Poverty Demands more than Means-Tested Welfare
By James Whitford, published in the Joplin Globe on October 23, 2016.
Early one morning, I took a seat on the steps of our mission beside an elderly lady whose words would greatly impact me. This small-framed rapid chain-smoker sat hunched beside a ratty piece of rollaway luggage. Her face was marked with a line for every year of life and her tennis shoes looked like they’d traveled with her the whole way. She appeared a woman who’d been somewhere remarkable and no less determined there’s still somewhere yet to go.
It wasn’t too long into our casual conversation before Margaret shared her misfortune. She lost her husband earlier this year along with the home they’d lived in for nearly 20 years. She spoke of her son who had kept her for a while but that she was homeless now because he didn’t want her there anymore. Tears began to stream down her face. I scooted over to comfort her. The next words she said are etched in my memory. “My life has never been what I’ve wanted it to be.” She leaned in close and lamented, “How did this happen?”
She didn’t know how it happened, how the events of her life culminated to leave her homeless on the steps of a mission. Truth be told, no one knows. In fact, no one can figure it all out because it’s too complex. It’s not complicated. It’s complex.
In his book, The Conservative Heart, Arthur Brooks, author, researcher and leader of the American Enterprise Institute discusses the difference between complicated and complex.
Complicated is building a jet engine. But once the math, the physics and the engineering are figured out and a successful one is crafted, it’s a problem solved.
Complex is a football game in which a limitless number of possibilities can tilt the game in one direction or another. No matter the strength of prediction or the depth of analysis, no one can determine with certainty the outcome of a football game because it’s not a complicated problem. It’s a complex one.
This difference, says Brooks, is the fundamental reason why the War on Poverty failed. Its architects thought poverty in America was more like a jet engine than a football game. The trillion dollars per year the government continues to put toward welfare programs has built quite a jet engine, but fails miserably in helping us win on the field.
Poverty, like Margaret’s life, is complex. And what she needs is far beyond what any means tested welfare program can offer. Government can’t generate solutions to restore Margaret’s dignity, peace or humanity. No expert can engineer a program that will renew her spirit or bring joy to her soul. But true and compassionate charity can because at the root of real charity is God’s love for broken man and His heart to extend life to those who need it. That’s relationship.
It’s through relationship that one extends life to another who needs life. I’m convinced that as we invest more there, our true charity will begin to solve some of the complex problems of poverty and maybe, if God be with us, just in time before our nation passes a tipping point when we survey the American landscape and lament as Margaret did with that same grieving question, “How did this happen?”
