Preaching a Partnership With the Poor

In Los Angeles, downtown is where the decisions are made. That’s where you’ll find most of the houses of finance, the offices of government and the courts of law.

If you want to get from there to Central Juvenile Hall, you go north--into Chinatown--then east along Macy Street, across the L.A. River, which isn’t a river at all any more. On the other side of the bridge, you go out Mission Street, along whose dusty margins the refuse of a city on the move is piled in block after block of automobile wrecking yards.

It is the grand concourse of the discarded, and it leads to Central Juvenile Hall, which sits sandwiched between the junk yards and the hulking beneficence of County-USC Medical Center.

Early on a midweek morning, the visitors’ parking lot already is full. Cars line the streets for blocks; each spot marked by a meter that takes only quarters. In front of the hall, Latino and African-American families mill in small groups. There are no Anglos in sight. There are no amenities. With noon still hours away, the sidewalks swim with heat. There is no shade in hot weather nor shelter in wet.

On the bus stop’s single bench, two women sit, one at each end. Carmen is from El Salvador; her sister in misfortune is a silent black woman with downcast eyes. The distance between them is an unbridgeable three feet.

Carmen and her husband came to the United States in 1987, she says. Her son followed last year. His new friends were “bad boys.” They stole; he was caught. Now, he is in Juvenile Hall and frightened. Carmen comes to see him whenever she can. But the buses often don’t run on time. When that happens, as it has today, she is late to work. Then the man in whose garment factory she sweeps up for $3 an hour is mad at her.

Her husband is already angry. It was she who was lonely for their son. They paid the man who brought him to El Norte $2,200. Now, her husband says, that money was wasted. He blames her. She has many troubles.

Perhaps “the senor is an abogado, “ a lawyer, and can help her son?

“No,” I say, “I’m afraid not.”

“Que lastima. “ What a pity.

Her sigh is a prayer too deep for words.

Only elected poverty is simple. The lives of those who are poor through circumstance are exceedingly complex. This seldom is understood, and the perplexity it engenders is an important source of this nation’s unresolved attitude toward those who live in want. When it comes to this “other America,” our national mind often seems afflicted with a kind of manic-depression characterized by abrupt swings between heedless activity and hopeless indifference.

Last weekend, in a commencement address at the University of Michigan President George Bush announced another of these swings. It is time, he said, for the Great Society to make way for the “Good Society.” It will not have, Bush said, “huge and ambitious programs.” In their place, will be the “service, selflessness and action” of thousands of volunteers acting on their own initiative. Grand words; I wonder what Carmen would make of them.

Inside Juvenile Hall, sitting under a laurel tree in the yard of the only sort of social welfare institution that now enjoys the majority’s unequivocal support--a jail--I spoke with two of the sort of selfless volunteers I assume Bush had in mind.

Sister Janet Harris is the hall’s Catholic chaplain. She is a nun of the Presentation Order. I know the place where her order was born in the soft green hills of Ireland’s Blackwater Valley. She knows the hard streets of East Los Angeles, where for many years, she worked with members of the Temple Street gang.

Father Gregory Boyle was raised in the manicured privilege of Los Angeles’ Windsor Square. Now he is a priest of the Jesuit Order and pastor of Dolores Mission, the poorest parish in the archdiocese. More than 90% of his parishioners, nearly all of whom are Spanish-speaking, live in the Aliso Village and Pico Gardens public housing projects.

It probably wouldn’t surprise Bush to discover that neither Sister Janet nor Father Boyle shares his belief that most of the Great Society’s programs were expensive and divisive failures. He might be stunned, however, to discover that they share his view that many of the programs were elitist in conception and hopelessly bureaucratic in execution.

The remedy they propose, though, is not abolition but a radical willingness to involve the poor as the interpreters of their own complex experience.

Father Boyle points to his community’s experience in undertaking initiatives which--though constrained by their precarious finances--already have proven results. There is a job-training program that pays the salaries of about 20 young people who have found positions in local businesses. There is an alternative school educating 93 junior and senior high school-age gang members.

“We have stuff that works,” he says. “We have a woman’s cooperative that started a low-cost day-care center for mothers on welfare. It’s a unique program, and the government didn’t start it. The people started it for themselves.

“What we do have a right to ask is that government reward solutions that come out of the community and prove themselves. There is a middle ground that doesn’t discount volunteerism or the efforts of the private sector, but doesn’t try to use those efforts to let government off the hook. It puts the burden on government to identify and encourage those efforts that come from below, from the people themselves.”

Middle-class welfare programs, like Social Security, in essence enjoy this kind of self-management through their clients’ participation in the political process. “In that sense,” Boyle points out, “the middle class is both the beneficiary of the program and a partner in its formulation and administration. The poor never enjoy this kind of partnership in the programs designed to help them.

“It’s not enough for government to call for volunteers unless it’s willing to match their efforts. The haves do have a responsibility to the have-nots. It involves more than simply answering a call to volunteer. It means accepting our legitimate responsibility to ensure the decency of people’s lives.”

“Or to put it another way,” says Sister Janet, “to help them achieve the decent lives they envision for themselves. It’s a question of providing support and not simply interference.”

“All you have to learn when you listen to the people,” says Father Boyle, “is everything.”