Hints from Eloise

Welfare-reform pioneer Eloise Anderson speaks bluntly--as always--about race, class, sex, and the realities of "the system."

Michael W. Lynch from the June 1997 issue

(Page 5 of 7)

Dead-end jobs. You know, this is a new philosophy. It's a job. If you want to go somewhere else, go somewhere else. We're supposed to be a free people. If that job doesn't take you where you want to go, move to another job. We don't do slavery anymore. So you don't have to stay on that job. If you go there and there's no movement in that organization, then you're free to go get another one.

Somewhere in the '60s, we started to believe that work was supposed to make us happy. I didn't grow up thinking work was supposed to make us happy. I tell my kids, "If you want to be happy, be happy at home." Your home life is supposed to make you happy, not work. If you're lucky, you'll find a job that brings together the vocational and avocational.

Reason: In California, you've said, nothing has changed in terms of the actual welfare program. Politicians are prone to hyperbole, and for all of the self-congratulation, one might have thought that Congress had toppled the entire New Deal. Has there been a real change?

Anderson: I think the states will get there, most of them, left to their own devices. Most of the states are trekking down the path of work. They are trekking down the path of short- term assistance. The relationship between the feds and states in domestic policy shifted just a little bit, and that little shift is going to open the door for a larger movement toward the federal government stepping away from domestic issues where it actually has no constitutional authority to be.

The other thing that I think happened is the beginning of a very different kind of discussion. This one is going to be harder. I'm hearing more and more people talk about how we are responsible for what happens to us individually. The government is not responsible for my happiness. I am responsible for my own. The government is not responsible for me when I do something stupid. I'm responsible for that. I'm hearing that more and more.

Reason: According to the author of a recent Mirabella magazine article that featured you, "Politicians have gotten the message that America no longer sees itself as a rich, generous country willing to help citizens through tough times. Instead, there's a meanness and anger in the land. People feel frustrated that their own lives are less than they have hoped for and don't want their tax dollars to support people perceived as freeloaders." Is there a meanness and anger in this land?

Anderson: The Mirabella writer believes that people who say, "I don't need to take care of that person," are mean-spirited. I think that 50 percent of Americans feel that way.

I have two neighbors in Wisconsin. One lives directly beside me, and the other one lives directly behind me. The family who lives beside me, he is a truck driver and she takes care of old people. She is an in-home support worker. She makes minimum wage and he makes a little bit above that, and he's not always working. She gets up at 5 o'clock in the morning and she catches the bus at 6 o'clock to get to work. And she takes care of her family. They've never been on aid.

The woman behind her can't even get her kids to school at 9 o'clock. She is still in bed until 9 o'clock in the morning. So her kids get themselves dressed and get off to school. We know this because sometimes her kids don't have socks on. But she's in bed. At 2 or 3 in the morning she's in her house partying. That's why she can't get up in the morning. But when she gets to the store, she brings out her food stamps and she eats better than anybody else. Her rent's paid. Her clothes are taken care of. She does nothing.

[The people next to me are] a poor working family. They pay for this woman to stay home. I'm sorry--that's not mean-spirited. That's saying, "I'm sick and tired of taking care of somebody else who's got nothing wrong with them and can hang out all night." That's not the way every AFDC mom is. But that's what they see.

And even if the mom didn't party--even if the mom got up in the morning and sent her kids to school--the question is, Why can't she work for her children, like this mom over here is working for her children? Why shouldn't she take care of her kids? That's the issue here. When women [did not] work by and large, we could do this. But now you've got all these moms going to work, and they think, "Wait a minute. Why am I busting my rear end to get up every day to go to work, and this woman is staying home?"

Reason: How do we get out of this situation?

Anderson: I think there are two things that have to happen. Parents have to learn to talk to their children about sex. That is not the schools' responsibility. It is the parents' responsibility. The other [problem] is that we abandon our adolescents. If they are as tall as we are and as big as we are, we think that they don't need us anymore. They are on their own. And what do we give them instead of emotional care? We give them toys. We give them material things. We need to put ourselves back into the lives of our children. One of the things we know about adolescent pregnancy is that adolescents get pregnant because they are looking for affection.

Reason: You compare a self-sufficient, working-class family who works hard to make ends meet to a welfare mother who lives off the system. Charles Murray, in many of his writings, creates similar scenarios to show how the welfare state undermines the efforts of the first family by making them suckers for working, when they could live at a similar material level and never leave the couch. How do you get out of this dilemma without cutting off the benefits, including the cash grants, food stamps, and housing subsidies?

Anderson: The best way to do it is one that we are not going to be able to stomach as a nation, which is to cut it off. But we can't do that. We don't know what the consequences of that will be. So the second best way to do that is what I think you've got people trying to do--wean people off. That is, cut it down and cut it down until it mostly goes away.

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