"Part of the reason impacted neighborhoods are the way they are is the condition people are in who fall into them... Had we been addicted, lazy, depressed, or any of a host of other personal problems, it might have trapped us where we were." Mpls. Issues Forum, Sept. 18, 2003
A few observations:
1) Most of us take for granted that these lines could only have been written by a white guy. Why is that?
2) The writer is talking here about neighborhoods ("impacted") where poverty has been intentionally concentrated for generations by the City. Isn't it peculiar that someone who on the one hand has invested so much energy in denying that these neighborhoods exist can on the other hand congratulate himself so heartily for having escaped the necessity to live in one? This is a perfect example of the bad faith inherent in what Brother James Graham is pleased to call the "protestant ethic". Which leads me to my third observation:
3) The writer apparently believes that the correlates of poverty are in fact its causes. This in turn leads him to suppose that people become addicted, ill, depressed, violent, and crazy in a vacuum, and that they subsequently "fall into" poor neighborhoods volitionally. No doubt it's a notion congenial to the talking heads on Fox News, but it can hardly be considered a fair and balanced judgement by one who calls himself a liberal. Bottom line: Can we really bring ourselves to believe that the poor have no one but themselves to blame for their misery? If we can, the writer is right. But frankly, that's not an ideological world I would care to inhabit.
Paul Weir Phillips
Dorothy Day was a hard woman. She was impolitic enough to point out that Jesus commands us not to help the poor but to BE poor.
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