When I was a teenager, I remember my grandfather would often
come for family dinner. On one occasion at the dinner table, my young
sister reported seeing a man that afternoon begging for small change outside a
store in the local mall. She said she had felt very sorry for him.
On her way back to the family car, she had dropped a quarter into his
collection box. She told us it felt good to help someone in need.
At dinner, Grandfather was the first person to react.
"Folks need to stop whining and begging, and get a job. It's all
about taking personal responsibility."
My dad chimed in, saying there is something to the
"personal responsibility" narrative, but any of us can
also make bad choices in our lives. He continued,
"Self-destructive behaviors ---- such as dropping out of school, hanging
out with the wrong type of kids, taking drugs, bearing children when one is not
ready, can eventually lead to poverty in adult life."
"So true!" my mother affirmed, "yet
researchers are also identifying the roots of these behaviors, and that they
are far more complicated than mere "human weakness".
My mother then pointed out the growing evidence that poverty
and mental health problems are linked in complex, reinforcing ways. My
mother referred to a Gallop Poll of a few years before which found that people
living in poverty were twice as likely to have been diagnosed previously with
depression, as other Americans.
It occurred to me, that if one is battling mental health
problems, or is a grown-up with traumas like domestic violence (or perhaps
witnessing a family member shot dead) aren't you more likely to have trouble in
school, to have trouble in relationships?
"Don't forget," offered my dad, "that
economic and social stress can rob us of some "cognitive-bandwidth."
Worrying about bills, food or other problems, leaves less capacity to think
ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, it is as if poverty imposes a
mental tax."
"Furthermore," said Dad, "when people have an
elevated level of stress, they are less willing to delay gratification ----
they become more impatient for immediate rewards, and thus are more prone to
"bad" choices. So, you can see, that a person's circumstances
can land them in a situation where it's really hard to make a good decision
because the person is so stressed out. And the decisions they get wrong
matter much more because there's less slack to play with."
It was time for dessert, but my mother had something else to
say first: "I wonder whether America's ideology of social and
economic mobility, the "Horatio Alger" notion that people can pull
themselves up by their bootstraps, may empower some poor people, but leave
others feeling like failures, brimming with self-doubt that makes bad choices
all the more likely. Certainly, self-doubt is seen widely among the
poor."
Later, as I thought about our dinner conversation, it
occurred to me that what caused the poverty problem for many of the
"street poor" (besides the person's circumstances) is an
element inside them, and changing that internal element is the
only way many of them will ever reduce their level of poverty. Perhaps my
grandfather had been correct at the start when he thought the solution was
simply about "personal responsibility." It's just that he had
been so very simplistic in his view. For example, an emphasis on
developing personal responsibility is part of any 12-Step program, which tries
to confront alcoholism, but these programs also have many other facets,
including weekly meetings and peer support.
But, for society to place the blame entirely on the
individual seems to me to me a cop-out. Our culture is cluttered with
excuses for bad behavior. It's usually said to be the perpetrator's own
fault. In some sense that may be true. But the doer's bad choices
are real, have consequences, and to some extent were shaped by factors outside the
doer's personality.
So, as long as we are talking about personal responsibility,
let's examine our own. Is our responsibility greater than merely putting
a few coins in the street beggar's outstretched hand? Do we have a
collective responsibility to provide more of a fair start in life, to all, so
that children are less propelled toward bad choices that may lead to
their poverty later on.
The evidence is overwhelming, it seems to me, that we too
often fail many kids before they fail is. Certain public and private
programs, however, could actually save public welfare money in the long-run.
Why aren't we more supportive of public and/or private
programs that would unblock the taking of personal
responsibility, before folks find themselves living in
poverty?
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These thoughts are brought to you by CPC's Adult
Spiritual Development Team, hoping to encourage in you some spiritual growth
this Summer.
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