The Nation: Welfare: Trying to End the Nightmare

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pulling teeth just to get the forms. You want to issue some furniture because the family needs it desperately. But you can't get anyone to sign the authorization. All we have time to do is move paper. I have yet to solve any social problems." Tom Lambert, dressed in blue jeans and a sports shirt, is a veteran after 2½ years. He says: "The directives would be hard for a lawyer to figure out, so everyone ends up making his own interpretations." Another worker says: "You learn to sign other people's names if necessary."

It takes more than ingenuity for caseworkers to survive the system. Lambert says: "You see so many emergencies that you have to build a shell around yourself to maintain your sanity." In Alameda County, Calif., Dion Lerch, 25, caseworker No. E-165, says: "Look, after a while you become immune to all the misery you see; you become an animal. I can tell someone I'm cutting off his check, you're damn straight I can. With 125 cases it's hard to remember that they're all human beings. Sometimes they're just a number." But she stays because she does remember, and Lambert stays because his shell is soft.

At the receiving end of it all—on the long lines at welfare centers and at supermarkets, food stamps in hand—are the people the system is designed to help. It is they who have been its chief victims. To be poor in 20th century America is to suffer the heightened frustration and deeper bitterness of watching the trillion-dollar gross national product paraded on a television set standing in a barren room. It is also to endure a dehumanization that only serves to make welfare clients even less able to care, or want to care, for themselves. The audit of public expenditures is necessary, but in no other area of government is human dignity so perishable an asset. A Brooklyn woman—in the late stages of pregnancy, injured and confined to bed—was left that way, without a "homemaker" to help her, until her toilet was repaired. Under the rules, no homemaker may stay where there is no functioning toilet; the unavoidable implication is that the client needs it less.

Last year a freelance writer, Mrs. June Bingham, tried to live on a welfare food budget. She learned about flash hunger pains and biscuits to assuage them, but even more about the debilitating effect of a lack of protein and vitamins. "I began to understand why poor children fall asleep in class." she reported. At the end of her welfare week, she had an egg for breakfast. "It gave me indigestion. I think perhaps it always will. If the occupational hazard of poverty is a chip on the shoulder, then the occupational hazard of affluence is insensitivity."

Insensitive or otherwise, many, if not most Americans, hold certain beliefs about welfare that are largely myths. In the harshest possible montage of these myths, the composite picture of a welfare family would be something like this: black, recently arrived from the Deep South to get higher benefits, a woman who stops conceiving babies only long enough to have them, an able-bodied man who drives to the welfare office in a pink Cadillac, and a dozen children who cannot wait to head their own welfare families; with even minimal guile, they can cheat their way onto the rolls and live better under welfare than if they had jobs.