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By Bishop John, January 5, 2011 4:43 am

Congratulations to President Obama and the U.S. Congress.  As the year ended, Congress enacted and the President signed a bill guaranteeing unemployment payments many months down the road.  This was difficult to achieve because of so much opposition in Congress.  A pole indicates that about 1/3 of the American population erroneously think that unemployment benefits discourage people from seeking jobs.

Why do so many ill-informed Americans consider unemployment benefits the cause of unemployment? Obviously, the right-wing television pundits fuel this and repeated endlessly in the struggle leading up to congressional action.  It is an utterly foolish notion.  With five applicants for every job opening, the overreaching problem is a lack of available positions not a lack of personal initiative.  David Sirota, writing in the Salon.com newsletter, points out that there are also deeper underlying causes that feed this constant and destructive myth.

Of course, there is what psychologists call the Just-World Fallacy.  This is where people believe that the world is inherently fair, that everyone who works hard can be a millionaire and that the unemployed deserve their plight.

In addition, Sirota holds that narcissism is also a factor.  Many in our society dehumanize the poor with expressions like “welfare queen” and “white trash.”  The myth of the “lazy unemployed” plays to that conceit and the still-employed look down at those who are not.  You remain in a job, says the myth, because you are better than the jobless.

Finally, there is fear.  With the labor market news downright frightening, the still-employed are understandably pining for a defense mechanism to cope with persistent layoff anxieties.  The myth of the “lazy unemployed” provides exactly that – a calming sensation of control.  The myth says “the jobless are out of work because they are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities.”  Thus, their distress is of their own choosing.  Try telling that to the Detroit autoworkers.

For the last thirty years, the Catholic Church has been struggling to eliminate and lessen this myth.  It has made some progress but it is constantly re-invented.  The main purposes of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development is to sensitize the American population as to the economic forces that cause so many to be unemployed and thus so many to be poor.

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By Bishop John, December 27, 2010 3:27 am

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development, which does an extraordinarily good job of trying to sensitize the 80% of us who are comfortably settled to an awareness of the reality and suffering that accompanies the agonizing poverty that has always been part of our society but is worse today than it has been in decades.  CCHD has designated January as a Poverty Awareness Month.  Awareness?  Awareness?  Why do we need to be made more aware of the reality of poverty?

The reality is that the vast majority of us are moderately comfortable and the way that our society is structured separates us from people who are really in dire straits as far as housing, food and clothing are concerned.  Oh yes, as we drive around town, we see people standing at red light intersections with a poorly made sign telling us that they are really in trouble and that anything will help.   I feel confident that if you got out and did a check, you would see that the vast majority of us do not look these people directly in the eye, don’t reach into our handful of quarters or dollar bills that are stashed in their ashtrays for parking meters.  After all, that guy is probably a real phony and is making more by begging than I am by working!

The Campaign for Human Development tries to make us more aware of why people are poor and the economic forces that produce expansion and then contraction of the amount of money that is available to the general population.  Tens of thousands of workers are idle in Detroit.  Do any of us really think that it is their fault?

The latest statistics indicate that there are more than 40 million people in poverty in our country.  That is the highest number since the late 1950’s and the greatest increase is among children and the elderly.

If you want to learn more about the poverties around us that we do not see, visit one or the other of these websites.

www.ccctx.org/poverty_stats_deaneries.php

www.ccctx.org/advocacy_deaneries.php

www.austindiocese.org/dept/social_concerns/cchd.php

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