As I anxiously await the debate tonight, I am struck by an Facebook exchange on a friend’s Facebook page, which addressed one of the major issues that lies in the shadows, but is nonetheless very much present: poverty and public policy.

Anna Hsiao read Ayla Ryan’s wrenching autobiographical story, “What Being Poor Really Means,” and remarked:

I guess it’s easy to take money away from starving children when they aren’t yours. Right, Mr. Romney?

Eli Gashi, a mutual friend from Kosovo and a former student at The New School wondered:

How can people vote for Romney – I dont get it

Anna Hsiao responded:

It’s pure ideology… They’re voting for his money, because that’s somehow gonna make them rich, too.

Muma Honeychild, a friend of Anna’s from Poland, whom I don’t know, insisted:

but how, really?

Anna:

Like it requires rational cause-effect thinking! We are masters of voting against our own interest – Bush’s two terms, hello….

While, Aron Hsiao, Anna’s husband and a student of mine, offered a different theory:

People mistake the absence of misfortune and a hindsight of fortuity for moral and ethical superiority. It’s a monotheist and specifically Protestant tendency, to my eye. “You’re suffering? Well, I haven’t suffered. God and the universe have punished you and rewarded me. Clearly, you have done something wrong and I have done something right.” That’s the morality of Mitt, and the morality of half of America. They will only develop “empathy” once they, too, find themselves shocked and crying out about the injustice of what has just happened to them. “Why do you failures not take responsibility for your own suffering!?” will become “Why has God forsaken me?!” and only then will they–at length–understand (and only some of them). It will only take another Great Depression to cause America to once again to loathe the idea of a Great Depression. The consciousness colonized by monotheism in most of its present guises cannot learn from mistakes, because the universe is an ordered space not of causality and physics, but of governance by fiat carried out by a moralistic, judging God. The rocks fall only on the heads of the sinners; those skulls that remain intact are the saved. They do not think to don a helmet or to place a “Beware the falling rocks!” sign; no mere helmet or sign can forestall God’s judgment.

To which I responded:

I find this exchange really interesting. I wonder. Would all of you mind if I reproduced it on Deliberately Considered? The question, repeated. The reference to a materialist and then a cultural explanation. I would add my wonder: the materialist explanation is inadequate because Romney is proposing an irrational response to the economic crisis, or at least is pretending to. On the idea of monotheism being the explanation: I would suggest my specification. Monotheism yields belief in one’s own truth, yes. A certain kind of Protestantism may be related to a lack of empathy for the unfortunate, but there are many other kinds. A good sociologist of religion might help us with this. Where is Weber when you need him?

Anna Hsiao:

Mine was merely a frustrated rant in response to what you call Romney’s inadequate and irrational response. I’d love to see a larger discussion on the subject on DC!

I replied:

“The rant” opened up an interesting discussion. I will try to turn it into something for DC.

So here it is. Thinking about inequality and abject poverty, and the kinds of albeit inadequate assistance we now provide, how could anyone support Romney – Ryan, who propose radical cuts in government support for the poor? Is it possible to think about the poor, including the working poor, and understand their situation and propose an increase in their taxes and cutting food stamps? If you pay close attention, it is clear that they do, after all, have much more “skin in the game” than the super rich, who have no moral qualms about hiding their money in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Can charity do the trick for Ayla Ryan and her family and the millions of others who have suffered disproportionately during the Great Recession, but also the bubbled booms of the preceding years? And I wonder how does all the talk about the middle class relate to this?

I hope Jim Lehrer raises the issue of  poverty and real human suffering in American tonight, but I fear he won’t.

On a bright June 15th President Obama directed the Department of Homeland Security to use their prosecutorial discretion to discontinue the deportation of those young undocumented immigrants under the age of 30 who had arrived in the United States before they turned sixteen, had lived here for at least five years, had not been convicted of a crime, and had graduated from high school or are currently in school. The standing rhetorical trope was that these youngsters should not be punished for being brought to America “through no fault of their own.” While some complained that the president did not have the right to determine which laws should be enforced or that the policy turnabout was cynical, so close as it is to a hard-fought election, much of the response, including the reaction from many Republicans, was that the policy, if not the process, was right.

Again and again we heard the mantra that children should not be punished for acts that were not their fault. How could a three-year-old decide whether to live in Tampa or Tampico? How could a seventeen-year-old valedictorian decide to return “home” to Veracruz when her family lived in Santa Cruz? According to surveys, most supported the idea that it was fundamentally unfair to prosecute and persecute these children.

This rare bipartisan comity raised an underlying issue. Many things happen to children through no fault of their own. Do we as a society have the responsibility to respond to these generational fault lines? Most dramatic are the pernicious effects of poverty. Just as some children are brought across the border in violation of immigration laws, other children are born into home-grown poverty through no fault of their own. Or they are brought up in familial environments of violence, drugs, neglect, and abuse. Does society have any responsibility in ameliorating the damage?

Perhaps we claim that these are fundamentally different matters. In the case of undocumented children, we are merely deciding that, if they pass our moral hurdles, they be left alone. This seems like a sturdy libertarian solution on which liberals and conservatives can find common ground. No resources are being transferred, and money is saved by the non-enforcement of not-very-enforceable immigration laws.

If we take seriously the rhetoric of “no fault” in poverty or other abusive realms, we would be forced to do more than to turn our backs and shade our eyes. Children go hungry and are badly clothed through no fault of their own. But as a society, we let those inequalities remain, because it would mean sharing the wealth and shifting the burden.

My examples are ones that point to the failures of parents. Parents have responsibilities at which they often fail. But what about education? Some children receive an excellent education, and other children through no fault of their own attend deeply inadequate schools. They no more chose to live in depressed neighborhoods than other children chose to cross the border. But here we proclaim the value of neighborhood schools without recognizing educational justice. With health care the issue is similar. Children do not choose to receive inadequate care, while residing in medical deserts. Parents bare responsibility, but the government must insure access to quality care.

The reality is that there are many domains in which we must consider the “no fault” argument, but often it is those with fault who are protected. When Wall Street investment houses teetered and banks swayed, it was hard to claim that these too-big-to-fail investments needed to be rescued for errors that occurred through no fault of their own. It was precisely their fault, but their bonuses and options and suites were preserved. A case could be made that the failure of these institutions would have had sharp reverberations throughout the economy, harming those who were not at fault, but why did saving the financial service industry first and foremost involve protecting those who were loaded with fault and with personal resources to cushion their own fall.

These bailouts were showered while each school day children attended crumbling schools received inadequate health care, and lived in deep poverty for which they had no responsibility.

There is much to admire in the President’s call to protect immigrant children from deportation, and there is praise to be allocated to Republicans like Senator Marco Rubio who recognize the fundamental rightness of the policy. But, given the rhetoric of the policy justification, who is to speak for other children who suffer through no fault of their own, while elites at fault find that forgiveness is easy and free.

As Philippe Girard has lamented in his history of Haiti writing about the country can be depressing. “One must consult the thesaurus regularly to find synonyms for cruelty, poverty, and thug, while looking in vain for an opportunity to mention hope and success unaccompanied by lack of.”

It is a mess here in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince. Walking the streets of Port-au-Prince, one cannot ignore the squalor. The local market in the neighborhood where I am staying consists of mostly older women – marchandes – selling their produce and merchandise next to little piles of filth and omnipresent burning heaps of trash. Hens are running around, dogs are lying around. Pick up trucks honk their horns when passing through the small, unpaved streets, causing the sand and dust to sweep through the air. Sometimes, the women can only barely move their baskets with produce in time to avoid being hit by aggressively fast moving cars. Somewhere in a building that only has a few remaining standing walls, a religious service of some kind is going on. There is music, singing, clapping. Next to collapsed houses, one can spot impressive houses behind high fences that are rebuilt or seem untouched by natural disaster. The differences between rich and poor are stark. But everywhere, the air is hot, grimy, and dry.

Haiti’s recent history is a somber tale of man-made disasters and natural catastrophes: political ineptitude, economic collapse, racial strife,  hurricanes, tropical storms, and earthquakes. After the foreign interference of the past, in the form of colonialism and slavery, the modern day and well intended international aid-industry comes with its own list of drawbacks, encouraging a never ending dependency on foreign aid. Ills such as the plague of corruption and the enormous disparities between the large group of the poor and the small group of the rich, have been preventing Haitian society from evolving into a safe, transparent, and decent society.

Most intriguing for me is finding within the mess a certain level of organization. In a very different place and time, I remember a story of endurance, of the staying power by inhabitants of a small town. After a series of bombardments, men and women simply returned and lined up at a spot where a bus stop used to be. All that was left was a crater in a destroyed road, but the people figured that some vehicle would stop as had been the custom for years. They still needed transport from point A to point B. And indeed, every now and then a bus would appear seemingly out of nowhere, and stop to pick up commuters.

Now, in Port-au-Prince, I’m seeing how people have not deserted the space where once stood their house. Although a massive earthquake has destroyed the (often poor) construction of steel and cement, life has gone on in the same place that had been their home or their place of work. Home or work is now in a tent, or just under a tarpaulin sheet, without electricity or running water. But it surely beats living in one of the many camp villages that were put up after the January 2010 earthquake, where living conditions are considerably worse and chances of improvement are not encouraging. Of course, even  before the devastating earthquake, the lives of the majority of urban dwellers and, especially, of those out in the countryside, were lived in extreme poverty.

It is intriguing to see how the people here organize their lives against all odds, how they manage in a hopeless situation. It is interesting to observe the organization within the current state of disorder. Life has its own rhythm, not in the least slowed down by the dusty heat. Although the majority of people do not have jobs, or at least no steady ones, there are still tasks that need to be done during the course of the day, like cleaning, cooking, repairing, worshiping. People will come together, meet, talk and socialize. Kids will go to school, even though too many won’t. There is merchandise and food to be bought and sold. The day before my arrival a big soccer game attracted hundreds of people in the neighborhood who all surrounded one small television screen to pick up some glances of the game.

Given the sweeping differences between life in New York City and Port-au-Prince, my first impression is a realization that human beings are by far the most resilient creatures when it comes to making things work. The problem of course is that “making it work” is not good enough. People organize their lives, but in the absence of viable government and private Haitian institutions, and the lack of institutionalization of initiatives in general, life becomes dependent on chance, on luck. There is so much room for improvement on so many levels, but a solid structure to put the development in place seems eerily absent, as does an agreement among any possible interested parties on how to lift the country out of its current status.