Date: 5.4.98
SETTING: THE HOMELESS SHELTER at the Church of St. Agnes in midtown Manhattan. While we are waiting for lunch to arrive, a homeless man picks up a dining room chair and smashes it against the wall. "Not victims of poverty," Heather Mac Donald notes dispassionately. "Victims of their own demons, what happens after living on the streets with too much time on your hands."
We are sitting at a plastic-covered table among the shelter's 40 or so regulars, or "clients," as they are respectfully known. Mac Donald, 41, has never eaten in this shelter before, but she knows the system well. Many of the homeless, she says, are not down on their luck but cunning manipulators of the welfare system. "A battle of wits between the wily homeless and guileless outreach workers is no match," she writes in City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
The City Journal, of which she is a contributing editor, has a circulation of just 10,000, but its influence is out of proportion to its readership. When Mac Donald blasted City University of New York for lowering its academic standards in the name of diversity, she spurred the current fight for wholesale changes.
Most of the comfortably affluent feel guilty about the poor and unfortunate. Beyond a certain point, this is harmful to the people we want to help. Watching the chair-throwing gets Mac Donald started: "The advocates have carved out this sphere of absolute autonomy for the homeless. They shouldn't have to work. Shouldn't have to behave civilly. They [the advocates] purport to be doing this out of compassion. I believe they are living a vicarious, anticapitalist fantasy, making the homeless into romantic rebels."
Mac Donald is a bit of a rebel herself, though it is not capitalism she rebels against but mushy thinking. Bored as a lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., she moved to New York in 1987 to take some courses at New York University and the New School for Social Research; she already had degrees in literature from Yale and Cambridge, and in law from Stanford.
Reexposure to academia turned her into a crusader against multiculturalism and other fashionable social theories.
"Multiculturalism was destroying universities!" she says. "Women claiming they can only read women. Blacks can only read work by black authors. It made me crazy." She began criticizing multiculturalism in articles that appeared in magazines like the New Republic, Partisan Review and the New Criterion.
"I was still a liberal," she recalls. "What was turning me around was race- and gender-based hiring, which is insulting to everyone." The chef comes by to announce that we will be having chicken lo mein, and to ask, since neither I nor Mac Donald qualifies as homeless, if we would please pay. I got the same rate the staff pays: $1 per meal, a sum upon which the kitchen says it breaks even. I wonder.
Mac Donald was not put off by the interruption. "Illegitimacy is the natural cause of poverty," she proclaims. "There is a great lie going around that poverty is an economic condition rather than a moral one.
What's left out is that the vast majority of those living under the poverty line are in single-parent households. It's the best way to ensure poverty. It dooms most children, making them many times more likely to drop out of school than children of married parents." More likely to suffer child abuse, to commit suicide, to abuse drugs and to end up in jail, too, she adds.
I think to myself: Lies! Mushy thinking! Romantic illusions! This woman feels strongly. I timidly proffer a standard feminist response to her diatribe against illegitimacy: "It's my body; even if I'm poor, I have the right to have a baby!"
"Not if I have to support it," she says crisply. "The poor don't have babies to get on welfare, but the policies have enabled illegitimacy, removing an enormous financial penalty."
Partly as a result, she says, we have created a network of people whose interests are served by keeping the poor poor. Shelters compete for the homeless to justify their budgets. At this one, run by privately funded Grand Central Neighborhood Social Services Corp., there was a special marketing campaign last November to engage new clients by offering a free breakfast and $5 in cash.
A steaming plate of chicken lo mein arrives on a paper plate. It's not great food, but it's certainly not bad, either. This is no stale bread and thin soup. That gets Mac Donald started again. "The homeless should be required to clean up or do something." Here the homeless are asked to help -- but are not required -- so there is such a thing as a free lunch.
"In the 19th century, charity had a work test," she recalls. "'Go out back and chop wood.'" In a 1990s version of such a work test, New York City is now requiring certain welfare recipients to do jobs like cleaning up Central Park. This requirement reduced welfare rolls 25% to 30%. Many of the recipients likely had off-the-book jobs already, Mac Donald suspects.
A neatly dressed young man of around 20 is sitting by himself. Mac Donald approaches him. He stands up and begins to move away. Mac Donald fixes her unblinking gaze on him and starts firing questions. "Do you work here? Do you come here every day? Do you have a home? A family?" she asks.
Glazed eyes nervously darting back and forth, he mutters that he has no place to stay and no family. I ask Mac Donald for her verdict: "He should be diagnosed for drug treatment."
After we said good-bye, Mac Donald descended into a subway station. As I returned to the office, I found myself realizing: Sure we should lend a hand to the poor -- but well-meaning programs to help them often don't do the trick.
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