WHEN WE WERE POOR: A REFLECTION ON MEMORY AND SOLIDARITY

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels^1_
Commonweal Magazine

Because Margaret Steinfels has a unique ability to frame issues with clarity and precision, she was invited to participate in the Living Justice Conference on October 20, 2001 as both an observer and a presenter. Her first task is to summarize themes from the day, and raise questions to try to continue the conversation, and then, to conclude with her prepared reflection on the day's subject. Peggy Steinfels looked first at the challenges we need to address to assure pathways from poverty and coalesce around a commitment to the common good, and secondly, asked us to reflect on our history and solidarity as we address these concerns in the future.

PART I – REFLECTIONS ON LIVING JUSTICE

Having listened to what has been spoken throughout today, what must we do to assure pathways from poverty and greater commitment to the common good? Sister Melanie DiPietro, David Cole and Father Thomas Massaro have pointed out that unfortunately those pathways for many poor are littered with obstacles, and for others the paths just disappear. Commitment to the common good has become more elusive thanks to our individualistic mindset. With the reauthorization of welfare reform before us, we have a paucity of documented positive prognoses and an abundance of sound bites on what may well prove to be superficial improvement for the most advantaged portion of the needy.

The issue of faith-based initiatives creates confusion and causes divisions. Despite the fact that the Catholic Church has formed the various pro-active systems and responsive services which have served our nation quite well, we are strongly under attack in health care and are financially choking in education. Questions are numerous and ponderous. "What will the future be?" "Are we limited by nostalgia for our past?" "Will we accommodate to the point of homogenization?" "Will there be a Renaissance of an action with faithful and fruitful innovation?" "Will funding continue?"

The Common Good Challenge to American Society
The common good has been much discussed in various forms today. Father Massaro argues that it has become an attenuated idea in our society, but not among individuals alone. Over the last several decades, this has been manifested by the withdrawal of the state and federal government from a wide range of services as well as by reduced funding for the poor, the mentally ill, and the lost souls who wander our streets. It has been further put aside by us, the citizenry, who increasingly avoid the meetings of civic groups – the political tasks that help form and sustain the ideas of the common good. As Robert Putnam has written, "We bowl alone," enjoying the experience but with no social or lasting commitment," or commitment to the common good.

This morning Tom Massaro set out the Church's understanding of the "common good" in a very precise and historical way, citing the documents, etc. In a paper John Coleman, SJ prepared for Commonweal, through a Pew funded project, "American Catholics in the Public Square," the Jesuit sociologist offered a complementary assessment of the common good. He doesn't look at what the Church teaches as did Fr. Massaro, but he looks at the kind of society we are and how receptive we are or are not to the common good. He cites three obstacles to the common good and American culture. First, "notions of the common good move deeply against the American individualist grain; second, appeals to the common good in any precise meaning of the term are increasingly rare in politics; third, massive institutional or sociological changes in our society make any easy assumptions about any received cultural sense of the common good harder to accommodate." Coleman's observation supports Massaro and challenges us: "The lived commitment to the common good is the distinctive Catholic contribution we can make to our culture." So I leave on the floor today this question of how Catholic commitment to the common good and the Catholic common sense of the common good can more deftly and intelligently penetrate the discussion we really need to have in our own American culture.

Challenging Pathways--Health Care For All, Affordable Housing & Economic Equity
Father Massaro also talked about the "war on poverty." Most of us who are old enough to remember don't remember the "war on poverty" and we don't remember many of the things that came from it. Msgr. William Linder of New Community may be the best thing that came from it, and what a magnificent story he tells. There are a few cautionary ideas I'd like to bring to the reflections on the "war on poverty." Since we spoke so much this morning about language, I want to talk a little bit about the rhetoric of the "war on poverty." And the first piece of rhetoric that I remember is Lyndon Johnson announcing that we can have "both guns and butter," that is, we could continue to conduct a war in Vietnam and respond to domestic social needs. Well the Great Society programs went ahead – but as we know, that response didn't happen. Certainly the war in Vietnam cut back an enormous number of social reforms that had been put in play with the beginning of the Kennedy administration, including the Alliance for Progress, which was the United States' effort to help bring, through the Organization of American States, a certain level of social and economic reform to our neighbors to the south.

The "war" on poverty, it seems to me, encouraged in some quarters – and I think they were mostly academic – the growth of a language of social pathology. The poor somehow were no longer like us, ordinary citizens who happen to be down on their luck, or having a hard time, or just not having enough money. They became something else. Indeed, the poor became the problem. I think many of you will remember a series of books about the culture of poverty – that poor people are poor because they live in communities that encourage social pathology. I think that is one of the downsides on the war on poverty – devising language that helps you to fight the war, but leaves a lingering sense of diminishment about our fellow citizens. As the "war" on poverty kicks up again, I hope we pick out a different way to frame the questions. Tom Massaro suggested "discrete measures" that might alleviate the conditions that poor people often have to cope with. He mentioned three measures which have been referenced throughout the day: first of all, health care; second, affordable housing; and third, income security. These three things are very different matters and require different people to pay attention to them. We have a very long way to go toward resolving some of the major issues faced by poor people, and by not so poor people. I think we all face the question of rising health care insurance costs, and medical costs. We will come to a time when many organizations cannot simply afford to provide their employees with health care.

Affordable housing is an issue that varies very much by region but we who live in New York know what it is like to live in cities that do not have enough affordable housing. This problem could be dealt with in some way on the local level if there were more energy by groups devoted to the idea as Monsignor Linder has been suggesting. If people do not have to pay 60-75 percent of their income for housing, they are perhaps no longer going to be poor people. Finally the income security question "sustainability – income sufficiency" needs studying. The panelists in many imaginative ways presented the work/income relationship in our society and described movements that are making us think more clearly about the fact that many poor people work. Some people work two jobs and are still poor people. That is wrong. We have to give some sustained attention to that issue because of the social and moral implications.

I've always been amused by the idea that two of the biggest "welfare programs" in the United States are never seen for what they were because they were given to GIs. And I refer of course to the GI Bill which probably helped pay for half the buildings here and on many other college/university campuses in the country. Many people who would never have had college earned a college degree. FHA loans probably built half of Long Island – as people who had served in WWII got low-interest mortgages to buy new housing. Veterans should have such benefits. When we think about the enormous changes that those two items brought about in our society and in our Church, once again we need to think about what we have received and what we might owe to the next crop of GIs, or of immigrants.

The Challenge of Cooperation and Collaboration between Churches and Government
Let's look now at the faith-based initiative which if not dead, is on a respirator. John DiIulio resigned in July and the moral and driving force behind that idea seems to be gone from the Bush Whitehouse. Since 9/11, Bush has another mission, and there is strong opposition to the faith-based initiative in Congress. The related voucher issue does not seem to be dead, even though it is often linked to the faith-based initiative. As we heard this morning from both Sister Melanie Di Pietro and David Cole, there may be some chance of different or various assorted voucher programs but the constitutional test is inevitable. The conscience clause at the institutional level is also under attack here in New York and in California and severely threatens Catholic institutions such as hospitals. Whatever you happen to think about the Church's moral positions, it seems to me very important for Catholics and others to insist that the conscience clauses and conscience exceptions be maintained. Mr. Hamilton of New York State Catholic Conference observed quite rightly "It really is a question much more of the free practice of religion and the religious execution of the values of conscience than it is a question about whether or not people, Catholics included, support or oppose insurance policy benefits."

The other part of the Catholic identity issue was also raised today. That is the temptation of religious institutions to shape themselves in a way to allow them to qualify for federal, state, city dollars. Catholic identity is at stake because agencies need the next contract to continue service. This issue has of course embroiled child welfare institutions in New York for 20 years now and it's not going to go away. Many institutions want to choose their Catholic identity but if it puts them out of business it's not so clear they would or could resist that. This is a big issue for the Catholic community but also for the service community where the Church holds a very prominent place.

Church/State issues are another place we need to look for imaginative thinking. Perhaps there is a resource in comparative law. Most European countries provide state benefits to all. In Canada, the schools, the hospitals, the social services agencies are all funded by the government, irrespective of their religious affiliation. It seems to me that we are a little unbalanced on this question in this country and obviously it's going to take a very long time to change minds. I certainly do not want to see an established church here in the United States because I do think the separation of Church and state is a very good thing, especially for the Catholic Church, which has a very bad record when it is the established church. It is time, however, for us to think imaginatively about this. Perhaps the Catholic Law Schools could provide some thinking about how this is done in other countries and could be done here without violating Constitutional rules of separation.

The Challenge of Dreams Realized
Monsignor Linder has given us a great example of imagination and business acumen put at the service of the poor. His is an imagination to create and emulate so that all can live in a truly different world. For now, at the end of this inspiring day, all of us need to think more imaginatively about this question of being poor and of poverty.

PART II - WHEN WE WERE POOR...

You will understand that some of what I planned to say today has been shaped by the events of September 11^th, especially the destruction of the two towers of the WTC and the deaths of thousands of men and women, of children and young people. Every day that went by my ideas continued to be altered by what has followed--anthrax in the mail, threats of more terrorist attacks, the bombing of Afghanistan. Today we are not what we were at 8:40 am on Tuesday, September 11. But what we have become and what we should do and how we should think about these matters remains uncertain and even obscure. Even the editor of Commonweal is waiting for an epiphany.

The Challenge of the Present
Nonetheless, there is one striking feature--at least to me--that seems to mark us. We have been reminded--starkly and somberly and with grief and sorrow--that we are all in this together. In sharing the experience of an attack that killed so many and left so many husbands and wives, so many mothers and fathers, so many friends, and especially so many children with a sense of loss so great that one has to question if it will ever be repaired. So much was damaged, so much changed. In this shared experience, we are reminded that we live in one world, we share a common ground; and seeing so much horror, we even share, I would argue, a common good as paradoxical as that may sound.

As citizens of New York and as members of communities, of parishes, of neighborhoods that have lost so many people, we are unequivocally reminded how vulnerable we are and how dependent we are on one another. Perhaps people who lived through World War II had this sense of interdependence as well. On September 11 we were reminded how much we depend on the heroic gestures of firemen and policemen; the expert knowledge and compassion of doctors, nurses, priests and rabbis; the alertness of public health practitioners and the CDC; the leadership of elected officials, especially our mayor; and the simple goodness and generosity of our fellow citizens.

Unusual for New Yorkers, we remain sad and somber. Yet I sense we all take pride in and are deeply grateful for the sheer magnitude of human solidarity that shone forth in those firemen racing up the steps of the twin towers while everyone else was rushing down--firemen willing to lay down their lives for others.

There was the human solidarity that shone forth in people rushing to help, to donate blood, to cook, to counsel, to do anything, and to do nothing but stand by. There were the vigils, the candles, the little altars, the instinct to pray for survivors and then the need to pray for the dead.... And then there has been the steady stream of funerals and memorial masses in which people are joined in one of the oldest and most instinctual of human needs--the need to bury the dead.

According to a story in the New York Times, Carol O'Neill and her husband will have gone to 68 funerals and memorial services by the end of October; 68 men and women from her husband's company died in the WTC fire and collapse. The Fire Department bag pipers have had to divide themselves into six units so that they can play at each and every funeral and service for their 343 fallen comrades.

Today we see our city and we see ourselves in a way that is usually hidden from us in the ordinary course of the day, in the bustling about, the getting and spending, the lunge to grab a parking place, the elbowing on the subway, and the sprinting to work or to school--in other words, to me first and getting ahead. We have been stopped in our tracks by the tragedy and by the sorrow and generosity it has brought forth.
This sense of solidarity is powered by an unusual and intense combination of emotions--shock, grief, compassion, a persistent collective mourning--and now a level of anxiety borne of fear--fear of the unknown, of what is to come. New Yorkers are said to have lost their sense of cynicism and irony--we are suffering, someone has said, from "irony deficiency anemia." This is a frightening state to be in, but it is also--as strange as this may sound--it is also a gift.

It allows us to imagine a world sharply different than the one we Americans have come to habitually live in and really to love and embrace--a world of abundance, of autonomy, of material well-being, of freedom to say and to do what we want when we want, freedom from disease, from chronic ill-health, from early death. For many decades, but especially the last one, many of us have lived more fully and freely than any people in history. The growth of individualism has been a boon, presenting Americans with an unprecedented possibility of human flourishing, but it has also brought a dramatic diminution in the sense of community and a sharp decline in a sense of solidarity. We have been distanced, sometimes from our families, often from our neighbors and our fellow citizens, and almost certainly from our fellow humans around the world. We do believe in American exceptionalism--we are different--and we are proud and relieved to be exceptional, to be exempted from the woes of humankind, past and present.

But now, we have been stopped in our tracks and have been reminded of something else: maybe we are not exceptional. We are vulnerable. We share the human condition. Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone," a study of this decline in American civic life and citizenship, compares the spirit following September 11 to the spirit that followed Pearl Harbor "The America of six decades ago now seems achingly familiar," he writes in yesterday's New York Times (October 19, 2001). "The attack on Pearl Harbor, like the attacks of September 11, evoked feelings of pride and citizenship--as well as anxiety and helplessness--in every American."

But we can go back before 1941 to the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth when we also shared a common fate. Back then, as immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, England, Belgium, Holland to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Saint Louis, Milwaukee, we were the poor, the sick, the indigent elderly, the abandoned wife, and the orphaned child. In the Southwest, Mexicans were captured, so to speak, and made Americans by the Mexican-American War. They too were poor.

...A REFLECTION ON MEMORY AND SOLIDARITY

Once upon a time, we were a nation of poor people, and in that, we were like many people around the world today. My call to reflect on when we were poor is meant to evoke our very complicated relations and ideas as Americans to those we call the poor. And to briefly look at the complicated relation to our own sense of having been the poor--our mothers and fathers, our grandparents, our great-grandparents. Maybe there are descendents of the Daughters of the American Revolution here today--or of the founding generation, who possessed land, were educated, and held various forms of wealth--but most of us come from families where people arrived with little except their native intelligence, their energy and their great expectations.

The Challenge of Memory
We were all poor; we lived among the poor; our friends and relatives were poor. We were the poor. Like the events and people on September 11, we shared a common fate. We were in the same boat. But somehow that knowledge has become history, too often mere history.

I would like to suggest that the continuing experience of September 11, when we all suffered and trembled and wept, should make us susceptible to the exercise of remembering when we shared a common fate, when we were poor. Now that we have felt a renewed sense of human solidarity, can we imagine again that we share a common ground, must commit to the common good? That can mean many things.

Consider this quote "The poor belong to us....We will not let them be taken from us." It is a vehement, even passionate, statement and a possessive one as well. It was made by Bishop Aloysius Muench during the New Deal debates over social security (one of the more remarkable examples ever shown of social solidarity by the federal government). That statement was made about us and on our behalf. It is also the title of a distinguished study by Georgetown Professors Dorothy Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, an examination of Catholic Charities and its contributions to the care of the poor and the development of the American Welfare system.

They document the willingness and ability, indeed the passion, of Catholics to care for their own, particularly in the face of Protestant disdain and proselytizing. The book also looks at the public policy chutzpah of Catholic nuns, priests, and lay women as Brown and McKeown write to "leverage their position in ‘charity' to win a voice in local, state, and national policy-making and to gain access to the public purse." Brown and McKeown examine "the decades of labor on the part of religious communities of women, by diocesan welfare organizations, and by the investment in institutions and services that fueled a growing Catholic presence in the formation of local and state welfare policy." (These views echo one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons of two pilgrims standing on Plymouth Rock, one saying to the other, "Well, I've come for freedom of religion, but I hope to get into real estate.") From the altruistic to the utterly practical, that's America.

But there is not only an institutional history of when we were poor; there are personal memories as well, our stories and the stories of our families. The immigrant no matter how energetic and how well disposed to making his or her own way was displaced, disoriented, and poor; some people did not survive. But time passed and people worked and saved and educated their children. Religious beliefs and ethnic affinities gave people hope and provided them with a community. When everyone was poor, it was a widely shared condition rather than something that set people apart. Protestants might look down on immigrant Catholics, but immigrant Catholics did not look down upon themselves.

There are thousands of memoirs, novels, sociological and anthropological studies that capture these memories. I think of two: John Phillip Santos, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation, which tells his family story of migration from Mexico, and Eileen Simpson's, Orphans which tells, in part, the story of her growing up with her sister in an orphanage run by an order of Italian sisters after their own mother had died. Certainly poverty is the background to these stories, but it is not the story these authors tell. When everyone was poor, poverty was not something that set people apart, not something you might notice.

As we look back on this story and as we canvass the story of our own forebears, our families and perhaps of our own childhoods, we can see that poverty is relative as well as absolute, that it can be long-term as well as short-term. It is not necessarily dysfunctional. If everybody rented, not owning your own home was no big deal. If everyone lived from paycheck to paycheck, there may have been embarrassment but there was no disgrace in borrowing money from your mother. People expected periods of unemployment. Limited educations limited the kinds of jobs people could take. When there was no social security, retirement was a dire event, not something to look forward to. There was no AARP. And still, when everyone was poor, it was not something that set you apart. And then, of course, there were no SUVs.

As we consider the history, that is the retrieval by historians of the facts and figures, the story of institutions and policy making and as we bring forth our own memories and our family memories, what does that history teach us, what do those memories recall for us? And what do they have to do with today's discussion.

The Challenge of Solidarity
Let me suggest two possibilities. Though many of us, and our grandparents too, work(ed) very hard, very few of the poor, very few of us, pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps; we are not, the story of Horatio Alger notwithstanding, self-made men and women. We have been carried and lifted up by a family, a community--many of us by the Catholic community, above all by the educations we received in Catholic schools, Catholic high schools, Catholic colleges; we have been carried and lifted to our current well-ordered and prosperous state. That is why I would argue that our vigorous sense of self-reliance, of only looking out for ourselves is a grievous form of false consciousness.

Second, we have been supported and nourished in these efforts by a distinctive form of politics and economics. This is a democratic and a capitalist society--a society open to new enterprises, new ventures, and new ideas. The mythology that tell each of us that he or she has pulled him or herself up by his or her own bootstraps also perpetuates the notion that this is a free market society run by an invisible hand disposed to insure the common good of all. This is not true. We are all brought along by the work, the sacrifice, the conscious investment decisions of many communities--religious, civic, economic, corporate, and political. True, some of us are hindered by the very visible hand that favors the best off rather than the least well off. But historically and still actually, we are a culture that is community built and those communities have been and must be sustained by human solidarity.

The dictionary says solidarity is a union of interests, purposes, or sympathies among members of a group; a fellowship of responsibility and interests. It is a word and an experience that carried many Eastern Europeans, especially the Poles from subjugation and oppression. The Czech writer, now president of his country, Vaclav Havel captured one aspect of its meaning in a book titled The Power of the Powerless. It is an idea that John Paul II has used in urging us to think about our responsibility to the oppressed and subjugated everywhere in the world and to the poor in our own country. A fellowship of responsibility captures something of what happened on September 11 and it captures how we must think of the new immigrants and those who are now unemployed, those who are poor, and those who are lost souls.

Solidarity both builds human community and is sustained by human community. Without that, a sense of the common good is very difficult to maintain.

"Since September 11," writes Mr. Putnam, "we Americans have surprised ourselves in our solidarity. Roughly a quarter of all Americans, and more than a third of all New Yorkers, report giving blood in the aftermath of the attacks. Financial donations for the victims and their rescuers have reached almost $1 billion. Attendance at places of worship has increased." Still as Putnam himself asks, "Will this new mood last?"

Will it last? The cynics will say, "no." But I think we can say we have been stopped in our tracks. Thousands of our fellow citizens, perhaps some of you, have responded immediately and directly to the crisis. And this sense of solidarity has lasted...so far. People died to save others. People worked until they dropped. People have given their blood, their food, their money, their labor. This experience of solidarity has sustained our city and our hopes. This sense of solidarity must be rewoven into our ordinary lives. The unemployed, the chronically poor, the lost souls must all be embraced by this solidarity. Whether we are worried about the welfare reauthorization bill, or homelessness, orphans or half-orphans, about the sustainability of institutions that care for the marginalized and the outcast, for the sick and the dying, this crisis has shown us what we are capable of: of sacrifice and solidarity in the face of unimagined assault.

^{1 _}Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal magazine a national contemporary journal of research and opinion founded in 1924 by Catholic lay people. She is a persuasive advocate and penetrating observer of society. She is a member of the Common Ground initiative and co-director of a Commonweal project on "American Catholics in the Public Square" funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. She has published widely in many forums.

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