Bridges Updates Blog

Bridges Update 9-23-11

Facts to face:

The latest Census report (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/) reveals that in 2010:

the percentage of all Americans living in poverty (15.1%) and the percentage of children living in poverty (22%) were the highest levels in 17 years;
the number of people living in poverty hit 46.2 million, the highest level on record since 1959;
the number of people living in “deep poverty” [incomes below half of the poverty line – below $9,155 for a family of 3, $11,157 for a family of 4] hit a record high of 20.5 million Americans (data goes back to 1975). The graph below comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Other studies show that 90 percent of all income gains in the last decade went to the top 10 percent of wage earners, and 40 percent of the increased wealth (assets) went to the top 1 percent. And the Census report shows that the median annual income for a male full-time, year-round worker in 2010 was virtually unchanged from its level in 1973, which means, as University of Michigan professor Sheldon Danziger states, “[they have] made no progress on average.

The US already has higher degrees of poverty and income inequality than most Western industrialized nations. It could have been worse. The Census figures also show that millions more Americans would have fallen into poverty or become uninsured without programs such as unemployment insurance, food stamps, the Earned income Tax Credit (EITC), and Medicaid. For example, unemployment benefits (including federal benefits scheduled to expire in December, 2011, and state benefits already trimmed by a number of states) kept 3.2 million people above the poverty line in 2010.

Most analysts anticipate that unemployment will remain high through 2012. Typically, after recessions, poverty decline slower than unemployment – in each of the last 3 recessions, the poverty rate didn’t begin to fall until at least a year after the unemployment rate began to drop. So we can anticipate that the poverty rate may climb even higher over the next year.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have too much; it is whether we provide enough to those who have too little. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Bridges Update 8-23-2011

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Lots of folks responded to my last Update about our friend who was padlocked and is out on the street once again. Most were quite sympathetic; some offered job possibilities or funds to keep his phone going. In describing his situation, I deliberately omitted one important piece of information: he is addicted to alcohol.

Does that change your response to our friend – better, HOW does that change your perception of our friend?

Pay attention to the mental model or image that you now have of him. Then, consider: what if his addiction were to crack cocaine or methamphetamine? How does that change things in your mind? What if the new information about our friend had to do with mental illness? How does that impact you?

Labels conjure up mental images that filter our perceptions and responses. They depersonalize and categorize, lumping together people who share a particular characteristic. They make it possible for us to deal with an abstraction rather than a human being. It’s the difference being referring to someone as an addict (noun) or as a person who is addicted (modifier). Do we define people by their behavior? Of course we do. It’s all to easy to stick a label on someone instead of wondering what’s behind the behavior.

Our friend knows he’s addicted. For a long time he didn’t want to admit it. One of the conditions of the rapid re-housing program was that he enter a treatment program. He was admitted into an outpatient program, which he successfully completed. Then he relapsed. We were invited to a meeting with our friend and staff from the re-housing program and persuaded him to enter a 28-day inpatient program. In our presence, he called the treatment program, but only got voicemail. The meeting ended with his social worker and him going to follow up on the phone call. Later, we learned that because his relapse happened after he’d finished their program, they would only offer him another outpatient program.

When I asked my friend’s permission to tell you of his addiction, he said, “of course you can tell them. And please tell them that there are a lot of us out here who are addicted to be sure, but much more than just our addiction.” I asked him if drinking had affected his work performance in the past, and he said that it had – before he went through the outpatient treatment program. He learned a lot of painful truths about himself in the program, and while knowing those things hadn’t prevented a relapse, they had helped him stop drinking again. Now he says he’s not drinking, even though he’s back in a situation where the temptation and triggers are very real and near.

Is he going to stay sober? I don’t know. I think he has every intention to do so. But addiction is a disease where a different part of the brain gets triggered and takes over. Recovery is far more complex than simply saying no. And our friend wants to do things on his own… We know he has to directly address his addiction if he wants to find and maintain stability in his life. We’ll stick with him until he does.

One reason why: we’re all addicts. Church of the Saviour pastor Gordon Cosby writes, Most of us today are living, to some degree, as addicted persons, striving anxiously after power and money and prestige and relevance, trapped in the turbulence of wanting more. These addictions are so subtle for most of us that we have the illusion of being free people when in actuality we are immersed in society’s expectations. We have given ourselves to God, but who decides what we do with our lives? Usually, we do. We are subtle control freaks…We are addicted to having more and more comfort, which society says we deserve. We are addicted to the things that money and power can buy….

We’re all in the same boat. So our friend and we have to help each other recover.

Bridges Update, 08-15-11

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My friend was padlocked out of his apartment last week. My wife and I have been friends with him for the past eight years. After seven years on the streets (during which time he earned a degree in machine design from CPCC), he’d been one of a very few single men who got into a federally funded rapid re-housing program which subsidized his rent for a year while he settled into life inside and searched for full-time work so that he could eventually support himself. All he could find was an extremely part-time job that was cut in the latest economic turmoil, leaving him with no way to pay the rent. Now he’s back out on the streets.

While he was in school, we made sure he had food and bus passes. Invited him into our home for meals and holidays. I recommended him for the rapid re-housing program. We helped him set up and furnish his apartment. Took him food shopping and worked with him to figure out how to make his food stamps stretch. Gave him job leads and wrote letters of recommendation to potential employers. Supported him as he successfully completed an outpatient treatment program. He’d stop by my office, and I’d listen to him and encourage him as the job search continued to come up dry.

Our friend is partly the victim of economics and diminished social capital – if he’d gotten his degree a year earlier, he would have had his pick of machine shop jobs. He is partly the victim of homelessness itself and public policy, which has left him with a police record of minor offenses such as trespassing or public urination (the only public restrooms in uptown Charlotte are at the Urban Ministry Center and the main library) that are hard to avoid when you’re homeless. And he is partly the victim of his own behavior, which led to his homelessness in the first place, and his personality, which shows itself in an obsessive-compulsive streak and an intense determination to do things on his own.

So now he must re-learn the rhythm of the streets. He told me about his first night outside – how he’d gone to a favorite spot in a park where there were long picnic benches to lie on. But people came into that area every so often, so he couldn’t get fully to sleep for any period of time. He had to learn where to find food, as the places have changed. He’s down to what he can carry in a backpack – we stored the rest of his clothing in our attic. He has two job leads he’s following; we’ll see. It would be ironic if he found employment the week after losing his housing…

He stayed for supper the night we brought his clothes to our house, and we talked about how we could support him now. We said that of course he could stay in our home on nights of bad weather, but our home is not easily accessible by bus, so in the past he hadn’t taken us up on our offer. I told him about changes in food availability in the uptown area. He promised to stay in touch; his phone is his lifeline, he said, but he’s often out of minutes. It was raining, and I invited him to stay the night at our house. But he asked that I drop him back near his now-padlocked apartment, because someone owed him money which he could use to buy minutes. He had an umbrella. And he didn’t think the rain would continue long.

The medieval mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207 – c. 1282/1294) writes,

What should you do?

Do good by doing compassion

to everyone you know needs it.

Expect adversity.

Bear adversity with love.

We wonder, are we being fully compassionate towards our friend? That will always be a question for us, I suspect, for we have far more than we need, and he has far less than he needs. And he is but one; every day there are new faces in line at the Center. Who will be compassionate toward them?

Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. How many steps are you away from someone who has lost their job and is in danger of losing their home…or has already lost it? What should you do? Do good by doing compassion to everyone you know needs it...

Bridges Update, 06-03-11

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In the Bridges Day One seminar, we describe the two post-World War II economic eras. The first, between 1946 and 1976, was a boom time with an economy based in industry; during that time, the income of the bottom 90% of all wage earners kept pace with the per capita national income. In these years, if you wanted to support your family and had a working body, you could find a job that would pay enough to do so.

The second, 1976 onwards, has seen the economic base shift information and technology, with the average income for the bottom 90% of wage earners only growing 10% (the average income of the top 1% grew more than 250% in the same time frame). Sectors like government, health care and leisure have been growing, generating jobs for college grads. Sectors like manufacturing, agriculture and energy have been getting more productive, but they have not been generating more jobs. Instead, companies are using machines or foreign workers. These days, you need more than a working body: you need know-how or skill to earn enough to be economically stable. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 35% of those without a high school diploma are out of the labor force, compared with less than 10% of those with a college degree.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics offers yet another way of assessing the structural changes in our economy. In the worst economic times of the 1950s and ’60s, about 9% of men in the prime of their working lives (25-54 years old) were not working. At the depth of the severe recession in the early 1980s, about 15% of prime-age men were not working. Today, more than 18% of such men aren’t working.

That’s a depressing statistic: nearly one out of every five men between 25 and 54 is not employed. Sure, some of them are retired, some are going to school, and some are taking care of their children. But most don’t fall into any of these sub-categories. They simply aren’t going to work.

According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. As David Brooks writes in the New York Times (5/9/11), “There are probably more idle men now than at any time since the Great Depression, and this time the problem is mostly structural, not cyclical…It can’t be addressed through the sort of short-term Keynesian stimulus some on the left are still fantasizing about. It can’t be solved by simply reducing the size of government, as some on the right imagine.”

“It will probably require a broad menu of policies attacking the problem all at once: expanding community colleges and online learning; changing the corporate tax code and labor market rules to stimulate investment; adopting German-style labor market practices like apprenticeship programs, wage subsidies and programs that extend benefits to the unemployed for six months as they start small businesses.”

“…this time the problem is mostly structural, not cyclical…” Note that the components on Brooks’ list deal primarily in the realm of political/economic structures, though a case could be made for including apprenticeship programs in human and social capital.

We have moved far beyond personal responsibility/choice as the sole reason why people become and stay poor.

Bridges Update, 04-21-11

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Every time Wanda and I lead a Bridges Day 2 training on building relationships, the people who come have been working hard at developing relationships with people in poverty. And they’re often puzzled, frustrated, perplexed, disappointed, even judgmental towards the folks with whom they’re working. Things just don’t go smoothly, they report. Folks in poverty don’t seem to get it, don’t respond to our good intentions. They lie. They make awful choices. They don’t respond with appropriate action – or gratitude. It’s really hard – to understand, to hang in with them, the people who come to the seminar say. Give us the answers, they demand.

We don’t, of course. Because there aren’t answers – quick fixes, simple strategies. Save two. First, seeking to understand where folks in survival are coming from – the hidden rules and the internal energies of survival. Second, the norms, assumptions, and values so deeply embedded in those of us who grew up middle class, that shape us in countless ways. Bridges Day 1 introduces people to the differences; Bridges Day 2 offers them the chance to wrestle with reality – realities, actually…their own, and the reality of the people they seek to serve. It’s hard work, ultimately spiritual in nature.

Jean Vanier is the founder of L'Arche, an international organization which creates communities where people with developmental disabilities and those who assist them share life together. A deeply spiritual man, he is a prolific writer of books such as Community and Growth, Jesus the Gift of Love, and (with Stanley Hauerwas) Living Gently in a Violent World. This Lent, I’ve been working my way through his Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John and came across this insightful passage, written as prose poetry:

A few years ago, I visited a large institution in Brazil.

It was about ten in the morning.

I was surprised to find a room with about forty children with

disabilities still in their beds

and not one of them was crying.

Children only cry out when they know and hope

that someone will answer;

they will not waste their energies

if they are certain that nobody will hear.

They will close up in despair; they have no hope.

People in slum areas, in prison cells or in institutions

can at certain moments cut themselves off from others;

they may even cut themselves off from their own anger

and hide behind thick walls of despair.

They know that nobody will come to their help.
They are convinced that they are of no interest to anyone

and that they are not loveable.

They become apathetic.

They shut off all the energies of life in them

and become like robots.

They may survive but they are not living.

If and when someone does approach them with love and respect,

it can take a long time to awaken new life and hope in them.

They have been disappointed so many times.

They are afraid of entering into any new relationship

and then being put aside once again. (106-107)

Yet another dimension of bridge-building across economic class differences. Perhaps it helps illuminate some of the dynamics of your own relationship with someone who is living in survival. Hanging in with people over a sustained period of time can be an essential ingredient for building trust. Wanda and I worked with an extended family, starting with the grandmother and then two of her daughters, for three years before the grandmother trusted us enough to tell us what was really going on in the family.

Perhaps Thomas Merton’s call to be faithful, not successful, is as true of these relationships as it is of all spiritual work.

Bridges Updates Blog

Bridges Update 9-23-11

Bridges Update 8-23-2011

Bridges Update, 08-15-11

Bridges Update, 06-03-11

Bridges Update, 04-21-11

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