Monday, 5/5/97 Volunteering doesn’t change system problems
Bureaucrats slash welfare, pressure individuals to assist poor
"How much better it is to prevent crime than to punish it?" –
Gov. Pete Wilson, on his new task as a volunteer teen mentor. So
Governor Wilson told us from the pulpit of last week’s political
love-in at the presidents’ summit on America’s future. Wilson’s
rhetoric would be easier to swallow if it was not coming from the
same Pete who bills himself as tough on crime, who supported the
three-strikes-and-you’re-out law, and who wants to build more
prisons. Forget all that; what these poor kids really need to not
become criminals, the new Pete tells us, is more positive role
models. Like a campaign photo-op in a race for nothing, the rest of
the summit’s bipartisan, star-studded lineup offered similar
ahistorical, feel-good pabulum to a crowd of enthusiastic
conservatives and uneasy liberals. Colin Powell pumped up the
military metaphors (an "army of volunteers"); Bill told us how the
era of Big Government is over (again) and Big Citizenship is in;
and Nancy Reagan, echoing her vapid approach to drug abusers in the
80s, told us to "just say yes" to helping others. What the country
really needs, they all proclaimed, is just more good old-fashioned
American elbow grease. Who can argue? Volunteering is a great
experience, and, in certain contexts, it can accomplish a lot.
Mentor programs fill a definite need, and Gov. Wilson should be
commended for stepping up to provide a model. I’ve fed people at
homeless shelters, taught music lessons for free to inner-city
kids, gone door-to-door for the environment, and organized students
in work brigades for years; I even went to Central America for five
months to lay bricks on a coffee plantation. I’m not alone. The
level of volunteer activism is already incredibly high in this
country. In Los Angeles, more than a million people will give their
time to a favorite cause this year. But for what and who, and why?
Can we count stuffing envelopes for the church bazaar as part of
the strategy to put America back on track? Who among this army of
middle- and upper-class volunteers is going to drive into South
Central everyday to play a significant role in a teen’s life? To
feed every hungry mouth? To stay every hand lifted in violence or
despair? Even Wilson’s much-ballyhooed foray into volunteering
commits him to just one hour a week of mentoring a teen. The
illusion is that these individual actions will somehow change the
larger social and economic forces that caused the disparities in
the first place. The implication of this summit is that wealthy
people with spare time spending one hour a week with a
disadvantaged youth will somehow prevent crime, fight poverty and
reduce drug use. Presenting volunteers as the panacea for society’s
ills is simply unrealistic. The inner-city participants at the
summit were not so smug. Quran Fulton, a 16 year-old Philadelphia
resident who helped cover up graffiti with the Clintons and Gores,
pointed out that the wall they were covering with a fresh coat of
beige paint will be tagged by spray-paint wielding gangs again in
the next few weeks, because nothing of substance has changed for
the neighborhood. In fact, the situation is a fitting metaphor;
rather than reading the writing on the wall, President Clinton and
others are trying to cover it up. One point is clear. No amount of
volunteering will eradicate the poverty lying at the root of so
many of the problems brought up at the summit. More than 36 million
people in the United States live under the poverty level, and more
than one in five children, the highest rate in the industrialized
world. The percentages are even higher in California. Wilson’s
comments reflected the stated goals of the conference, which
emphasized the need to address the problems of poor children and
youth. As many of the summit’s attendees pointed out, however,
rather than addressing that crisis, recent legislation promises to
send these numbers through the roof. Under last summer’s welfare
reform package, Congress passed the responsibility for cutting
welfare rolls to states in the form of block grants. Programs such
as Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) will be
eliminated and food stamps programs slashed, while teen-age mothers
will be dropped from the rolls altogether. These actions are
particularly heinous given the impact they will likely have on –
you guessed it – poor children. In California, Wilson, the
child-loving mentor, wants even harsher timelines than those
recommended by the federal government for welfare recipients to
find jobs. This comes even as analysts predict there will not be
enough jobs for them to fill. What is remarkably mean-spirited
about these cuts is that they represent such a minuscule
expenditure for the government. Federal AFDC supplements amounted
to $22 million in 1995; in California, the per-person monthly check
was only $64, not even enough to cover food, let alone child care
if the parent or parents left to go work. The cruel irony is that
states are now looking at how to give that block grant money to big
corporations by privatizing welfare, under the conservative
ideology that the private sector can always do it better. Yes,
after telephones, utilities, universities, roads, public schools
and prisons, someone has finally come up with a way to privatize
poverty so a corporation can make money off of it. It puts Ralph
Nader’s term "corporate welfare" in a whole new light, when we pay
wealthy corporations to boot poor people off of public assistance.
Under the Wisconsin model, corporations are allowed to pocket
savings from reducing their caseload, setting up an immediate
conflict of interest between their clients and the profit motive.
In Texas, several Cold War corporate giants are competing to land
the multi-billion dollar contract, hoping to skim their profit off
of administrative streamlining that will lay off thousands of
current employees. Why aren’t we asking these incredibly rich
companies to volunteer their private-sector savviness to clean up
the government bureaucracy their CEO’s like so much to complain
about? Cheryl Davis, the director of welfare in Sacramento County,
recently asked at a seminar for corporations interested in getting
into the welfare scheme how they were going to find jobs for the
44,000 households on her case load. Where will those kicked off of
public assistance go? To what kind of jobs, if they get them at
all? And what happens to their kids? No one had an answer for her.
According to President Clinton, that is where we come in. The end
of welfare as we know it is supposed to mark the beginning of
volunteerism as we haven’t known it. If all these poor kids just
have the right role models, they will just pull themselves up by
the bootstraps into a life of productivity and model citizenship.
The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector calls it a "liberal myth"
that poverty is bad for kids. You know, it builds character. So
never mind having a safe place to go to school or to play, never
mind having enough to eat. Never mind a system that rewards greed
while stealing from the poor, never mind the lack of decent jobs
with decent wages. If more kids just had a fine upstanding role
model like Pete Wilson, our problems would be solved. "How much
better it is to prevent crime than to punish it?" Then again,
perhaps Pete has already begun to learn something from his new
teen-age friend. The question is, who is mentoring who? Ritter is a
graduate student in the department of ethnomusicology. Previous
Daily Bruin stories Joy comes to those who make life meaningful ,
January 8, 1995