With the Jewish community’s participation this week in Project Homeless Connect, offering homeless and low-income individuals in San Francisco a range of needed services, this is a good time to reflect on our Jewish values and our response to the nation’s poor.
The statistics are daunting. In San Francisco, an estimated 6,000 children and adults are homeless each night. Nationally, according to First Focus, a bipartisan advocacy organization, in the 2011-2012 school year more than 1 million homeless students were enrolled in preschools and K-12 schools — the highest number on record, and a 10 percent increase over the previous year. The number of homeless children in public schools has increased 72 percent since the beginning of the 2008 recession.
According to a Pew Research Center report in April, “During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”
The United States is one of the few developed nations that does not provide affordable child care, reasonably priced low-income housing or universal health care.
Many Americans might not be aware that a majority of citizens will experience poverty at some point in their lives. Job loss, reduced work hours, family split, major medical problems and foreclosure have pushed or will push half of all American households below the poverty line. A majority of the poor have a history of working hard, and they become unemployed due to economic or political circumstances. Nearly one in four American children lives in poverty.
Over the last 40 years, public resources providing safety nets have declined dramatically. Our economic and political systems increasingly operate on values that embody “survival of the fittest.” The wealthy and corporations have taken an ever-larger share of economic and political power. Unrestrained capitalism has replaced the value of “equal opportunity for all.”
The ruling principles in the economic and political environment appear to be:
• Citizens have responsibility only for themselves.
• Unbridled capitalism is good for the country.
• Poverty is the individual’s fault and is a result of failure to work hard enough, lack of motivation or poor decision making.
• Resources going to safety-net programs are bad for the economy and society.
• The rich deserve what they have earned.
• Individual wealth results from individual effort alone.
The values and principles on which our country was founded are being abandoned to those of power and greed. Left behind is the social contract embracing equality, equal opportunity and social responsibility.
When considering children — who clearly are not born with equal opportunity — abandoning our social contract seems especially repugnant and cruel. They receive lower-quality education, child care, nutrition and, until recently, medical care.
As the rich get richer, public programs are disparaged. Incredibly, 48 million recipients had their food stamp benefits reduced in November. An estimated $5 billion will be cut from the program in 2014.
Unfortunately, endless examples can be given for how money and political power are controlled by the wealthy.
Jewish participation in Project Homeless Connect is good. But are we addressing the causes of poverty? Should the Jewish community, which embraces the notion of social justice, do more to confront the affliction of poverty?
Gayle Donsky is a social justice activist and retired psychotherapist in Mill Valley. She is on the board of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council.