Did anyone but me hear the National Public Radio (NPR) story on All Things Considered (www.npr.org/allthingsconsidered) where they interviewed a guy as he watched his neighbor’s home be foreclosed (“Responsible Consumers Decry Mortgage Bailout”, originally aired on Friday, December 7, 2007)? I should have know by Chris Arnold’s tone at the story’s beginning that this was going to send me careening off into another lane on the expressway:
“The White House plan to help struggling subprime borrowers has an unexpected backlash. It's coming from consumers who say reckless borrowers in trouble should not be rescued. But housing advocates believe subprime borrowers deserve to be helped, because so many were misled by deceptive or fraudulent lenders.”
But things went from bad to horrible when I heard the guy they interviewed. You could accurately summarize the neighbor’s comments with “It’s too bad so-and-so lost his house but hopefully so-and-so has learned his lesson now.” Excuse me? Is the loss of a family home just some mistake like knocking over a glass of milk or tripping on a crack in the sidewalk? Do we really want to reduce something this momentous to a traditional Mommy catchphrase like, “Watch what you’re doing!”? It wasn’t so bad what this neighbor said but the nasty tone in which it was said. You know the type. It’s the snotty, church/temple-lady tone you heard all too often when you were busted doing something wrong during services. This tone reeks of judgmental haughtiness coming (naturally!) from a position of security. Something easily said when you’re not the one in trouble. But when it is applied to the loss of a home-not only a place to store your stuff, but the local defining your kid’s school, your job, and the middle-class security we have all been brainwashed to attain in order to be designated an adult-sentimental, Hallmark Channel “you should have known better” fails to recognize the seriousness of this crisis. Yet again, Americans have followed their leadership from stupidity into cruelty.
I see the same thing when it comes to social service funding. I have ranted numerous times in this blog against the funding (can I call it what it really is – professional begging) process in this country when it comes to caring for the needy. If you are looking for the cause of my rage, it is attitudes such as those held by that neighbor mentioned in the NPR piece. To get past this mentality-that the needy are needy because they have done something for which they are now being punished (my brothers and sisters from the HIV fight remember this well!)-social service agencies have to concoct or produce sappy, half-contrived pieces of sentimentality that are posed as “real stories of how our services help real people” or contort their meager staff into pretzels to compile meaningless data that somehow justifies the agency’s existence. Then, some executive director, president, or CEO drags through a group of well-meaning but intellectually vapid group of do-gooders through the organization all the while singing some variation of “We Shall Overcome”. Meanwhile, some lowly, underpaid program director writes 100 page government grant applications where she/he is forced to regurgitate that “our agency is going to do EXACTLY what you, Master, want us to do” in a way that is just slightly more creative and spunky than last year. At the end of the day, the agency gets $2.50 to do a $10.50 job and when the agency asks for more, the giver-either the individual or the government-looks inquisitively while asking, “What makes you think ‘they’ need more than this?”
It is ridiculous that we Americans think that care is conditional and our response to other’s pain should be measured by some personal standard of deservedness that can change depending on whether or not the sob story of the moment makes us weepy or, and I see this too, whether or not we or a close family member has somehow been impacted. You would think that in the 21st Century we would have recalled an old saying my great-grandmother had, “by the grace of G-d go I” and realize that we are all a banana peel away from foreclosure of some kind.
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