Newsgroup: it.cultura.religioni.cristiani
Titolo: [recensione] 35 mio poveri in USA

The Working Poor': Can't Win for Losing
By RON SUSKIND -  N Y T
Published: February 15, 2004
The phrase ''working poor'' doesn't carry much weight in this
fractious political season. It slips by in a campaign speech, with
nothing much to grab onto as it passes. It suffers from a kind of
blunt-edged simplicity -- a collision of enormous, rounded terms
that, by the lights of American exceptionalism, should not be joined.
Both political parties quietly agree that it is an ugly, unsettling
combination -- that any American who works steadily should not have
to suffer the barbed indignities of poverty. But Americans do --
millions of them. There are 35 million people in the country living
in poverty. Most of the adults in that group work nowadays; many of
them work full time. And while there are heavy concentrations of
African-Americans and white single women in the mix, the group is
every bit as diverse, and diffuse, as the nation is.
Which presents a central problem for David Shipler in his powerful
new book, ''The Working Poor: Invisible in America'': how do you
write a treatise on something as vast and many-hued as an ocean, a
forest, the sky? Shipler knows this and, somehow, proceeds undaunted.
A former New York Times reporter, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his
book ''Arab and Jew,'' and then managed to wrap his arms around the
classically obstreperous topic of race in America with ''A Country of
Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America.'' This is what he's become
known for: tackling the unwieldy.
Of course, Shipler has plenty of company in writing about fault-line
issues of the American experiment, like race, class and the nature of
opportunity. But it is an area populated in the past decade or two by
writers -- like Alex Kotlowitz in ''There Are No Children Here'' or,
more recently, Barbara Ehrenreich, who chronicled her personal
journey as a low-wage worker in ''Nickel and Dimed'' -- who incline
toward the power of personal narrative. In the first few chapters of
''The Working Poor,'' Shipler shows, inadvertently, why so many
journalists have made that choice. He lunges forward at the book's
start with some sweeping judgments, like ''the rising and falling
fortunes of the nation's economy have not had much impact on these
folks'' and ''the skills for surviving in poverty have largely been
lost in America'' -- both debatable issues -- and introduces a
racially diverse, thinly connected army of poor workers, some
appearing for just a paragraph or two. Parts of an early chapter
titled ''Importing the Third World'' read like a dissertation on
sweatshop cash flows.
I suggest that readers -- and this is clearly one of those seminal
books that every American should read and read now -- stick with it.
Shipler, like the man who pays to wrestle a behemoth at the county
fair, is just trying to get leverage on an indomitable opponent. By
the fourth chapter, just a third of the way, his strategy takes
shape: he's wearing down the giant. Shipler's subjects, many of whom
he spent nearly seven years following with meticulous empathy, begin
to reappear in the text. Their stories start to deepen, mixed with
complex insights that Shipler interweaves judiciously. In the chapter
''Harvest of Shame,'' he deftly shows how government crackdown on
illegal immigrants creates ''migration within the migration,'' as an
army of immigrant workers races from strict-enforcement states like
Ohio to more lenient ones like North Carolina, and notes that ''when
a migrant stops moving . . . he starts to enter America.'' There are
employers like Jimmy Burch -- a North Carolina farm owner -- who
co-signs loans for new trailers for his workers. He has an interest.
His workers do, too. He says he's ''never been burned'' with a
default -- not yet. Shipler never shies away from noting the
employer's power, but by embracing complexity, and trusting the
reader to be up to the task, he burns off the easy illusions of hero
versus villain that so often addle journalism.
Doing that frees the writer to ask a set of questions off limits to
many practitioners of what is called ''poverty literature.'' Kevin
Fields, a beefy 280-pound African-American man, with a shaved head,
gold earring and a felony conviction for effectively fighting off a
street gang, is virtually unemployable. Men with a similar arrest
record, but different profiles, have less difficulty. ''Violence,''
Shipler points out, ''has a longstanding place in many whites' images
of blacks. So, if you are black, if you are a man, if you are large
and strong, or if you have a prison record, you are likely to be
perceived as a person with a temper, a vein of rage.'' 
Half of all poor families are headed by single women, and, in a
chapter titled ''Sins of the Fathers,'' Shipler doesn't flinch from
delving into how many struggling women were sexually abused as
children. The evolving estimates show the outlines of an epidemic.
Kara King, a white New Hampshire mother, was molested by her father,
who told her ''that's the way a father and a daughter are.'' The
effects -- ''a paralyzing powerlessness'' that ''mixes corrosively
with other adversities that deprive those in or near poverty of the
ability to effect change'' -- are visible each time Kara and her
family appear in the book.
The same goes for other subjects whose jumbled lives serve to
illuminate various elements of this enormous topic. The reader learns
the issues; knows the aching heart. What takes shape is an ensemble
play that weaves together traditional feature reporting, digressions
about ''best evidence'' and a few passionate expository arias to
display ''the constellation of difficulties,'' as Shipler puts it,
that defines working poverty. It defines the lives of millions of
Americans.
Toward the book's finish, Shipler tries to harness the outrage
provoked by his characters' stories to examine the question of what
can be done. He shifts his focus to programs for job training, early
childhood care and remedial education (that alone meriting a domestic
Marshall Plan, considering that 14 percent of American adults can't
find an intersection on a map, total a deposit slip or determine the
correct dose of a medication). The author's efforts, here, are
uneven. Programmatic solutions, after all, are the hard, ungainly
work of hours and inches. Shipler's frustration seems to get the best
of him when he is talking about unenthusiastic students, bad teaching
and the way dreams of future success are little more than ''a notion
carried on a breeze of impulse.''
But alongside these broad, imperfect efforts, Shipler threads a
glowing filament: the telling acts of kindness, so often just small
offerings, that lift both giver and receiver. It's the little traps
and trips that foil those at the bottom. When you have no bank
account, no car, no health insurance, it inverts the slogan of that
best-selling self-help book: You have to sweat the small stuff. A
modest mishap to someone who can land on a cushion of nominal
security can land a poor person on the pavement, often literally.
Caroline Payne, with a two-year associate's degree and no teeth,
can't afford dentures. No one wants to hire her. When she finally
gets a job in a Procter & Gamble factory, all is almost lost when the
plant's rotating shift policy leaves her unable to care for her
daughter one week every month. A friend steps up; her job is saved.
In the book's last section, Kara King is fighting cancer. Her
husband, Tom, has no car to the drive the two hours to a Boston
hospital for visits. It's crushing to read. When a local car dealer
gives him a loaner it feels like the healing of the world. The
working poor -- that enormous cohort -- are easily outnumbered by
America's broad middle class. Most experts agree: lifting a poor
worker to the uplands of self-sufficiency takes a concerted,
many-pronged effort. In that mix, invariably, must be someone willing
to lend a hand, to make even a little sacrifice.
Shipler's underlying mission, no doubt, is identical to that of the
narrative stylists who toil among America's underclass: to press
readers beyond appraising poverty's causes and effects, so often
inventoried for swift, harsh judgment, to the deeper understanding
that the working poor are really us. ''I hope this book,'' Shipler
writes, ''will help them to be seen.'' In short, he wants to give
readers something to hold onto.
Then, the questions tend to be about the ''hows'' -- how we, as a
country, might now act. Readers, by the last page, can scarcely avoid
that question, or the larger algorithm that Shipler offers: ''To
appraise a society, examine its ability to be self-correcting. When
grievous wrongs are done or endemic suffering exposed, when injustice
is discovered or opportunity denied, watch the institutions of
government and business and charity. Their response is an index of a
nation's health and of a people's strength.''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Suskind's latest book is ''The Price of Loyalty.'' He is the
author of ''A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey From the Inner
City to the Ivy League.''

 every bit as diverse, and diffuse, as the nation is.
dati che furono l'oggetto di una lettera pastorale della conferenza
episcopale statunitense degli anni 90.
Appena ritrovo i ldocumento posto qualche passaggio interessante.
y.