"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored"
Aldous Huxley

One of the facts that will not cease to exist and that has been with us as long as mankind is the need for the able to help those who cannot help themselves. It has been said that a society can be judged on how compassionately it cares for its lowest element. By that measure, we as a nation have hardly earned a passing grade.

Thirty years ago, my father told me that during the bottomless depths of the depression he found the country to be at its most kind. Few had anything and if someone appeared at the kitchen window, offering to rake leaves or sweep the garage for a sandwich, they were seldom turned away. Sharing seems to love a common denominator and we have become increasingly less common, both socially and economically. Whether that is good or bad is for each of us to judge, but the fact can hardly be denied.

Since and largely because of that great depression, the government has seen fit to make itself more and more responsible for the welfare of the poor and the mentally ill, with generally disheartening results. We shove an enormous amount of money across that national kitchen window and fewer seem willing to sweep or rake anything. Individual charity has all but been forgotten in the institutionalizing of welfare and the growing opinion that those who want to work can find work to do and someone else will take care of the problem. The someone else of course is ourselves as taxpayers, that catch-all category that allows us to pay for anything or everything, regardless of whether we feel it to be useful or worthless.

Yet the growing frustration leads to support for draconian measures that would end welfare and, like a lynch-mob having hanged the rascal, in our quieter moments none of us would have been willing to tie the rope.

Welfare has become what it is for good and charitable reasons, ineptly applied and added endlessly to existing programs at the federal level. There has been amazingly little contact with the intended recipients, making decisions for the poor with little understanding of what they need. The bureaucratic machine that stands between the help and the helpless sucks a huge amount of money from the lines of transmission. Administration is unfair and nightmarishly expensive. Like the law, welfare has become so complicated as to be unavailable to the poor, at least on any equitable basis. Hence the celebrated welfare-cheats who make headlines and drive a further wedge between our charity and our frustration.

I believe that we need to stop tinkering at the federal level, establish a temporary base commitment and search for creative local solutions. As long as the someone else is doing it mentality persists, the bureaucratic fumbling will persist and the misunderstanding between givers and receivers widen.

Neighborhoods within cities and small towns need incentive to respond to their unique problems of poverty and joblessness. In some areas it's cyclical, in others endemic, in still others scarcely exists at all and yet we mostly try to cover these varying wounds with the same bandage. Certainly the burden of support is upon us all, but the most useful and economic solutions will come from the shortest possible pipeline. Where creative solutions are found, they should be widely shared, but seldom legislated into the law of the land.

The recent congressional trend to throw up their hands in despair and make states more responsible for their own welfare programs is the right move for the wrong reason. It was done to duck responsibility for a welfare program so out of control it threatened a budget congress hasn't guts enough to balance. It's typically evasive reasoning, but the benefits are already beginning to show themselves. States given less money and more control are following the example of cities that have recently faced shortfalls in revenue. Privatization of some services, using computers to better serve constituents with fewer workers, unsnarling the rules of engagement and asking those on the front line how can we better do this? have all had their beneficial effect.

As we ask the poor instead of the legislature what we can do more effectively, further progress will no doubt be made from widely variable programs, resulting in more help at less cost. The Constitution declares that all men are created equal, but they hardly stay that way. The same is true of the poor, they are not all equally poor and not likely to remain that way, with multiple reasons for their poverty, subject to multiple solutions. Yet we try to cover them with the same blanket, which is foolish, costly and irresponsible.

The understandable demand that welfare be tied to workfare, the frustrated cry that the poor get up off their knees and become rich will find its most humane and innovative solutions at local levels. Churches, businesses, schools and citizens have largely been left out of the equation, suffering instead the cover-all solutions of a federal bureaucracy. They can willingly and effectively be re-engaged in welfare problems, the solution to which energizes and improves the local community.

This is a direction rather than an instant solution and it will require patience where patience is wearing thin. But the state of affairs to which welfare finds itself hostage today has been bought and paid for over decades of well meaning mismanagement. We are not so much incapable of solutions as we are incapacitated by the snarl of federal mandates. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was begun at the wrong level. Our society is still capable of greatness as measured by our care of the less fortunate, indeed it is champing at the bit to house the homeless, care for the mentally ill and give a hand-up instead of a hand-out.

Wasted money and a growing class of have-nots have made us bitter, not without reason. We are the most giving nation on the face of the earth in times of calamity, but we're not suckers and hate to be sucker-punched. Charity is in all of our hearts if our federal government would stand aside, holding a net perhaps until we get it right, but confident of the knowledge that we are the best able to get it right.

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