Kelley Walker wrote,
>Yep, you got it, they're leaving the welfare bureaucracy behind in order to
>instantiate an emerging Charity-Religious Perplex? I have no doubt that it
>will be just as wasteful as the welfare bureaucracy and after a few exposes
>of Tammy Faye Bakers buying false eyelashes with public funds... It's a
>tough one, but, as I said, why let them define what it means to be
>"faith-based".
. . .
>Finally, while I see no problem with criticizing and refusing to work
>within the system, when it comes to the impoverished and what their lives
>will be like, having been homeless and impoverished and applying for food
>stamps as recently as last year, I'd like to see a lot of folks on the left
>actually doing something once in awhile. I had utterly no food in my home
>last holiday season. I would have liked to have gone to a food bank with
>women's health center pamplets shoved in my hands, not praise jesus flyers.
First, they won't be leaving the welfare bureaucracy behind because it's too
powerful a constituency and will be all too happy to make the right or
righteous noises to save their positions. What they'll do is graft a piously
partisan layer of bureaucracy to oversee the career bureaucracy and purge it
of "leftists". If there are any exposes, they won't have legs.
There could be a third course besides refusing to work within the system and
trying to subvert it from within. It isn't an easy one and it IS perilous.
That would be to develop complementary design proposals that could, if
implemented, make the faith-based approach both more likely to succeed and,
at the same time, more emancipatory. WHOA!, you should be thinking. What's
this guy been smoking? As I said, it wouldn't be easy and would be perilous.
Brad DeLong and Nathan Newman should be appalled, I'm sure. But if Shrubby's
going to be around for eight more years, why not make him/it an offer they
can't refuse -- five, six, seven and eight are on us?
The key element in any complementary faith-based proposal is time --
"compassion time". You can talk all you want about not throwing money at
problems, but "suffering with" people means spending time with them, time
that working Americans -- and especially working families -- have less and
less of (Juliet Shor etc. etc.). Stupid Al Gore kicked off his campaign on
the keynote of healing the "time deficit" and, as far as I know buried the
theme right then and there. Either Gore and his advisors figured they didn't
need it or they figured it would be a campaign liability.
Without boring Pen-ler's with concrete proposals, I can simply say I've got
plenty of detailed proposals for facilitating the voluntary reduction of
working time, if that is what is necessary to enable people to do one-on-one
"charity" work. With regard to the quotes around charity, it is the bad
connotations (just like the bad connotations of welfare) that make the idea
offensive -- the idea of some self-important robber baron philanthropist
preaching thrift and handing out dimes to the widows and orphans of miners
who've died in his mines. Nobody wants that kind of charity, but then nobody
wants welfare, either.
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
