Those helping take care of people in need should be nurtured

David Webber, January 27, 2024

“Many people would do more social good, if they knew how to do it.” So my mother said back in the 1960s. About 60 years later, I’m thinking she was, and is, right. My hunch is that for every person, stereotypically a man, who yells “Get a job” to a panhandler from inside his secure, protected vehicle, there are a dozen people who would share a meal, provide extra clothes, give a ride, even share a spare bedroom if they could connect and make it work smoothly and safely. Some of them probably volunteer around town, but others would be more involved if they knew how to make it happen

Over the past four years, I’ve distributed Bombas socks, it will be 74,000 pairs by the end of 2024, to low-income and homeless organizations and individuals in mid-Missouri. I mostly distributed the socks through government and nonprofit organizations, but I posted on a local Facebook group that I could provide some socks to anyone who had a way to distribute them to the intended users —“the needy” as my mother would have called them. I was generous but a good steward of the socks so I engaged the sock recipients in conversation.

I particularly remember five women who contacted me last year. One ran a second-hand shop out of her garage on the outskirts of Columbia. When I delivered socks to her, I noticed she didn’t appear all that prosperous. One woman simply took them to her church, which had an “extra clothes” room. I met a third in front of Walmart who said she stopped her old car in public parking and offered clothing out of her trunk. It was a rather old trunk.

One woman told me, “I just know lots of people who need them.” I gave her 75 pairs. I delivered some to a another woman in the Columbia Public Library parking lot who told me how seeing how I distributed socks reinvigorated her and caused her to re-establish her Christmas gift giving to families staying at Welcome Inn and other local low cost hotels. I didn’t see that coming.

Over the past three years, I’ve learned of several women who have gone far beyond distributing socks and actually housed families with children and adult men at their own expense without the support of government or nonprofit organizations. Yes, all of the caregivers I know of are women. I’ve noticed that women volunteers at Loaves and Fishes and Room at the Inn are more frequent than men — but that’s a topic for another column.

I learned of a woman who allowed a unhoused man to stay in her house, intending it would be a few days. She helped him get identification, took her to job interviews and cared for his dog. She was surprised as he slowly took over her kitchen and electronics with no signs of his moving out. Apparently, she never felt her physical safety was at risk but she eventually asked for help to see that he moved out.

Another woman told me she has housed several different men at different times on a neighboring lot on the outskirts of Columbia, encouraging them to do small tasks and gardening. My sense is that she has mixed feelings about her caregiving efforts. She learned that many homeless men have legal, physical and mental issues about which she could do little.

Somewhat similarly, a different woman told me she provided pet food to several homeless men but she ultimately felt unappreciated without seeing much change in their situations. In both cases, these women seemed to have established boundaries due to their physical situations.

Several women have provided short-term shelter to families needing help due to domestic instability, housing problems and job loss. They see themselves as stopgap caregivers, providing help until more permanent housing and assistance can be obtained.

Perhaps the longest ongoing “success” story I am aware is a woman who responded to an anonymous posting on a local Facebook group by a woman on the brink of being evicted from a hotel because of complaints about unruly children who had many disabilities. The potential caregiver responded after realizing that her four bed, threebath house was largely unused because of her two jobs and it needed physical maintenance. It’s been more than a year and a half and the family is still with her, paying a small rent, but more importantly helping her care for the house, too. The caregiver reports that the children have blossomed with stable living, a backyard, and a third person, almost a grandmother, with whom to interact. She wrote, “I am a conservative and so frustrated with the homeless situation in this town. I do feel society just throws money at the problem without bringing any real tangible solutions. The number of people begging for help to find decent housing is terrible. I just think we can’t be the only ones in the situation we both were in, who could benefit from similar solutions …”

What all these caregivers seem to have in common, beyond their compassion, is their belief that society needs to do more and to better —but not necessarily more of what we are currently doing. As I have learned from talking with homeless adults who won’t go to shelters and observing college students at risk, many people don’t do well in institutional settings with well-intended caseworkers structuring their lives.

Columbia has many organizations, such as Love Columbia and the United Way, addressing the needs of families who know how to navigate their processes and have the time and temperament to obtain the services they need. There are lots of potential caregivers and care receivers who would mutually benefit helping one another. There are, of course, the potential obstacles of physical boundaries, clear understanding of the arrangements, any rental agreement and any potential liability. Columbia should find a way to assist and educate more potential caregivers.

David Webber joined the MU Political Science Department in 1986 and wrote his first column for the Missourian in 1994.

Congress will remain our major challenge in 2024

David Webber, Columbia MISSOURIAN, January 20, 2024

While the 2024 presidential election could not be over soon enough for most Americans, the central bottleneck in our political logjam — Congress — will persist. I write that with confidence but not with pleasure, for I am an “Article 1 guy.” I believe that the most distinguishing achievement of our Founding Fathers was the establishment of our national legislature with two equal chambers, the House and the Senate, representing the people and the states respectively. A responsible Congress is the keystone of the checks and balances that we were taught in high school civics.

The problem is that there is too much gridlock, too many market-like auctions of political influence, and too little forward-thinking policymaking. Unfortunately, our political system excels at electing, and re-electing, but is not so good at governing.

None of this can be blamed on former president Donald Trump. It is Congress that routinely passes stopgap budget, as members did again this week, and runs an annual deficit. It is the Senate that packed the Supreme Court with political motives, and it is the House that can’t keep a speaker.

These problems are not new. I’ve been looking through some of my political science books and was surprised how old they are. I have a book titled “Tell Newt to Shut Up” by David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf that won the Everett M. Dirksen Prize for Journalism in 1995. It describes how Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, who strategized the Republican Party becoming the House majority in 1994, faced increased opposition from House Republican members over his decision to force the first government shutdown in 1995. The books title comes from the Republican members coming back from their 1995 Thanksgiving break with reports that their Republican constituents made two requests: 1) balance the budget and 2) tell Newt to shut up. Way back 30 years ago some Republican voters were uncomfortable with the emerging leadership of House Republicans. Newt’s speakership remained rocky, and he resigned from Congress three years later.

Ironically, Sen. Everett Dirksen, the person for whom the award to the authors of “Tell Newt To Shut Up” was named, was a Illinois Republican who served as the Senate minority leader who appeared nearly weekly on national TV newscasts alongside his Democratic counterpart. Can you imagine that happening in 2024?

Today, the House is teetering on the edge of losing its Republican majority. Republicans began the session with a 222-213 majority but are down to 218 members because of resignations. They have passed 24 laws, but no major, self-initiated legislation this year.

The crux of the current governing problem is that Speaker Gingrich institutionalized strict party voting (i.e. all Republicans were expected to vote for the Republican position on leadership votes). Not only does this make the minority powerless, it makes the majority party vulnerable to a small minority of its own members. Since it takes 218 votes to pass major initiatives, as few as five Republican members can gum up the process.

Prior to Gingrich’s ascent in 1995, the Speaker of the House was less a party leader and more of an institutional leader. And there were fewer “party votes.” It was common for dozens of members to not support their party leader’s positions because of political interests back home or because they had an honest disagreement. Furthermore, historically bipartisan policymaking has been responsible for America’s greatest policy successes such as international stability, civil rights progress and natural resources protection through the 20th century. I have a book to support all this, too. It’s Paul Light’s “Government’s Greatest Achievements” published a generation ago in 2002.

A book that still nearly haunts me is “It’s Even Worse than it Looks” by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, perhaps two of America’s most respected academic observers of Congress. I remember reading it when it was new. It was published in 2012. The subtitle is “How the American constitutional system collided with the new politics of extremism.” They attribute much of our political stalemates and congressional inaction to the art and practice of gerrymandering mastered by practically all state legislatures.

Missouri’s legislative districts are surgically drawn by computer-aided cartographers to maximize the power of the party that happens to be in power at the time. You might expect your Columbia neighbor to be in the same congressional district as you. Not so fast. Broadway, through downtown, is the dividing line. In fact, one of our two Columbia congressmen announced last week that he was retiring after this term. If you reside in southern Boone County and east of Broadway, you should know we will have an open seat in the 3rd District, now represented by Blaine Luetkemeyer. Elsewhere in Columbia and Boone County, the 4th District, will likely be represented by current officeholder and former Kansas City TV journalist Mark Alford. I have not seen, or heard, that either was in Columbia this past year because, well, our city has been “fringed out.”

Gerrymandered legislative districts encourage political polarization and congressional gridlock because there are few competitive districts where legislators are forced to compromise and be moderate.

Rather than spending time and brainpower on the politics of MAGA followers or investigating their rivals, members of Congress should be debating and adopting new rules and regulations to constrain a powerful, yet unaccountable, Donald Trump. Congress should propose policies dealing with the Southern border crisis, migrants in other cities, reducing the education slide post-pandemic, increased sea levels on the East Coast, a decaying infrastructure and the economic and privacy loss due to ChatGPT. Congress can do that best when its members forget their party at home and govern, not electioneer. It’s been three decades since the House majority tried to govern as the majority party on the Hill and it hasn’t worked — for either Republicans or our country.

David Webber joined the MU Political Science Department in 1986 and wrote his first column for the Missourian in 1994.

People like ‘Demon Copperheads’ are easy to find right here in Columbia

David Webber, January 5, 2024

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “Demon Copperhead” caught my attention about a year ago, but I didn’t get to reading it till last month. Perhaps it was the unique names of the author and the main character that first caught my attention.

“Demon Copperhead” is a retelling of Charles Dicken’s classic “David Copperfield” in the context of Appalachia’s struggle with poverty and opioid addictions. Having taught at West Virginia University from 1982 to 1986, I am familiar with how absentee money exploited the resources and people of the region for a century and how in the past two decades Big Pharma flooded it with addictive pain killers.

I seldom read fiction. I’m not bragging, I’m acknowledging a shortcoming. I prefer the clarity of economics and history to remembering all those characters and twists and turns. Nonetheless, I decided to attempt the 548-page novel when I read how Kingsolver mirrored “David Copperfield” after having an imaginary conversation with Charles Dickens, who advised her to “let the boy tell the story.” Corny, but it captured my attention.

Kingsolver is a well-accomplished writer. She received a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year and, of course, was an Oprah Book Club selection.

Demon Copperhead is the main character and narrator who recounts his life born into Appalachia without privilege or good fortune. He never had a chance. The first sentence of the book is: “First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.”

So it was that Copperhead was born to a single, drug-addicted mother on the floor of the kitchen of a trailer home; his father had died of a mysterious heart attack before Demon’s birth. The only encouragement I felt to keep on reading was that Demon was the narrator — so if he made it through the whole book, he must have some good fortune.

Kingsolver recounts Demon’s struggles with a nearly helpless mother, an unaccepting stepfather, the uncaring foster care system, a decade of opioid drug addiction initiated with a medical industry new pain-reducing panacea to cope with recovery from a high school football injury. Demon’s one positive twist of fate is that he escapes into Marvel superheroes that sharpened his drawing skills and eventually allow him to earn some money as a cartoonist.

Kingsolver can flawlessly do a teenage boy becoming a young man. From what I’ve read, and learned on YouTube, a reader more literate than I would appreciate Kingsolver’s clever twists of the dozens of characters’ names and experiences that parallel Dickens. I will just applaud her mastery of teenage boys’ and young men’s language, attitudes and experiences.

Three big themes will stick with me. First, how our lives are shaped, if not determined, by fate and the unfairness of it all. Demon, whose formal name was Damon Fields, but got the nickname due his red hair, was born into the Appalachian mountains of southern Virginia with its tobacco and coal economy. The only fairness of it is that none of us chose our parents, birth year or birthplace. Some of us are dealt a good hand, some of us aren’t.

American public policy has thrown a few crumbs for economic and social development into Appalachia where 25 million people are trapped, left behind, or chose to stay.

A second theme Kingsolver reveals, chapter after chapter, is that once life is headed downhill, it just keeps on going. The child of a mother with a substance use disorder is rewarded with low-quality housing, schooling, foster care, job opportunities, peer examples, role models and more parental and family poor choices. Trauma is often and consistent. It’s usually hard to tell the difference between good luck and personal resilience among survivors of misfortune.

Third, there are big policy and societal failures and small policy and societal failures throughout Appalachia. Perhaps the highest order is absentee land ownership of coal and land resources that have allowed exploitation and environmental destruction. Next to that would be the historical political manipulation that has allowed the political system to tolerate, and even encouraged, abuse of local citizens for political and economic gain.

I know, I know: Some people look at mountain top removing (strip mining), acid polluted streams and black lung disease and see the free exchange of resources and labor for pay; other people see social injustice. There are everyday policy failures, too, with poorly implemented foster and hospital care.

“Demon Copperhead” deals with dark topics, but I found the book engaging and inspiring: How is it that Demon can take such a kicking and keep on ticking? Moreover, Kingsolver captures the caring community often found in impoverished towns and neighborhoods. Demon is benefited by a caring grandmotherly neighbor and a long-term football coach who sees mutual benefit in helping Demon’s living situation as Demon helps the school’s football performance.

I’ve met several Demon Copperheads on the streets of Columbia. Men and women born into drugs, poverty, family dysfunction and social instability, followed by unsatisfactory schooling, quite often physical and sexual abuse, a health problem or two and some encounters with the criminal justice system.

On a personal, individual level it is not hard to treat them with kindness and respect; on a policy and societal level it is hard to know how “to solve” the problem. Like Demon, local homeless folks have experienced a wide variety of societal and institutional failures, all of which need to be fixed to reduce the incidence of homelessness America is facing.

Demon is able to complete the task of narrating his own story through the miracle of his indomitable human spirit and getting a small lucky break here and there. Whether this conclusion is a mean false or not depends on the reader, I suppose. Kingsolver left me clinging to that hope but knowing that the odds are too often long.

David Webber joined the MU Political Science Department in 1986 and wrote his first column for the Missourian in 1994.