Concern for poor dwindling

Opinion: February 18, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Harold Jackson

McClatchy-Tribune

For no particular reason, a memory flashed across my mind the other day, of my late mother opening the kitchen window of our home and declaring with a casual sniff of the outside air that “somebody’s cooking cheap fish.”

I wondered whether that olfactory observation meant Mama knew the smell of cheap fish because it was typically served on our plates. Or was it the opposite? She knew what noncheap fish should smell like, and that wasn’t the aroma she was sniffing.

Not that it really matters. I didn’t have to inhale our neighborhood to know it wasn’t exactly ritzy. We lived in the projects, an experience that I believe increases my empathy with people living in poverty.

I think most Americans want to help the poor. But much of today’s political rhetoric about cutting federal spending makes me wonder if our concern for the downtrodden is dwindling.

Federal budget cuts

Pay attention to the federal budget cuts proposed by the tea-party-inspired Republican Study Committee, which in taking an ax-it-all approach to reducing the size of government would harm some of this country’s most vulnerable citizens.

The Republican group wanted to cut $100 billion from the current-year federal budget (House party leaders prefer $32 billion) and chop $2.5 trillion from it in 10 years, excluding Medicare and Social Security. Only lately have the Republicans said they will also consider some defense cuts.

Their focus on cutting discretionary spending would mean hundreds of thousands of poor children would be dropped from Head Start. Thousands of poor college students would have their Pell Grants reduced. The Study Committee wants to eliminate the Legal Aid Corp., which provides lawyers to poor defendants.

It also wants to stop funding for other programs that conservatives see as liberal interests, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Humanities. But more egregious are its proposed across-the-board cuts that would affect antipoverty programs such as food stamps.

Politicians who want to indiscriminately wield a budget ax are in essence asking people to be selfish, to think only about themselves, and not about how their tax dollars might be appropriately spent to help others.

When I was growing up, people who had gained some affluence and didn’t concern themselves with their neighbors were said to have an “I’ve got mine” attitude. They had made it and didn’t care about anyone else.

They were called “sadity,” a slang term used derisively in African-American communities still guided by the Booker T. Washington principle that black people helping each other could collectively pull themselves up from the aftermath of slavery.

In today’s economy, many people need a hand to reach their bootstraps. But instead of helping them, some budget-cutters are acting like Dickens characters who would rather send the poor to an almshouse if the alternative is taxpayer assistance.

That’s selfish. It smacks of Ayn Rand’s “objectivism,” which contends that selfishness is not only good, it is a necessary ingredient for human survival.

‘Selfish’

Rand could have used the term self-interest to describe what she had in mind. But she said it was good to be “selfish,” apparently to put at ease anyone who might otherwise feel pangs of guilt for ignoring the poor.

“The moral purpose of a man’s life is the achievement of his own happiness,” Rand said. “This does not mean that he is indifferent to all men, that human life has no value to him and that he has no reason to help others in an emergency.

“But it does mean that he does not subordinate his life to the welfare of others, that he does not sacrifice himself to their needs, that the relief of their suffering is not his primary concern, that any help he gives is an exception, not a rule; an act of generosity, not of moral duty.”

If that had been the prevailing view when Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were proposed, those programs would not exist. Welfare, even the reformed version we have today, would have never been born. Lyndon Johnson, who failed to achieve his “Great Society,” would not have even attempted it.

I don’t mind politicians being zealous about the need to cut government spending, but let’s do it in the context of protecting the poor in the process. Social welfare programs shouldn’t be exempt from spending cuts, but neither should their reductions be so draconian as to put poor families in greater jeopardy.

As for those right-wingers who consider themselves religious but want to make budget cuts that would hurt the poor, they should read 1 John 3:17: “If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?”

How, indeed?

Harold Jackson is editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.