Are there no prisons? No workhouses?
Much has already been said of the New York Post's decision to run an op-ed
dismissing squalid and dangerous conditions at city homeless shelters. (The Times
ran a report on one where "mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers," which does not sound like a launching pad for lifting anyone out of poverty, not when your most pressing daily concerns are dodging vermin and predators.) The rather impressively Dickensian response from the Post is that the poors have it too good, and that the constant threat of someone raping your children should be thought of as, if anything, motivation to go out and improve yourself already:
Yes, the family's housing has problems, including mice and reports of sexual assaults and other crimes. But [...]
You have to be a little impressed at the genteel editorialists' ability to put a "
but" as caveat to reports of
sexual assaults and other crimes against homeless families. "
But" is the single word carved onto the wall over Ebenezer Scrooge's desk. If you can
but your way out of any horror, so long as it does not happen to you, you are well on your way to plucking out your own little soul with an ice cream scoop.
[But] the Times and Elliott, like much of the liberal establishment, seem to think it's the city's job to provide comfortable lives to outrageously irresponsible parents. In this case, that's a couple with a long history of drug problems and difficulty holding jobs. [...]
If the city is at fault here, it might well be for having been too generous -- providing so much that neither the father nor mother seems much inclined to provide for their kids.
I see the problem, I think: the explicit premise that a life without mice or sexual assault would qualify as a
comfortable one. That perhaps the mice and the sexual assaults are merely acting as proper impetus for the homeless and jobless to improve themselves, and if we as a society provided homeless shelters where young children did not have to be on the lookout for potential rapists than we would be intolerably softening the brats. Note the Post focus on whether or not the parents are persons of merit, with no thought as to whether the children ought to weather these things even if the parents are not. Note the dismissal of the children as worthwhile entities at all, so focused the scions of our better classes are on making sure the parents do not get one cent or one meal or one shower unless it is in morbid conditions—and even then, they grate at providing
that much.
So what exactly is there to say? This is the mindset of cruelty, and of selfishness, and it has no shortage of voices in any forum you can name. The notion that the poor should not be helped by the rich is tattooed onto the minds of a great many people who consider themselves the decent class. The notion that the poor should be explicitly punished for their plight, lest they get to comfortable with it, is commonplace. The notion that America is the land of opportunity, unless you are born to the wrong sort, has been with us as motto and as caveat since the earliest days.
I have little doubt that the people who wrote that a shelter with mice and sexual assault is too good a shelter for the shiftless poors went to church that very Sunday and sang the same hymns as every other week. That is how these things work. When you have a steady job (and what could be more secure than being a newspaper editorialist, I ask you, a job synonymous with the bright and glorious future if there ever was one) and steady pay (on the higher end of the scale, of course) you tend to think that you are naturally better than anyone who does not have these things, and of course smarter, and of course God loves you considerably more and that is why he did not give you over to parents who did drugs while not being a congressman or who gambled their money away while not being a cabinet member.
I suppose the belligerently cruel and self-centered are doing us a service, in a way. They give us someone to point at when we talk to our own children about life choices and responsibility: You see that person, there? Do not grow up like them. They had every opportunity to better themselves, but never did. That said, I am not sure they need such a fine shelter as a newspaper editorial page to call home, at least not one without a few rats and mold growing up the walls. I worry that giving them such nice things is only contributing to their dull-minded, slothful ways.