All the people from New Orleans who had money enough to own a car or hire one deserve a pat on the back for being affluent enough to save themselves. Or so apparently goes the logic of Bill O'Reilly in his recent online column. All those poor people stranded on their rooftops should be icons to us, and our children, of what happens when you trust your government rather than working hard and making something of yourself. Those poor poor people are also apparently stupid, since they've allowed themselves to be victimized by "charlatan ideologues and dishonest politicians" who have made promises the government cannot keep - nor should.
In all fairness, I don't believe O'Reilly has a vendetta against the poor, nor does he desire that anyone remain poor - he just doesn't think his poverty ought to be your problem (or would he put it a different way?) In fact he says Jesus was wrong: we don't always have to have the poor with us "here in America" because we have "options all over the place." He sums up:
Here's the end zone on this: the government can force your parents to send you to school but can't force you to learn. If you do not educate yourself or develop a marketable skill, the chances are you will be poor and powerless. If you react to that situation by committing crimes or becoming addicted, you will sink further into the swamp of hopelessness and your life will be largely meaningless.
Let the kids see the poor in New Orleans and the suffering they endured. Then prod the children to connect the dots and wise up. Educate yourself, work hard, and be honest. Then when disaster occurs you will have a fighting chance to beat it.
If you don't do those things, the odds are that you will be desperately standing on a symbolic rooftop someday yourself. And trust me, help will not be quick in coming.
My problem is with the rhetoric of selfish individualism, which amounts to something like "we've got all these options, take care of yourself; haven't I paid enough taxes?" Setting aside the fairness of the tax code and the powers and proper domain of the government, it should be troubling that the kind of American character advocated by O'Reilly is one that looks on human suffering from a distance, objectifying persons into a moral message, saying in effect, "I'm glad I'm smart enough to be successful" - not unlike the Pharisee who thanked God he was neither poor nor a woman.
From O'Reilly's homepage you can link to the Red Cross or to a number of charities he supports. He is not, then, by any means ignorant of the place of charity within a liberal democracy. He would, presumably, simply argue that the government should not be one of those charities. Fair enough. However, contribution to charity would seem to in itself contradict an attitude that says look after yourself so you won't be one of those poor victims.
I don't pretend to a thorough grasp of economics (in fact I've heard most economists have to hedge all their predictions and explanations with considerations of human unpredictability), but I do know that whole systems of legitimate government power can still be blind to their own faults, that great numbers of people working less than full-time do so involuntarily, that in an evolving job market even educated people can be hard-pressed to stay afloat, and that a capitalist economy cannot be amoral simply because it is constituted by moral beings. "Private vice is public virtue," that Enlightenment mantra applauding greed and ambition, has long since sunk below the surface of public discourse and become the arsenic that laces our water, infecting our ability to think straight about the moral determinants of economics. Some would have us believe we can purify the stream - these are the idealists, who have lost the ability to recognize evil. Others would have us believe the poison benefits us - these are the pessimists, who have despaired of a moral order and retreat into the ego.
I'll not offend the plight of New Orleanders and other victims of Katrina by offering up a simplistic and condescendingly obvious fix-all solution to future disasters, or by blaming so-and-so and such-and-such (who are always the troublemakers). But I would suggest that we as human beings can do better than O'Reilly in interpretting recent events. None of us is immune to the effects of natural disasters, nor can we all be safe from the violence of others. As individuals and as a society we can work toward improving our chances of survival, but we cannot expect to create an absolutely safe, sterile world. Rather than pity and moralize over one another's suffering, we ought to react - as many, many people have - with compassion, charity, and care. Even the TV pastor who says to do no more than pray has said more than the one who shakes his head and says, "Oh, those poor poor people.
