Our social safety net has a hole in it. The fibers of the net are decaying; the hole is getting bigger. More people are falling through, and the people with the least strength are holding the most of the weight. Three to four million Americans are homeless according to the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 5. 5% cannot find jobs according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and the figure is over twice that in the 20-24 year old age group, according to the Department of Education. A very slim minority of these people are sucking off the system, but the vast majority just had a bad break.
Such is the story of Peter and Megan, as told by author Jonathan Kozol in his Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award winner Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America. Peter was a carpenter and she was a homemaker who raised their five children. They lived in a neat, working class apartment building in New York City. Peter did construction for public housing projects, and had a vast array of technical skills and tools: I did carpentry. I painted. I could do wallpapering. I earned a living. We spent Sundays walking with our children on the beach. It may sound like this was a happy family, iving the American Dream.
Perhaps they were — they were self sufficient for all of the 12 years that they had been married, they had a steady income, a close and loving family, a home, and a chance for their children to do even better than they had done. Then the fire struck. They came racing home after hearing the news, only to find that everything had been destroyed. The children lost their pet dog and cat, Megan lost her grandmothers china, but Peter perhaps lost the most: his tools. Since the fire, he has not had a job, because a carpenter without tools might as well not have eyes.
He explained that for every job he had, he would add a new tool to his collection. But they all went up in the blaze. When Kozol first met them, they were living in a welfare hotel in New York, where they had been living for two years. They cant get out because federal assistance programs (better known as welfare) tell them that their family limit for an apartment is $366 a month — this with seven family members living in New York City. (In comparison, thats about the rock bottom price for a week in a New York City one room motel. In their two room apartment, the entire place is falling part, with crumbling walls, no working toilets, and a stench Kozol describes as overpowering.
A year later, Kozol meets Peter and Megan again. This time theyre living on the street, and their children have been taken away, all to different foster homes, because, Peter says White children are in demand by the adoption agencies. The social safety net designed to help people who are down on their luck: where is it for Peter and Megan, not to mention their children? And without a safety net, how can we expect people to fulfill this American Dream?
Evidently, we cant. Its as good as dead. Peter and Megan are real people. This is a real story. For as long as anybody can remember, weve been pounded by success stories of the American Dream. But for every Colin Powell, Lee Iacocca, Bob Dole, or Arnold Schwartzenegger, there are dozens, if not hundreds of Peters and Megans. And as long as there are people who want jobs and cant get them, as long as children live on the streets because of no fault of their own, as long as the value of a dollar for the worker keeps declining, we cant really say that the American Dream is a reality.
The American Dream doesnt have a set definition. It used to mean having a husband who worked and provided for his family, a wife who raised the children, and for every generation, a chance to do better than your parents and to have your children do even better than you. But today a new definition of the dream is in order. It basically comes down today to the knowledge that if you, as President Clinton says, work hard and play by the rules, you will be able to provide food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, and a few pleasures for your family.
First, though, society needs to get its proverbial house in order. As a ociety we need to make certain that some things are brought back to the table if we want to restore the dream, specifically: · Job stability – Without a steady source of income, its impossible to have a budget on which to base how you allot your money, and obviously a steady cash flow is the only way to purchase the necessities. · A superior pubic education system – In order to get ahead, you have to have an education.
In order for people to allow their children to do better than they did, their children have to have more education. Some programs like a voucher system that would jeopardize the public ducation system are threats to the American way of life because they strip public schools of their income base and direct it to private and parochial education, which should only be subsidized by parents, the private sector, and the countrys religious institutions that we give a tax-exempt status to for this reason among others.
Some would say that the public education system has failed, that the buildings resemble prisons more than schools, that there is incessant violence, and a whole host of other complaints, but they can all be fixed as soon as we start taking care of the underclass that we created. It has become a self-perpetuation situation and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Certainly nobody expects there to be an American Dream without a firm educational basis, and certainly nobody believes that our country would have been better off if we has never had publicly subsidized education.
Dollar power for the worker – Inflation must be low and the dollar must remain strong in a world market. Almost all workers are now also in competition with every other worker in the world. Purchasing power must be kept high for the working class, and the minimum wage must be enough on which to support a family. According to Harvard economics professor Larry Katz, the budget would be balanced today if real wages had real increased at the same rate over the last two decades as they had over the two and a half before that, all other factors remaining the same.
In addition, the dollar cannot remain strong without balanced international trade and an internal stimulation of the economy. Tariffs are a historically useful tool for restoring trade imbalances. They add money to the federal budget while encouraging Americans to buy domestically made products and sending a strong message to companies that operate weatshops in places like Haiti, Indonesia, El Salvador, and Sri Lanka, all places where popular brands like Nike, Reebok, Structure, Tommy Hilfiger, Guess, and Liz Claiborne have factories. These sweatshops both deprive their employees of basic human rights but cost Americans jobs.
A message of hope from public officials – The government must see the American Dream as a viable possibility, or else they will plan for failure and self-destruction. · And finally, a net to fall onto as needed. Every time someone switches jobs, has an illness, has an unforseeable disaster, or falls between the racks, we cant expect him or her to start all over again. The whole purpose behind this safety net is to allow people to tread water for a few minutes when they need it the most. Its seldom a way of life, except for people that fall through the gaping hole in the center.
It will be impossible to attain these goals without some form of government intervention. Conservatives talk about the heavy hand of socialism like it was the Antichrist. This will not lead to government regulation of every facet of our lives; it will merely set up some new programs, eliminate some old ones, and restructure the existing ones to atch the hole so that the net can catch people and help them rebound. * * * The Homeless Voices Project is a project sponsored by the National Coalition for the Homeless that gets the stories of the homeless to show the more fortunate what theyre going through.
The best way to express how the dream is failing is by telling the stories of those that it has failed for in their own words, the words of the men and women who feel the pain of desertion by the country that promised to help make them strong. (The actual voices of these people can be heard on the Internet at http://nch. ri. net/vocpage1. html using Netscape, MS-Explorer, or NCSA Mosaic with the appropriate helper applications. ) Every one of these people has been failed by one of the tenets of the dream. Mike, like Peter, is a construction worker.
I’m a construction worker, unemployed at the moment, and living at a shelter. There’s three or four guys who are on the same project with me, who live there. The situation here in Washington is that there are no…. no strong unions or regulations for putting up these government buildings and as a result, we just make enough to basically feed ourselves. And… y then, the job is over. And then we have to look for another one which may be a year from now, and it’s just not… possible for us to get into the … the permanent world that most people are in.
And most people are laying people off instead of hiring, there’s just no permanent jobs available. The best you can do is a temporary one. So, we go from one temporary situation to another, and never manage to get enough money together… to… to do anything… for ourselves in a permanent way. So it’s kind of a self-perpetuating situation. “I don’t own a car… The recreation, if you want to call it that, is ostly with the church I belong to. I go out to their activities. We have picnics… retreats… evening activities– tutoring, things like that.
And that’s what I do in the evenings. It’s good to get away from… from the hopelessness that most people like myself have to deal with twenty-four hours a day. “So, hopefully it won’t always be like this, but I don’t see anything happening to change it right now. ” Mike is one of the lucky ones. He can at least work from time to time, and make some money. But there is no way that he can move up in the world when he cant even afford a place to live. The conventional wisdom is to sacrifice, but where is that sacrifice to come from?
With corporate America restructuring (read: laying off and firing), it has become impossible for people like Mike to enjoy the first part of the dream: job stability. And when he has a job, his dollar is worth the least its been worth for the working class since the Eisenhower administration. Angela had a job, paid her taxes, and played by the rules. But a string of unfortunate events put her living in a cardboard box in Manhattan. She is educated, hard-working, and thoughtful.
But she, like so many, lipped a little bit and there was nothing to catch her. Hello everyone, my name is Angela Owens, and I am homeless. I want you to know that homelessness can… [happen]to anyone. It can happen to you, it happened to me. I had three years of college. I worked two jobs for four years, and things happen… and that is one of the reasons why I am homeless. Uh.. , you don’t necessarily have to be mentally incompetent, you don’t necessarily have to be handicapped. Things can happen, whether you have a silver spoon in your mouth, or you are just below the poverty line. You can become homeless. ”
Paul Deitrich is an African-American man who saw his minimum wage job go from one on which he could take care of himself to one where he could barely scrape by and have no real savings to speak of. Then that job bottomed out on him, he got his two weeks notice, and he was on the street within a month. Both the lack of job stability and the lack of dollar power contributed to his fall. And there is no net to help him get back up — how can you apply for a job when you dont have a phone number, address — or even any clean clothes? “It’s a real tough job… o pay the high cost of rent–on minimum wage, or a small pension. It’s really almost impossible.
The economic bind that people are in, who have real small incomes, or no incomes at all is unbelievable. I remember in the last years of Dr. King’s life, he moved away from social commodation (sic) issues and concentrated more on economic issues in the South–in terms of supporting the organization of hospitals and garbage workers to raise the minimum wage to help remove this bind. The bind got worse, because nowadays with computerization and automation, the whole strata of lower level jobs has been completely eliminated.
And Dr. King, in the last years of his life, was not only nterested in that, he was organizing at that time a poor peoples’ encampment to dramatize the terrible bind the lower levels of our societies are in. And in fact, he had begun to formulate a slogan, which might describe whats happening to hundreds of thousands of people here in the United States. And that slogan was written: “Unbridled Capitalism is Economic Terrorism”… And we have to live with that. And it drives many of us to despair–and behind that despair, we turn to those things that numb our despair… Similar to the enclosure system at the end of feudalism, when the big and owners realized they could make far more money by driving the serfs off the land and growing sheep for the factories.
And the cities in Northern Europe filled up with many, many hundreds of thousands of people who had a rural culture, and didn’t know how to deal with the urban culture at all. And the despair got so great. That is when in the history of the world alcoholism became epidemic–out of that despair. And it seems like we’re seeing a similar, similar situation now. “And when youre homeless, where do you wash your clothes?
When youre homeless, where do you clean yourself? The good God-fearing women in the churches provide us with food, which is a great blessing. When you look for a job, where do you tell them to call you back? When you make phone calls at a public phone, you might lose at least one out of four quarters…… Where do you get a drink in this kind of weather? ” Society has truly abandoned the people who can be heard the least. But if we ignore the hole in the net any longer, the middle class will erode into poverty one family at a time, and then, and only then, America will not be able to recover from what it will have become.