On the Difficulty of Embracing Human Needs
I spent some time yesterday with Pittsburgh Carnegie Library and Museum workers. They are in a broad sense, the keepers of our human heritage and the custodians of our continuum of human thought. Yet many of them are paid $10/hour and have no say in how best to give public access to the trove of treasures they organize, explain and guard. They have formed a union to give themselves more voice and respect.

Take a gander at “48 Hours” and “Dateline”. Billed as “real” crime shows, they actually detail the lives of poverty, where death is the collateral damage of a culture that is hopelessly feeding on itself to survive. “Killer Kids” details murders by young people who have been locked up for life. There too we see a panorama of kids who have been brutalized, or isolated or whose pathological mentality went unaddressed. An unsettling peek into a generation that both kills others and is increasingly suicidal.

We have to recognize we have a society with massive human needs. We have also become a siloed nation. We live with those like us and apart from “others”. We don’t understand their worlds, see their needs or be confronted with the details that might cause us to act.

The depth of America’s human needs are the roots of a lot of other problems we as a nation are grappling with. Poverty breeds crime. Worker suppression affects productivity and the capacity of our workforce. Children in crisis are a generation that will increasingly erode society as they become adults.

At its most basic level, the “Build Back Better” legislation,is one belated attempt to have government ameliorate these human needs. It’s chock full of money for training, worker empowerment, mental/drug/alcohol treatment, basic food and healthcare support, housing availability and transitioning people to a sustainable future. Not everyone believes that the government should be involved in addressing these problems and many are leery of what they see as throwing money at problems that money can’t solve. We don’t have these qualms when we’re handing money over to the wealthy or spending on physical infrastructure. We do have a hard time taking responsibility for changing the human conditions of our society.

Because of our decades of “hands off” on people-problems, coupled with a repressive solution to the results of our inaction, these issues have become crisis. We are having a hard time denying that crime is the product of poverty and inequality, rising workforce militancy comes from employer domination, increasing mental health/drugs/alcohol related disruption is a result of our defunding of treatment programs and our overall culture is turning a portion of our youth into angry, isolated and disconnected people. What we’re doing, and not doing, isn’t working.

We all are facing the consequences of our failures to address America’s human needs. We can live apart, but our society still has to function together. It is dangerous to see the failures of our “pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps” approach and refuse to devise other solutions. Build Back Better is challenging us to realize we can’t build highways without skilled labor. We can’t have physical security for some, without economic opportunity for all. We can’t let the sick go untreated or the ignore the isolation of those who never feel the warmth of arms wrapped around them. We can waste our time calling each other liberals or conservatives. We can argue about how much money the wealthiest nation in the history of the world can afford to spend on its people. We can even demonize those in need to give ourselves a selfish excuse to ignore their problems. Or we can be thankful that we are again focusing on root causes and people-needs and step into the fight for solutions.

ihg 11-8-2021

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