By the time I was going door to door for Clinton for the 1992 election, I was doing brief psychotherapy at an agency in southwest Detroit, with kids and families…. very poor kids and families. And I’d started to think that, maybe the awful state of Detroit since the 60s was because of the increased entitlements it soaked up, not in spite of it.
The clencher for me was when I was treating a 14 year old for school refusal. She was different than other kids with that problem; usually, there is some underlying depression and anxiety or a messy dynamic with the parent or parents. But not with her. She just plain thought school was stupid -- which it is; but she didn’t have any ideas of anything practical to replace it with.
Wondering if “poor self esteem” was causing her to not want to jump out of bed in the morning in order to sleep at her desk at school, I asked her, “But what will you be able to do as an adult? What kind of job will be you able to get?”
She looked like me as if I had just asked what 2 plus 2 was. “Job? What do I need with a job? I’ll just go on welfare, like my mom.” After questioning her a little about this, I realized that everyone in her extended family was on welfare, and everyone she knew in the generation before was on welfare. She never saw anyone getting up to an alarm clock in the morning, never saw anyone pay a bill, never was told mom or dad or auntie or whoever couldn’t take her to visit grandma because they had to work, never saw anyone around her sacrifice or delay gratification in anyway. And she had no ability to project what it might be like to be different, so she didn’t feel at all ashamed or guilty for her plan to just have other people take care of her for the rest of her life. Something clicked right then:
She looked like me as if I had just asked what 2 plus 2 was. “Job? What do I need with a job? I’ll just go on welfare, like my mom.” After questioning her a little about this, I realized that everyone in her extended family was on welfare, and everyone she knew in the generation before was on welfare. She never saw anyone getting up to an alarm clock in the morning, never saw anyone pay a bill, never was told mom or dad or auntie or whoever couldn’t take her to visit grandma because they had to work, never saw anyone around her sacrifice or delay gratification in anyway. And she had no ability to project what it might be like to be different, so she didn’t feel at all ashamed or guilty for her plan to just have other people take care of her for the rest of her life. Something clicked right then:
Throwing money at people was making them dependent.
I remembered a plaque my 6th grade teacher had had on her wall at the Catholic school I’d attended: “Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.” I felt like Helen Keller must have when she figured out the sign word for water meant something wet and cool that she used to call “wah”.
