A SENSE OF SECURITY
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
On November 8, our president addressed the nation on the matter of
homeland security. Before the speech, the spin was that George W. Bush would
offer the nation a pep talk, to talk about American values, to urge us to get
back to normal, but at the same time to be more vigilant. There was so
little breaking news in the speech that only one network carried it live –
others carried it on a delayed basis, or ran excerpts later.
AS life would have it, I was spending last Thursday evening with a group
of women who have also been concerned with matters of homeland security. The
Boston-based Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development was
celebrating 20 years of providing support for low-income women and their
families. In their tenure, they have developed nearly 400 units of
affordable housing, provided more than 100 permanent jobs, offered low-income
women an array of economic development services, and raised questions about
the appropriate ways to approach economic development activities.
When I learned that President Bush would talk about homeland security, I
wondered if the Women’s Institute celebration would be impacted. Then, I
realized that their supporters, with them for the long haul, understood that
there are many dimensions to the concept of security. A thesaurus says that
similar words for security include safety, protection, immunity, defense,
invulnerability, salvation, refuge, or shelter. A couple of those words
resonated with me. Shelter. Safety. Some people in our nation have never
had a sense of security. They’ve never had affordable, safe housing.
They’ve never known where their next dollar was coming from. They’ve never
felt protected or invulnerable. They’ve never known immunity or refuge.
These folks are our nation’s poor, a population we’ve been relatively
indifferent to. For so many reasons, we fault them for their own poverty,
without understanding that their poverty facilitates our prosperity. We pay
them less than a living wage for an array of essential services, including
caring for our children and elderly parents, cooking our food, cleaning our
hospitals, preparing our office buildings for our next-day occupancy. If
they disappeared we wouldn’t know how to make it, but we are remiss in
addressing the reality of their presence. How can we consign these folks to
scrambling for affordable housing without understanding how complicit we are
in their economic situation?
All of a sudden our nation seems to be focused on issues of security. To
let the folks in the White House tell it, we are rediscovering lost values.
First Lady Laura Bush, speaking to a sell-out crowd at the national Press
Club, talked about the way our compassion has surfaced. We’ve opened our
hearts to friends and to strangers, she said, to rousing applause. What
strangers?
Have we really opened our hearts to those who have never, ever known
security, whose lives are about stitching a living together between two or
three part-time jobs? If we opened our hearts to them, shouldn't our budget
reflect it, with our stimulus package offering more social spending than
corporate bailout? If we are really opening up our hearts, are we paying
attention to issues like homelessness, affordable housing, and a living wage?
Or, in our rush to move back to a kinder, gentler, normal, are we ignoring
those ragged edges of our national quilt and ignoring the economic insecurity
that so many Americans face.
To be sure, ten years of economic expansion pushed the poverty rate down
to 12 percent, meaning that just one in eight Americans is poor. The numbers
for African Americans and Latinos are double that, though, at one in four or
more. In our exuberance about falling poverty rates, our nation seems to
have forgotten that the magnitude of poverty is unacceptable in some
communities. Would we be pleased if the national poverty rate were 25
percent? If the answer is no, we can’t be pleased when some parts of our
nation experience so much poverty.
A few organizations have applied themselves to these issues, struggling
to find microeconomic solutions even as macroeconomic indicators suggest much
more success. The Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development is
one of that small set of organization, directly involved in addressing the
problem by producing housing and jobs. They have been so busy doing their
work that they’ve not been able to toot their own horn, so that they are a
well-kept secret both in their local area, Boston, and nationally.
Thus, it was ironic that while our nation focused on homeland security,
there was an organization celebrating a history of providing low-income women
with a more basic kind of security. Security means refuge, it means shelter;
it means something that too many low-income women simply can’t afford.
George W. Bush can speak until he is blue in the face, and Tom Ridge can
address homeland security issues until we are all dizzy. For some, though,
the security issue is far more basic. For those who enjoy the services of
the Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development, it’s all about a
roof over the head.