidence of a passive society where nobody cares enough to get involved...
...In Philadelphia, law students from both the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University are operating "food stamp clinics" in low-income downtown neighborhoods...
...an Omnibus Hunger Bill that provides $11.5 million to supplement various federal food programs (most notably WIC and meals for senior citizens), helps to defray the costs of emergency food providers, and requires that local welfare agencies give food stamps within twenty-four hours to families in dire emergencies...
...And when even 10 or 20 percent of a student body of 30,000 gets involved you get a real sense of critical mass, of thousands of people...
...There are real differences between students in the 1960s and now, but activism isn't one of them...
...But that's not all...
...That's not surprising...
...Earlier this year the Los Angeles Times conducted a poll of 2,446 Americans and found: Seventy-three percent of the public favors government action on behalf of the poor, and 57 percent would even be willing to approve a 1 percent federal sales tax to pay for it...
...Moreover, all this happened at a time when the very notion of public social programs was under attack...
...I don't like to sound out of touch, but I don't buy it...
...SOCIAL ACTIVISM is taking new forms in the 1980s: mass marches and law suits are not as common as they once were...
...Passive...
...While practical judgments about what government can do to fight poverty may have changed, the moral consensus has not...
...The disability community — a disproportionately unwealthy, unpowerful group that still finds itself unwelcome in many places — organized...
...In Chicago there is now an Interagency Hunger Network that has divided up responsibility for the city, and is pressing responsible government agencies with the same vigor as it is pressing its own private and voluntary members, in order to see that emergency needs will be met...
Vol. 112 • December 1985 • No. 22
