COMMENTARY: Rising Tides, Leaky Boats

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Suzanne Holland teaches religious and social ethics at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash.) (UNDATED) If it’s true, as Chicago-school economics teaches, that a rising tide floats all boats, can someone please tell me why homelessness is on the increase in the most prosperous nation on Earth? How […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Suzanne Holland teaches religious and social ethics at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash.)

(UNDATED) If it’s true, as Chicago-school economics teaches, that a rising tide floats all boats, can someone please tell me why homelessness is on the increase in the most prosperous nation on Earth?


How is it that, according to a new Urban Institute study, children made up 38 percent of the nation’s homeless in 1996?

A rising tide floats some boats, maybe even most boats, but what happens to the 3.5 million Americans who don’t have a roof over their heads? How can it be that the number of people who were homeless at any moment increased from an all-time high of 600,000 in 1987 to 842,000 in 1996?

Well, sure, you might say, that was four years ago; things are better now. But better for whom? Surely not for the children of poverty sleeping on our unforgiving streets.

This week, my local TV news channel did a feature on hunger in Washington state. It seems this booming high-tech mecca, filled with what might be the world’s largest concentration of Gen-X cyber-millionaires, is also home to one of the largest concentrations of people going without food each day. And those who suffer most from a daily dose of raw hunger are children _ too many of them.

Is there anything to be proud of in this picture? Or is it that most of us can’t stand to feel the shame, so it’s easier to look the other way and applaud our bullish economy?

I’ve been giving some thought to this concept of shame, a word that’s studiously avoided by liberals as well as conservatives; it just doesn’t conjure up the kind of sentiment that moves voters to the polls on Election Day.

The Oxford American Dictionary tells us that shame is a”painful mental feeling aroused by a sense of having done something wrong or dishonorable,”along with the”ability to feel this.”And who wants to indulge this feeling, this prick of the conscience?


Shame is shunned because it implicates us, all of us. But isn’t a healthy dose of shame integral to a genuine change of heart? The great prophets of the world, from Amos to Martin Luther King Jr., knew you can’t get to justice without going by way of shame. When the gap between the rich and the poor gets wider every year in the land of plenty, we know that’s dishonorable; we know that as a society we’ve done something wrong.

It’s disgraceful to be prosperous in the face of the hungry children. And who among us does not feel the shame of that?

In a few weeks, the Christian world will begin its season of Lent, that period of reflection, repentance and self-sacrifice considered essential to readying the heart of the believer for the radical message of the Easter Resurrection.

Similarly, the Jewish world will celebrate Passover, commemorating the act of deliverance of God’s people from slavery to freedom. None of us, Christian or Jew, is permitted to forget the least among us. In fact, we are commanded to place the outcast first, for as the Scriptures tell us, “You, too, were strangers in an alien land.” So it’s vital to remember these statistics on homelessness and hunger are not numbers, but real human lives.

I wonder if we can’t summon the courage to sit with our shame about this, instead of congratulating ourselves on our bullish economy and rising prosperity. After all, isn’t a healthy dose of shame part of the recipe for responsibility, for turning our hearts around?

Millions among us, especially homeless mothers and their children, are drowning in this rising tide. And in the faces of such children, the”rising tide”theory seems little more than shameful folly.


DEA END HOLLAND

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