The discussion generated by my last post, The Other Story: De-bunking the Welfare Lie, was so rich that I felt compelled to pick up where it left off. I found some of the responses curious, some confusing, some offensive, and some inspiring.
In so many of the responses I found that the critique focused on the relationship between the individual and the welfare system, and/or the onus of taking action fell on the individual to decide whether or not to receive benefits from the state. The state seemed to be this conscience-less entity that gets its resources illegally and/or immorally. I am always suspicious of conceptions of “the state.” It is too attractive to detach ourselves from it, as though we are tourists on this trip through life. Furthermore, it is next to impossible to conceive of or confront such a shapeless entity.
Detachment is a dangerous sensation. Take for example the commenter who reminded us that exchanging food stamps for money to buy drugs is yet another reason poor people on welfare are vilified. It is certainly true that some people with addictions use food stamps to get drugs instead of feeding their children. I have a distant cousin who was guilty of this. And yet the very act of condemning people with addictions for such behaviors arises from the crushing and isolating theme of individualism and “personal responsibility” in our culture. This theme socializes us to respond to questions of social welfare by condemning the behaviors of poverty and of addiction, as opposed to (for example) compassionately attempting to rehabilitate the addicted person with curiosity about the root cause of the addiction (usually poverty).
We focus on individuality instead of mutuality, personal responsibility instead of collective responsibility, and discernment of “right action” instead of vision of shared prosperity. We give over the immense power we could have as “we”, as soon as we admit to there being a “them.”
Last year, I facilitated a weekend workshop called the Economics of Jesus, as part of a radical seminary series run by Missio Dei in the Twin Cities. During the weekend, I came to the realization, with the help of the group I was facilitating, that almost everything Jesus teaches us to do is impossible to do alone. You cannot love one another alone. You cannot give sup to the needy alone. When Jesus exhorts his listeners to give up everything they have and to follow him, he hardly intended them to do this alone. Truly, no one would. The very act of following Jesus is, each time, a joining of one person to another.
The emergent theme here is mutuality, but that requires not simply sharing resources but also sharing power over those resources. And power is at the heart of my critique. We cannot resolve the issue of demoralizing the poor by changing where they receive their benefits. It can be just as demoralizing to receive charity from the church as it is from the government. It can be just as dehumanizing to receive welfare from family as it can be from strangers. In all of these dynamics, the power belongs with the giver, not the receiver. I had to laugh when I read the comment, “You will do well to cling to family and neighbors and to look at the state as the enemy.” I had read this shortly after getting off a call with my case worker—a small-government conservative if I ever met one—who was explaining to me that I should always turn to family and church first and see the government as a last resort. She expressed no sensitivity towards or curiosity about the nature of my relationships with family and church, and whether or not it would be healthy for me as an individual to enter into such a relationship with family and church. Not to mention the fact that for many of us, family and neighbors ARE the state, or at least are so deeply entrenched in the state apparatus as to make no matter.
It is not enough to say that we should turn to family and church. It is not enough to pit private charity against public entitlements, as if one could ever win. As long as this is the conversation, we are allowing the system as it is to set the terms of the debate. The end result always, as Sarah Lynne rightly assessed, blames the victim of poverty, rather than acknowledges the complex circumstances that result in poverty.
But we have a vision. We know what it might look like to have shared abundance, to have equity, to have “enough.” The essential problem is that we tend not to enter into relationships with people who are different from us in order to build that shared abundance. We often ignore or fail to recognize the importance of true diversity in actually building that new world and sharing power. I will give a few relatively low level examples from my own experience.
My husband and I, my parents-in-law, and their friends engage in a land share for our garden. We collectively build a garden on land only one of us legally owns each spring, and harvest from it throughout summer and fall. Because of that, we now have winter storage of pickled vegetables, prepared sauces, root vegetables, and frozen fruit. None of these relationships are with people who share my political beliefs. In fact, some of them are self-identifying Republicans. The connection between us is familial and regional. We love each other and enjoy each other’s company. We see each other as the sum of our life experiences, not as a deconstructed set of political talking points.
In my fundraising experience on political projects, I have more success raising money from friends and family who do not share my politics than those who do. This is because my family and friends are still people who want to live in a better world regardless of their liberal, moderate, or conservative politics. They are ready to invest in a vision of a better world, and happy to do so.
We need to build relationships and systems that stand outside of the normative relationships of exploitation, consumption, and detachment, while simultaneously not pretending that WE OURSELVES can stand outside of those relationships. We must build the new world in the shell of the old, but not forget that it is US who are building it, and that we are broken people just like that shell is broken. We must love and accept each other in our brokenness, and that love is shown in relationships of equity, transparency, honesty, and shared power.
I had the privilege of seeing Cornell West speak live a few nights ago, and he reminded the audience that it used to be that we understood “leaders” as those rare individuals who had an intimate love of the people, and as those who were willing to die for the people. He pointed out that in such a narcissistic, hedonistic, materialistic, and sadistic culture, we must be willing to die in order to live. He sounded a lot like Jesus, and being in the room with him felt an awful lot like going to church. If I apply that teaching to this conversation, I find myself thinking of the ways in which our culture needs to die in order that we might live. Our capacity to judge others for their choices must die, and so must our capacity to alienate them based on the ways they are different from us. Our desire and willingness to horde our power and resources, to create scarcity where there should be abundance: these must die in order that we all might live.
