The Awkward Pose

In the first three months of 2011 I know two people who died, three family members who were admitted to the ICU, and I lost count of the reported aches and flu’s flying around my orb. Blame it on the harsh winter, nuclear fallout from Japan, or just plain getting older, but everywhere I go the first point of conversation seems to be an organ recital of bodily complaints.  I am firmly planted in that demographic where personal health is a primary concern – eclipsing the career development and family issues that dominated earlier.  As far as I can tell, I’ll stay with this group until I die.

So far I am fortunate and don’t have much to add to the conversation, unless I perceive a person receptive to the virtues of yoga, in which case I can muster the missionary zeal of a Mormon.  Still it is probably no coincidence that amid all of this death and hospital visitation I read three health related books.  Each describes an aspect of how our society enhances / obstructs health. Together, they form a comprehensive view for thinking about our individual well being.

T.R. Reid’s, The Healing of America: A Global Search for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care is the most cogent presentation of the dysfunctional American healthcare ‘system’ I have read.  Mr. Reid, a journalist who has lived all over the world, takes his bum shoulder to a half dozen or more countries around the world, enters into their healthcare system and in the process of pursuing his personal diagnosis, observes and evaluates each system as a whole. He is offered surgery in the United States, physical therapy in France, herbal remedies in India and advice to persevere in Britain. In each case the therapeutic approach to his sore shoulder reflects the priorities of the system.

Of course, the shoulder is just a pretext for a more thorough analysis.  Mr. Reid succeeds where all others fail because he takes a broad view with few judgments (except the initial judgment that the US System – which gobbles up 14% GDP and leaves many untreated – is unsatisfactory).  He divides all health care systems into four categories:

Government funded universal care (Britain, United States Veteran’s Administration)

Single Payer System (Canada, United States Medicare / Medicaid)

Private Insurance (Germany, United States private insurance)

Pay as you go (India, United States uninsured)

Every other industrial country has determined that healthcare is a right and extends it to all citizens; but since the United States is unable to make that definitive statement, our system is a hodgepodge that includes all four delivery methods witnessed elsewhere.  It is this hodgepodge nature that results in the inefficiencies that make our system twice as expensive yet significantly less effective than others. Our private insurance companies spend 20% on administrative costs because it is in their interest to deny payment in the hope that a ‘heavy user’ will exit the system, winding up a pay as you go patient, who then will not be able to afford to pay and eventually join the Medicaid pool (while, along the way, loose his assets and likely declare bankruptcy).  In Germany, which has a 100% private insurance model, the insurers have no incentive to get someone off their books, if one company has an inordinate number of ‘heavy users’ premiums are redistributed among companies to level the load.  If the US can do that among major league baseball teams, why can’t we do it to provide equitable healthcare?

The book is full of equally illuminating perspectives about how a unified system – any system – is better than we what have now as a means to provide equal access, improved public health, and more rational delivery.

Ultimately Mr. Reid’s book is a policy piece, it inspires government action but, sore shoulder notwithstanding, it does not address how we can improve individual health.  Since we are what we eat, clues to that question are bountiful in Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  Over the course of 500 + pages Mr. Pollen traces the origins of, prepares, and then eats four meals. 

The first is a fast food meal (McDonald’s, eaten in the car, of course).  This triggers an analysis of American industrial food production, which ultimately means corn, corn and more corn. The hazards of feedlot processing make a person never want to eat another McNugget, but the depth to which these amalgamated process have entered virtually every item on our supermarket shelves leaves one wondering what, if anything is safe to eat.

Next is the ‘health food’ meal purchased from Whole Foods and prepared at home.  Although the food is less chemically infused than the McDonald’s meal, the compromises that a national distribution network must make in order to serve the whims of people who want every type of food all year round make the roasted chicken Mr. Pollen prepares less sustainable than the bucolic images that hover above the beautifully groomed produce at Whole Foods lead us to believe.

The truly organic meal comes from a farm in Virginia where a fascinating dance of sun and grass, vegetables and animals, all in small doses, are guided through the landscape to create a sustainable ring of food production.   This is the most interesting and hopeful, portion of the book; the best endorsement for Community Supported Agriculture I have read.  Mr. Pollen does not postulate how to scale this up to feed a nation of 300 million, mostly urban, citizens, but having convinced me that the existing system is unhealthy and unsustainable to us and the animals we put in our service, I appreciate the glimmer this segment offers.

The last meal, in which Mr. Pollen goes hunter/gatherer and actually kills a wild pig and gathers his side dishes, provides more fantasy than useful analysis.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an important read, though it suffers from being as overstuffed as the nation of eaters it addresses.  Mr. Pollen could shed 150 pages without losing an ounce of content.

Anticancer: A New Way of Life, by David Servan-Schreiber is the keystone book of the trilogy, fusing connections between our healthcare systems, our food, our behavior, and our individual health.  Like T. R. Reid, Mr. Servan-Schreiber balances the personal with the systemic. A neuropsychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh who suffered brain cancer, the author understands each side of the healthcare world.  His description of how colleagues treated him when he moved from being ‘Dr. Servan-Schreiber’ to ‘Cancer patient’ is reason enough to read the book, but there are many others.

First is the compelling case that cancer is tied to our environment and individual behaviors much more intimately than we, or the media, would like to believe.  Genetic predisposition? Only a 15% risk factor in developing cancer.  Smoking? Obesity? Lack of exercise? Stress?  All greater risk factors.

Then he outlines in clear tables, the good and the bad.  Best foods to counter cancer, worst foods to invite it in, best/worst cleaning supplies, toilet accessories, exercise regimens; you get the idea.

So, has all of this information changed my life?  Not really.  I have decided that money spent on better food is money well spent, so I buy more organics, even if they fall short of nirvana; my beef eating has dipped to less than three times a week; and I’ve stopped microwaving leftovers in plastic containers.  But I still love my soda and rarely pass up a cookie; no guilt there.

I don’t have any of the awful cancer indicators, like smoking or obesity, so if I develop cancer or another chronic disease, it will likely be due to larger environment causes or plain bad luck.  Trying to avoid that would require radical change and probably be futile; I have no intention of moving away from the city or refusing to ride in airplanes or tossing everything in my cupboard with ‘high fructose corn syrup’ on the ingredient label into the trash.

Mostly, I am absorbing this information, letting it linger, allowing my behavior to welcome the aspects that most resonate with me.  I enjoy reading these books for their own sake, even when what they teach me is that our world has evolved in ways bizarre.  If in the process I find tidbits that enhance my personal health, that’s just icing on the cake, which, as everyone knows, I am not inclined to pass up.

The main branch of the Cambridge Public Library has been open over a year.  The building has been heralded as a success both as a work of architecture (Boston Globe 11/10/2009) and for stimulating library use (over 4,000 items were checked out on opening day).  As a longtime Cambridge resident, member of the Cambridge Friends of the Library, and ardent library user, I looked forward to our new library and I acknowledge that everything said about the new library is true.  However, after using the library for some time, I find the praise superficial.  The new building is a stunning piece of architecture (William Rawn Associates) with its super-cool double glass curtain wall and other energy conscientious features, and it is set in clear relation to the superb restoration of the original building (Ann Beha Architects).  Yet, no commentary addresses what I see as the obvious question.  What should a contemporary library look like?  Should be a big, bright glass box, and if so, what does that say about our libraries and ourselves?

Three centuries of structures have graced the site of the Cambridge Public Library.

In 1889 the city opened a new library on a tract of land donated by philanthropist Frederick H. Rindge, a Romanesque beauty designed by Van Brunt and Howe that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  It is an elegant pile of rusticated granite, serious in both intent and execution, a public building in the truest nineteenth century sense in that it manages to both humble the individual by its imposing authority, yet ennoble that same individual through democratic access to the knowledge within.  The building has beautifully proportioned rooms with vaulted ceilings and carved woodwork.  The six story stack area with frosted glass floors literally surrounds the reader in a three dimensional world of books.  It also contains inscriptions and entablatures intended to instill moral backbone into Victorian man, including a full listing of the Ten Commandments.  We don’t condone such moralizing in our public buildings today, so the restoration sports a creative scrim that conceals the commandments from everyday view, since a condition of the philanthropist’s bequest that they remain in place in perpetuity.

In 1967 the city opened an addition to the original library, a squat box shunted to the back of the site that included a children’s room on a lower level and miscellaneous space above.  This has been demolished as part of the new library scheme, and all traces of twentieth century architecture have been erased through careful reconstruction of the 1889 exterior.

Now we have the 2009 addition with its gigantic glass wall and clear open spaces.  The new main entrance, not quite on axis with Trowbridge Street, leads to a trio of crisp, taut transaction desks where library staff process returns, provide reference, and check-out books.  The ceiling is uniformly high – sixteen feet at least, and the light is brilliant. An axis of bold red walls and ceiling define a spine that ties the original building to the new and incorporates the giant stairs that connect the principal levels. The addition is full of activity, very busy, very noisy, and unlike any library I’ve ever been in; which I believe, is the whole point.

The library complex is a conscious duality of composition.  Having disposed of the mid-twentieth century box that no one loved, the 1889 original, now referred to as the stone building, represents hierarchy and stability.  It is a collection of rooms, some cozy, some grand, with straightforward circulation links.  Even in areas where the functions have changed, like the former six story stacks that have morphed into the tall and narrow teen area, the stone building remains a collection of discrete spaces with identifiable character.

On the other hand, the 2009 building, referred to as the glass building, is open and democratic.  The entire first floor is one large space, unencumbered by spatial definition, and a wide array of activities, from conversations with the reference librarian, to using a computer, to eating a snack, to browsing new fiction, to checking out a book, to tucking into a chair with a magazine all take place in the same large space.

The internal organization of the glass building is, according to Susan Flannery, Director of the Library in comments at an open house for library supporters, derived from the book store experience.  The library is not organized by traditional Dewey Decimal classifications, but rather affinity groups that the library staff considers relevant, so a section called Hearth and Home that includes home repair as well as crafts, and foreign language tapes and travel books are collocated.  Theses affinity groups will morph over time to reflect changes in taste, just as they do at Borders.  As I listened to Susan explain this organization, what struck me was how arbitrary it appears.  True, the Dewey Decimal system of classification is not perfect, but it is universal, it is an actual system with consistency and logic.  However flawed, I prefer my library organized in a manner that I can learn and understand and depend upon, rather than by the staff’s perception of latest trends.

As I considered the possibility of collections in constant flux, I realized what I find wrong about the glass building.  An experience that is transparent and universal can not be unique, compelling or memorable.  By creating a space in which anything can occur, the glass building denies the opportunity for specific experience.  The ideal space to meet with a reference librarian is not standing at an open desk along major circulation spine.  The ideal space to do computer work is not in the center of a 6,000 square foot room.  The ideal space to nestle into a magazine is not along a glass wall exposed to every passerby.  By accommodating any kind of activity, the glass building does not accommodate any particular activity very well.

The argument that contemporary buildings take cues from the retail environment is prevalent in our society where consumer preferences are paramount.  As an architect who designs hospitals for a living, and one of the designers of an early medical ’mall’, at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical center back in 1991,  I know that successful retail formulae permeate design solutions for virtually every building type.  The parts and pieces of retail design are seductive – simple frameworks that can accommodate quick turnover with generous fronts for advertising and seductive but complicated passageways to draw consumers in and hold them as long as possible.  But why must this building type, designed to enhance consumerism, be the model for so many kinds of buildings?  Are we so impoverished as a society that we can no longer create buildings that aspire to anything beyond layouts that induce people to spend money?  There are good reasons why we don’t inscribe the Ten Commandments on our new library, but why is there nothing we can inscribe in its place?  Do we believe in anything with enough conviction to carve it into our buildings?  A hundred years from now, when it is time to make a wholesale transformation of the glass building, will we value it as much as stone building?  We will bother to find creative ways to repurpose the glass volume, or will the big box be deemed as irrelevant as the 1967 addition; will we demolish it?

The argument for the glass building is flexibility.  I disagree with the contention that open spaces make the best flexibility.  Few spaces were so strictly defined as old-fashioned vertical library stacks, and yet they were transformed into a teen area of great character; more interesting than any of the spaces offered in the glass building.  Similarly, at the open house for library supporters the library set out an array of pies from local bakeries.  Instead of serving dessert in the glass building, or even the transparent connector between the buildings that is lined with café tables, the pies were offered in the stone building’s reading room, a clubby space of excellent proportion that is conducive to the conviviality of sharing a sweet in a way the glass building will never be.

Technology abounds in the glass building; the double glass wall, the automatic shade devices, the daylight sensing fixtures.  Yet, for all its technically sophisticated components, it is old school in its operations.  If the point of technology is to enhance human experience, by freeing us from drudgery to enable deeper, more meaningful activities, why was so little thought given to the process of how people use the library?  These days when I go to the airport I am greeted by a phalanx of ticketing kiosks in front of staffed ticket counters.  The arrangement allows me to use technology if I choose, but also facilitates better interactions when I need to talk to actual people, who are not harried by mundane transactions.  The same concept could easily be applied to a library, where most of us simply need to check in or check out.  Unfortunately the glass building doesn’t offer anything new choices for customer interface.  Three immense desks – check-in, check-out, reference – line the primary circulation route in the middle of the vast space.  I don’t know how the staff tolerates the noise.  True, there are some computer check-out stations out of sight around a corner, apart from staff should something go wrong, and every time I have tried to use them, something has gone wrong.  The result is that the main desk areas are packed with lines of customers loaded with books and CD’s, waiting for a librarian to check them out by the same process we’ve known for generations.  A facility as sophisticated as the glass building deserves a comparable rethinking of its operations as it does of its exterior skin.

When I consider signature library spaces, two contrasting prototypes come to mind, the reading room and the study carrel. The best reading rooms, whether the Bates Room at the Boston Public Library, the main reading room at the New York Public Library, or the St. Genevieve Library in Paris, have impressive volume, walls lined with books below large scale windows that flood the space with daylight, and rows of sturdy tables with individual task lamps.  The rooms are enormous, yet they are clearly rooms.  They have shape and form; they define their human-scaled work spaces; they allow natural light from beyond, yet, since there are no direct views to the surrounding streets, patrons achieve shelter from the outside world.

The study carrel, on the other hand, is an intimate space for one, maybe two people, often lining an exterior wall with a peep window. Kahn’s library at Phillips Exeter is the most famous modern example.  In rare libraries, these spaces coexist, as in the reading room and adjacent alcoves of Trinity College Library, Dublin.  Where are these spaces in the new Cambridge Public Library? The main room in the stone building is a wonderful reading room on a community scale, and the booths in the teen area approximate individual carrels, but in the glass building there is nothing that approaches either.  With the exterior wall given over to technology; the zone that might have provided intimate nooks is instead crisp, clean and transparent.  And with so many things going on in one open space, there is no definition of reading ‘room’.  Distractions abound.

It is fair to say that the City of Cambridge has gotten the library it wished for.  It is an energetic, if overly literal response to the challenge of creating an accessible, open library.  But after a fifteen year planning process and $90 million, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps we should have reached for more.  Reached beyond innovative building technology to uncover innovative operations, reached beyond the simple notion that open equals flexible to create actual, confident spaces.  Rooms crafted with the conviction that our forefathers exemplified in the stone building.  The conviction that well-defined spaces enhance specific experience and, when necessary, can be repurposed with more character than amorphous, ‘flexible’ space.

We should have reached beyond a retail model for our library. A library is not a store; it is the antithesis of a store.  A library does not sell things for people to use and ultimately throw away.  A library lends things to people for free, with the implicit understanding that the items will be used as required and then returned for others to use as well. A library is the ultimate model of sustainability, an endless stream of knowledge recycled again and again through our community.  Could we have reached beyond the retail model to make our library more than open and accessible?  Is it too much to ask that our library also be aspirational?

There is a remarkable two page photograph in the NY Times Magazine (2/13/2011); the stone interior of a dim church, seven worshippers bundled in their winter coats dispersed among the pews, a sharp shaft of light descending on a balding, middle aged man, his puff-parka arms clenched tight to his body, his face twisted in deep frown.  The subsequent story is about the sex abuse scandal of priests in Ireland, that most Catholic of countries, and the havoc they are wrecking.

My mind flashed back a decade, to the days when the focus of the clergy abuse scandals was here in Boston, when every morning the Globe’s front page announced new revelations, new abuses, deeper cover-ups. 

I do not believe I was ever abused.  However, one morning, reading a lurid story that I could barely stomach yet not put down, the scent of the sacristy immediately after Mass filled my soul.  Forty years evaporated and I was a child of seven in a black cassock with a lace tunic, standing before the priest offering him the glass cruets with whatever water and wine remained.  The rituals of the sacristy were just as prescribed as Mass itself.  The priest accepted my offering.  He drank whatever was left in each vessel, lifted a linen cloth and wiped each clean, dried them, placed them on a shelf, the same spot every time.  I stood quiet.  I watched every move.  Housekeeping done, the priest turned to me.  “May I have your blessing, Father?”  I kneeled.  He placed his hands on my head.  “Bless you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” The pressure on my skull was deep, I buckled at the waist.  The room was silent, the congregation departed, the air thick with wafting streams of snuffed candles. The priest’s hands were warm and firm.  I was secure, the chosen, the fortunate altar boy offered a glimpse of the sacred. God was touching me.  And if the priest had any inclination to touch me further, I would have offered no resistance.

After that flash of memory, I understood the scandal in a deeper way. The crimes of the perpetrators are horrific.  But given the power they held over us, the power we yielded to them, the scars from the crimes are etched deeper then even the physical penetration.

So now, finally, it is Ireland’s turn to dredge up the crimes of men against children in sacristies and rectories. I say finally because Ireland is almost the end of the line.  There is no place more Catholic than Ireland, except perhaps the Vatican itself.  And I feel quite sure that even there, the day of reckoning will come.

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I wrote a WBUR commentary about a seminarian I met during the height of the clergy abuse scandal in Boston.  I have posted it as a companion piece.

This piece was presented as an editorial commentary on WBUR in March, 2002.  I recalled it when I read a recent NY Times article about he unfolding sex-abuse scandal in Ireland, which I discuss in a companion piece.

There is a crisis of vocations in the Catholic Church.  As Cardinal Law decimates the ranks of local priests in light of sexual abuse revelations, who will replace them?  I recently met a seminarian, and I was troubled by what I found.

I met ‘Steve’ at a gay night spot.  We exchanged small talk and telephone numbers.  Steve told me he was a philosophy student and an artist, looking for that special someone.  Several phone conversations and a dinner date later, Steve’s story was quite different. He is not a graduate student at BC; he is studying for the priesthood at St. John’s Seminary.

Steve is in his thirties.  He talked about struggling through college and holding a series of hourly wage jobs.  He described his dream of being an artist on the coast of Maine.  He wished he had a regular boyfriend.  But his jobs had been dead ends, he never completed a piece of art, and he considered himself ‘unlucky’ in relationships.  Steve was at loose ends when he struck upon the idea of becoming a priest.  His local diocese pays his expenses now, and though he has little money, seminary life is nicer than what he managed on his own.  Once ordained, Steve anticipates an even higher standard of living.

Dinner conversation centered on his vision as an artist, and his attraction to men.  He admitted that most of the seminarians were gay, although “no one ever talks about it, especially with the scandal going on.”  He spoke of his studies only once, how much he enjoyed teaching morality to junior high school students.  But his enthusiasm alarmed me when he continued by saying, “I have always found young boys and men to be so beautiful.  I have always been attracted to them.”

The application requirements of St. John’s Seminary include interviews, psychological testing, and discussions about spirituality, and sexuality.  So how does a sexually active homosexual with an artistic fantasy more vivid than his calling to Christ manage to pass the tests?  I fear the Church evaluates their seminary applicants with the same blind eye that continually found John Geoghan and other abusive men ‘fit’ for priestly work.

When I dropped Steve off, St. John’s, the imposing building and elegant lobbies graced by portraits of Pope Paul VI and Cardinal Law struck me as an ironic place to prepare for priestly vows.  Although diocesan priests do not take a vow of poverty, such as Franciscans do, there is something unsavory about a person going into the priesthood for creature comforts.  Perhaps their vow of celibacy is equally incongruous.

In my 1950’s youth, priests were revered for sacrificing spouse and family in order to serve God.  But these days sacrifice is not so highly regarded.  People can lead lives of service without having to deny their essential aspects.  This makes the priesthood a pragmatic choice only for a man like Steve, a guy with few prospects and no qualms about teaching morality in the afternoon then disguising his identity in search of men at night.

As long as the Church extracts the price of celibacy from those who wish to be priests, the dilemma of finding qualified vocations will increase.  But celibacy’s harm is greater than simply deterring talented men from entering the priesthood.  It actually offers a haven for men of conflicted or deviant sexuality; men willing to wish away their sexual selves in exchange for positions of respect and influence greater than they can achieve elsewhere.

A vow of celibacy does not drain a man of his sexual desire, it merely denies it.  The ongoing scandal of abuse by priests painfully illustrates that when the desire overwhelms the vow, heinous crimes and irreparable suffering follow.

Handing abuse claims against current priests to outside authorities is a necessary response to past sexual abuse by priests.  But the Church must do more.  It must guard against future abuse.  It must scour its own training grounds to separate those who deserve sanctuary to follow a true calling from those merely craving the comfort of seminary walls.  Then it must put forth a call to those currently denied the opportunity for priestly vocations – woman, openly gay men, and married people.

Diocesan priests are not monks and men whose vocation is to escape the world rather than to serve it have no business being diocesan priests.  To ordain them diminishes the vow of priesthood, and increases the risk of further abuse to come.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is getting a lot of traction calling out public sector employees as 21^st century welfare queens. Thirty-five years ago Ronald Reagan popularized the phrase during the 1976 presidential campaign, spinning elaborate tales of women, mostly black, who abused the welfare system.  The image of profligate black women fleecing hard working Americans played well; ‘welfare queen’ is a term that invites a visceral response.  Reagan eventually won two terms as president; the parties tripped over themselves to enact welfare reform, and when President Clinton ended ‘Welfare as we know it’ in 1996 by replacing Aid for Families with Dependent Children with the stop-gap TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), welfare queens disappeared from public discourse.  But back in their glory days, 1977 and 1978, I had the good fortune to know one very well. 

I spent that academic year as a VISTA volunteer in Levelland, Texas, providing housing and energy conservation assistance to the poor and elderly of the South Plains.  This required a disparate set of skills – absorbing arcane government eligibility regulations, palling with cowboy booted USDA county agents, learning Spanish, designing solar hot water heaters, driving 2,000 miles per month, praising the cornbread and Jell-O salads at the endless covered dish luncheons, shooting a gun (my first and only time), downing Tequila shots, getting stoned, and dispensing hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy and housing assistance funds to the polyglot of whites, blacks and Latinos who scrape a living from this broad swath of earth dominated by huge corporate farms.  The fields were beautiful, miles of speckled white cotton and brilliant yellow sunflowers undulating in an immense inland sea; the towns were ugly, squat and pale; the people friendly and accommodating.

One day I canvassed the black neighborhood north of town, across the tracks, within the shadowy stench of the soybean processing plant, to tell people about the energy improvement / heating bill assistance available. I knocked on the door of a wide, narrow house with a long front porch.  A black woman answered, medium height, medium weight, medium expression, a few curler papers stuck to the ends of her damp hair. 

Emmer Lee Whitfield leaned against the door, listened for a few moments, nodded, then spoke. “I could use that. This here house is so drafty and my bills is so high.”  I wrote down pertinent information. It took a long time. Emmer Lee reported that she was disabled; she had two high school aged children.  She received food stamps and AFDC and SSI and Medicaid; her son was part of a CETA job training program, her daughter was in a different program.  Within ten minutes Emmer Lee rattled off the details of these programs with impressive fluency.  She knew the income limits, eligibility requirements, funding cycles.  I distrusted her.  She didn’t look disabled, her house was no palace, but it was better than most on the unpaved street, she was clearly smart enough to work.  I took all of information and left, resolved to find some way to disqualify her from receiving yet another government program.

Back in the office, I asked about Emmer Lee Whitfield.  Everyone smiled knowingly.  She was a professional welfare recipient, receiving virtually every form of assistance our Community Action Agency offered.  And even though it galled me, she qualified and received energy conservation assistance.  As the year progressed I ran into Emmer Lee from time to time.  She was pleasant and soft spoken but having decided she was a fraud, I gave her little opportunity to justify herself.

The next round of energy conservation assistance funds arrived with more complicated eligibility requirements.  One provision required forming committees of local citizens charged with evaluating and disbursing the funds.  The committees had to include members from the community at large, the utility companies and the ‘target population’, a bureaucratic euphemism for poor people.  My job was to assemble and facilitate these committees in seven counties, which meant a meeting pretty much every night.  When I considered who might serve in Hockley County, of which Levelland is county seat, Emmer Lee Whitfield topped my list. 

In a typical meeting of a Community Energy Conservation Group, four to six folding tables and chairs sit in a square.  The utility executive arrives in a suit; as does the community member that I cajoled from our board. They sit next to each other in the front of the room.  Other representatives of these groups sit nearby and take notes.  I sit to the side with my huge stack of applications.  The target community representatives sit in the far corner in their work clothes. I describe an applicant; pass the paperwork around the table.  The executives scan and comment.  The target representatives nod.  Whoever the suits recommend gets the money.

But the first meeting in Levelland was different.  The Vice President of the utility company set himself in the main seat.  Emmer Lee Whitfield came in and placed her purse right next to him.  She wore a shirtwaist dress of satin sheen, small pumps and a single set of pearls.  With the natural order of the room disrupted, the rest of the group found chairs as they could.  I started through the applications.  Emmer Lee looked them over first.  She checked the name and provided an opinion.  “Bertha Mae really needs this because husband is laid up… Wanda’s boyfriend is working nights on a rig down in Denver City, they are doing fine…Millie doesn’t need the cash so much, but she could use some repairs that she can’t manage now that her son has left home.”  She commented on every black applicant and a good number of the whites and Latinos as well.  Emboldened, the other target representatives spoke up.  The meeting took longer than usual, but when we were done we had actually allocated the money according to an understanding of need much deeper than the application forms could describe.

I walked home that night, past the quiet courthouse square and the bank sign flashing time and temperature.  Eighty-two degrees at 10 pm on a quiet May night.  The sky never exhibited more stars.  In two months I would be leaving; I was ready to go.  Hopefully I had touched some people during my tenure, but that night it was me who witnessed an event that would shape my perspective forever; a woman of extraordinary ability at the top of her game.  Emmer Lee Whitfield was the most accomplished welfare recipient I ever met, and even if it is not a skill we condone, I had to applaud her ability, a poor black woman in a backwater of our country with scant education and few prospects. In 2011, a well dressed articulate black woman sitting next to an executive might be accepted as an important member of the proceedings, but in Levelland, Texas, 1978, she was brazenly out of place. 

I believe Emmer Lee Whitfield understood the options that life presented her with a clarity few of us can claim, and she understood that her best opportunities lay in extracting the most from the welfare system.  I am confident that without welfare, Emmer Lee would have survived; perhaps she would have even exceeded the limits that the welfare life imposed.  But I acknowledge her decision to be a welfare queen as a rational one.  Each of us, every day, absorbs the world around us, assesses our strengths, our opportunities, and determines how to engage with the world.  The systems our society has established, whether they be Wall Street or welfare, are key factors in these decisions.

The principle lesson I learned in my year in VISTA was almost the opposite of what I expected.  It was not a lesson of altruism or virtue.  It was the stark, Ayn Randian reality that “All people act in their self interest” and the corollary acceptance that “Self interest is always the best possible motive for action.”  The magic of realizing this reality in the context of a VISTA year is that it begs the question of what constitutes self-interest.  I believe Emmer Lee Whitfield acted in her best interest, very astutely, as a welfare queen.

Fast forward to 2011 and we have Scott Walker facing off the unions in Madison and Chris Christie stirring venom in Trenton, demanding that the ‘welfare queens’ of the public sector forego collective bargaining rights and accept the insecurities that we pension-less, seniority-less, private sector employees have learned to endure. 

Like so many points of tension, this is a debate about self-interest.  Out of fear, the public employees perceive their self-interest lies in the status quo.  Proponents of less government envision collective benefits from lower taxes and they rattle the taxpayer’s sense of injustice to strip benefits enjoyed by a dwindling few. Each group defines self interest in a narrow, niggardly way, fomenting division by defining a limited resource pie that must be sliced into winners and losers.

No one acknowledges how the systems we create twist individual self-interest out of whack with broader objectives.  Having had the good fortune to know a woman who made clear, rational decisions and ended up a welfare queen, I know that our conflicts about competing self-interests will continue until we change the tenor of the debate.  First we must define the collective interest, and then develop political and economic systems that align individual interests with the common good.  Each individual will also always act in his or her best interest, and I think that is good.  How individual interests reinforce the collective interest; that is what defines us as a society.