Bad Faith

This week I've had a running e-mail exchange with my dear friend NycWeboy over the potential for effective bi-partisan governance.  As you probably all know by now, I am motivated by righteous anger and moral outrage.  It fuels my work.  And it grows everyday as I get deeper into this gig; I'm spending hours daily reading about growing unemployment, growing homelessness, growing hunger, and corresponding increases in fear, anxiety, and depression.  How can I not be angry?  It's either that or hopeless, and what good is apathy and despair?  That only leads to throwing the covers back over my head every morning.

My professional work has been in economic development and disaster recovery, mainly in poor urban communities, usually economically depressed African-American neighborhoods in large cities - Memphis, Miami, New York, New Orleans.  My work in Lower Manhattan after September 11 was an exception, but still there I was working with independent small business owners who'd just seen their businesses physically devastated and their livelihoods put at risk, many of whom were immigrants to the U.S. decades ago and had built steadily over the years their small enterprises in the shadows of Wall Street.  When people are crying in your office about their inability to cover their rents, or when you drive past one pile of rubble after another in your post-Katrina neighborhood tours, it's hard not to internalize the suffering of your clients.  The few inspirations besides outrage are the often visionary local non-profit leaders who remain optimistic about and committed to pursuing economic opportunity for their communities - through small business development, or educational programs for residents, or by building affordable housing, for example - and your fellow colleagues who keep you going during the most depressing moments.

I'm writing all of this because this clip of Obama speaking at a recent press conference about working with (GOP) members of Congress operating in bad faith left me thinking about why I've been so furious over the stimulus shenanigans.  This wrap-up of the stimulus makes it sound alright, and who knows, maybe it'll help us all, even a little bit, in the long run.  But it's been hard for me to see the bill as anything other than a total failure, because it comes up so short in relation to the scope of our economic crisis, and it really seems to me that our government is operating in its own short-term self-interest - per usual, NycWeboy is eager to point out.

That may be true, but underlying all of my ire is the high expectation that our government can do better than this, and has in the past. I'm an angry cynic because deep down I'm a hopeful citizen who believes in the power of our government to do right by its people.  But what happened to our nation's priorities?  To our commitment to ending poverty, to improving livelihoods?  We spend most of our money on defense, social security and medicaid/medicare/SCHIP, but no one's talking about cutting back on defense spending - only on entitlement reform.  Why is this?  And why do most of us accept it?

I'm curious what motivates you all as anti-poverty activists.  You're here at Change.org, connecting with one another over social justice issues, supporting non-profits and other activists and your communities.  What do you think is the potential for our government to deliver the programs and services we need?  To honor our priorities?  What should be our national priorities?  Do you think anger is an effective stimulant?  Heh.  What gets you out of bed in the morning?