The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [159]
To acknowledge a people problem is to acknowledge complexity, the futility of relying on just money for solutions. It’s not always society’s or the teacher’s fault when kids can’t read. Contrary to Jesse Jackson’s preachments, few criminals are “political prisoners.” Jobs would have prevented some but not all of the looting after the 1977 blackout. Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold reported that 48 percent of those arrested were employed; more comprehensive studies suggest 65 to 73 percent were unemployed. Whichever figure you accept, it is true that many of the looters were employed. Put more money into the education system and more than likely it will go to increase teacher pay and benefits, not pupil instruction. There is little class solidarity between workers who sacrifice their union brothers to layoffs while they continue to receive salary increases. Even clichés can be true. Welfare can create a cycle of dependency; shorter work weeks and more time off can make people lazy. Landlords steal, but so do poor and middle-income people in subsidized housing.
Many are the victims of racism, joblessness, hopelessness—of a capitalist system that often punishes the least efficient, the ugly or the old. But some people, determinists prefer not to concede, are bad people, unreachable. Bushwick’s Crazy Homicides, one suspects, would as soon knife you as step on a roach. In just that sense, they are probably little different from the redneck killers of civil rights workers, who killed as a political act. Writer William Bradford Huie once speculated that James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were trying to reason with and appeal to their common humanity when some racist Southerners took them on a back road in 1964 and blew their heads off. The rednecks were as difficult to reach as the Crazy Homicides or the youth gangs of the South Bronx. And yet our schemes to rebuild the South Bronx, for instance, tend to ignore this reality. What if the new South Bronx is torched just like the old?
Most of us are afraid to talk about this problem of an underclass for fear—the most dreaded fear among liberals—of being called “racist.” Pat Moynihan, despite his unfortunate reliance on hyperbole, once tried to show how the breakup of black families contributed to crippling black youngsters. He was roundly condemned as a “white racist,” among the gentler epithets. Senator Ted Kennedy, exercising considerably more skill, escaped the epithets because he did not appear to be blaming the victim when he told Detroit’s NAACP: “Every measure we have tells us that these children are the most likely to be victims of parental abuse, the most likely to be dropouts from their schools, the most likely to be unemployed, the most likely to be on welfare, the most likely to be delinquent, the most likely to be jailed the most likely to be found in an early grave.”
Interestingly, Kennedy placed a large part of the blame for the breakup of black families on the welfare system devised by liberals. “The heart of the problem is a welfare system that too often works against the welfare of those the system is supposed to serve,” he said. “There is ample evidence that the welfare system itself, in combination with other factors, has helped to produce the very disease we now seek to cure.… we say to this child—wait, there is a way, one way, you can be somebody to someone. We will give you an apartment and furniture to fill it. We will give you a TV set and a telephone. We will give you clothing, and cheap food, and free medical care, and some spending money besides. And in return, you only have to do one thing: just go out and have a baby. And faced with such an offer, it is no surprise that hundreds of thousands have been caught in the trap that our welfare system has become.”
Epithets and scapegoating, sadly, also extend to liberals’ interpretation of the fiscal crisis. On the first page of