From Where I Sit

There has been a lot of down time at my place of work lately.  I have been trying to use the opportunity to brush up on reading some of the writings in my field.  I came across a report prepared for a 2011 Anti-Poverty Programs conference held in Berlin.  The author was Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution.  He seems to be a very knowledgable conservative in an important and often predominantly liberal conversation. "Fighting Poverty the American Way," was its title.  What a great title set in an intriguing frame.

Research galore to back up his opinions and very sound arguing; essentially the conclusion was that policies handicap American programs that try to do away with poverty and need to be revamped.  The forces identified in this report that keep poverty alive and well are low wages, family dissolution, mediocre education, and immigration of poorly educated workers.  You would think 2 of those would come out of a conservative's mouth, one from a liberal's, and one from both (everyone has an opinion on education in America, and usually it's that it could be better...) So I found the article to have a tone I could consider seriously.

I am not a world-class researcher.  I am not nearly as smart as the author and the others at his table. I do not have the background and the experience they do. My own actual position twists and turns so much that a real solution would be hard to come by.  The following are only musings deriving from observations made from where I sit.

Half of all children living in female-headed households live in poverty.  When a child lives in a household with only a mother, they are four times as likely to be poor. Those are facts. There was another statement made that I was not as comfortable backing since I didn't see the hard numbers: that children in female-headed families are more likely to be arrested, become pregnant as teens, have mental health problems, commit suicide, and become divorced when they grow up. 

All of the single mothers (well, I could argue all mothers in general, but that's a different tangent) I know personally live with elephant-size guilt.  Some fully acknowledge it, others try to stuff it under a lot of bravado and it rears its head only in the most vulnerable of moments.  I don't think these statistics do much to encourage these women.  I don't know that keeping the men in their lives would have helped their situation.  I don't know what to do with these statistics. 

The feminist angel -or devil - has a lot to say; men are absolved from a lot of the responsibility of child rearing, men have more earning power and better social standing, etc.  The Christian angel - or devil - says families are supposed to be two-parent headed. If I think through what Jesus would actually have to say I can't help but conjure up images of him writing in the sand in the midst of a mob with stones in their hands. 

We can say a lot, and take a conversation in several different directions.  But what to do - well, the United States of America hasn't figured that out either.  No country has.

I spend a fair amount of time intellectually hanging out on the macro level, planning programs and beyond. At the end of days when I have time to reflect, it is the time I spend hanging out on the individual level that the most gets done, for better or worse.  It's one thing to read numbers and another thing entirely to look into the eyes of someone those numbers represent. At some point we hope the planning and work on the ground inform one another and make headway.