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| Chris Powell |
The law, in its
majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg
in the streets, and to steal their bread ― Anatole France
Were it possible to plant a similar sign in large
Connecticut cities, where failing schools are winked at by always solicitous
politicians, it might read “Educate these kids like they were yours.”
It may be time to bring out of the closet Chris Powell’s luminous perceptions concerning the connection of failing urban families and failing urban education. But, of course, in urban areas of Connecticut, one finds boxes in boxes in boxes of chronic problems, many of them connected to one foul root. Powell, now retired, was the long-time Mangaging Editor of the Journal Inquirer. He continues to write colunms for the JI and other papers.
It has been 57 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once Assistant
to the President for Domestic Policy in the Nixon administration and later, in 1976,
US Senator from New York, warned in a much read and quickly shelved document, The Moynihan Report: the Negro Family, the
Case for National Action, that “The gap between the Negro and most other
groups in American society is widening. The fundamental problem, in which this
is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence — not
final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban
ghettos is crumbling. A middle-class group has managed to save itself, but for
vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of
conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated.”
In the intervening 57 years, that gap has become an
unbridgeable abyss. In every large city in Connecticut, crime is up, education
is down, fatherless families are up, social anarchy is up – and politicians
across the state, far from proposing workable solutions to urban social
problems, seem by their silence to have amicably bid this ganglion of
disruptive social problems a fond farewell. In law, silence signifies assent;
in politics, silence signifies the presence of acceptable false solutions to enduring problems.
In some city churches, one may hear from the pulpits laments
concerning the absence of fathers in households. But in Connecticut’s General Assembly,
silence signifies a general assent to the urban status quo – where fathers,
more than a half century after Moynihan’s cautionary report, have simply disappeared, replaced by
solicitous welfare workers.
Powell’s latest column, “Education disaster in Connecticut's cities is
all child neglect by parents,” blasts
“New Haven's Board of Alders (aka the city
council),” for having “spent much of its last meeting debating reading
instruction techniques even as 58% of the city's public school students are
classified as chronically absent.”
But there is an ironic beam of sunshine in every dark cloud:
“At least the meeting produced admissions from Superintendent Ilene Tracy,”
Powell tells us, “that for two years student mental health and
‘social-emotional learning’ have displaced academic instruction and that
student behavior is now ‘atrocious.’”
For years, Powell has been shining a bright light into the
dark recesses – and debilitating consequences – of a welfare state that rewards
women relying on a crutch held out to them by a paternalistic state. The
welfare state is paternalistic in the precise meaning of the word. It REPLACES the
moral obligations of fathers and mothers with state welfare procedures.
Whatever you finance in this sorry world you will have more
of. Welfare finances prolonged dependency and its attendant consequences through
generations of householders: mothers without husbands, families without fathers;
neglected African American young boys who prey upon each other and turn for personal
affirmation to criminal gangs; honey-tongued cons who know how to beat the
welfare system; schooling that does not educate; and, of course, a true picture
of urban life in Connecticut’s larger cities would not be complete without
weepy politicians who attend the funerals of three year old children shot by nineteen
year old children, whose names
are forgotten two weeks after last rights are read over them.
What the poor in cities need to be self-reliant is precisely
the same social architecture struggling middle class householders in, say,
Greenwich, Connecticut need to survive in a world that averts its eyes from
private sufferings.
In our 21st century post-progressive
anti-clerical nirvana, we have, thankfully, replaced “the sin that dare not
speak its name” with a much more penetrating silence wrapped around a false
paternal state support system that keeps the poor under bridges while solicitous
politicians agitate for an end to poverty caused in large part by solicitous
politicians.
Restoring social order is, in our day, for reasons mentioned
by Powell, a high hill to climb:
“City officials and legislators cannot examine the causes of
child neglect and educational failure without indicting their own constituents.
“State officials can't examine the causes without indicting
themselves for a welfare system that destroys the family while putting thousands
of unionized and politically active 'helpers' on the government
payroll.
“Educators, also numerous, unionized, and politically
active, can't do it without calling more attention to their irrelevance and
impugning their employment.”
Powell, a very lonely voice, nearly a party of one, should be given the equivalent
of a Connecticut Pulitzer for having the courage to grapple with these problems
seriously -- and in public -- while the rest of us stand by mute and unheeding.
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