The Way I See It What it means to have a voice

The Way I See it
by Hollis Wormsby, Jr.

What it means to have a voice

I have spent most of my life studying ways to move our community forward in one form or another. One of the tools that I have been blessed to use is the ability to communicate in writing and to express myself orally in a way that people have chosen to listen to over the years. It has meant much to me to play this role, and to feel that words properly used can be a tool in the effort to build a better world.

A good friend noted to me recently that it appears that my words are angrier than he remembered in my earlier writings, and while I had not had that thought myself, upon hearing the thought I realized there was probably some truth to what he said. While I still have great love for our community, and a great commitment to being a vehicle of positive change, at this stage in my life there are two factors that make my voice angrier; first of all I am over fifty now, so I know that I have a limited window of opportunity left to make a meaningful difference, and secondly, it seems to me as if the voice of reason has met an untimely death in the last decade, and ludicrous solutions to the perceived problems in our communities have become both abundant, and well received.

There was a time when the word shame still had meaning in our communities, but the time seems long past. It used to be a shame to have children out of wedlock, now it is just the gateway to a life of welfare benefits. It used to be a shame to be a man with children you were not providing for, now it’s okay, welfare is willing and ready to step up and be head of household. Used to be that even while the phrase it takes a village to raise a child was prevalent, that the only time as young children we felt like there was a village was when our mama’s or daddy’s were whipping our butt, and it hurt so bad, you knew there had to be a whole village beating your –ss. Used to be that Black men ran the neighborhood, now Black boys terrorize the neighborhood, and men are forced to sit on the sidelines and be irrelevant, as the thug culture and way of life is protected by ACLU types, who don’t have to live with the crime that the freedom from responsibility they advocate creates.

When I was thirty, two things were different; one was that family values had not taken as bad a beating as they have today, and secondly there were still more households with two parents leading them. And a third thing, would have been that a larger percentage of our community was still working. The welfare system of today has created a world where a sub set of our community has tucked into a dysfunctional fantasy land financed by taxpayer dollars. As you drive around our communities today, an obvious sickness is that you see too many able bodied adults living off the fat of the land. Please note that I said able bodied. I have no issue with assistance for the disabled or the elderly, but a system that allows healthy adults to escape the requirement to work to provide for their needs and the needs of the children they create, leads to the kind of madness we see in too many African American communities.

Over the many years of having a voice I have spoken of this issue in many different ways, and most recently in anger. I would justify the change by saying that I felt the change in style would garner attention, but the friend who asked me the question noted that one thing they valued about my softer style was that it was often a contrast to the angry ravings that were common elsewhere, and that now it was closer to more of the same. They reminded me that earlier in my career I had noted that my writing style was kind of like the perfume commercial that said if you really want people to hear, you should whisper. And they noted that they heard my whisper better than my more recent rants. So while I am angrier at the state of our community than I have ever been, I am going to believe I can make a better contribution to the solution by controlling my anger and perhaps trying harder to find some truths that I can whisper that might help bring about the kind of change so badly needed in our community today. Because the other side of the issue is that if you are not saying it in a way that will make a difference what is the point in saying anything at all. Or at least that’s the way I see it.

The Way I See It

by Hollis Wormsby, Jr.

We must reduce the empathy for criminals

When I was a child and you did wrong, you got your butt whipped, and whipped good.  You were lucky if it was only one whipping, it depended on who gave you the first.  My father used to say in a tone that brought fear to us, “I will never be too busy, or too far away, if you do it, I will find out, and your ass will pay,” emphasis on the word ass, as payment.

Me and my cousins didn’t get into a lot of trouble as children, in part because we all had butt whipping fathers, and in part because in those days there was no empathy for children whose butts were whipped for doing wrong.  Nobody looked at the whelps on your legs and said anything like, “Oh you poor child.”  If anything the look was more like, I’ll bet you won’t do whatever you did to get those again.  But on the rare occasion that one of us, such as my cousin Billy did get in trouble, it was my Grandfather who would go and speak to the Judge.  My Grandfather owned a construction company, and there were two things he would promise the Judge; that Billy would get a butt whipping that he would remember, and that Billy would have to get up every day and go to work for him at a construction site.  Both of these were unpleasant and immediate consequences, and based on the certainty of this result, ultimately cousin Billy decided that crime did not pay, or at least in a currency that he could enjoy, and that if he did not make better choices there were awful consequences that he would prefer to avoid.  There were times when Billy’s mama would try to take up for him, but my Grandfather never listened to her.  He simply told her that if her way was working, he wouldn’t have had to get out of the bed in the middle of the night and go get her son out of trouble.

Fast forward to today.  A sixteen year old wanders the neighborhood all day.  His custodial parent doesn’t take the responsibility for monitoring him or holding him accountable for his actions.  There is no positive male involved in his life at all, and he has just kicked my door in to steal my tv.  I don’t want to hear about his problems.  What I know is that when he kicked in my door he violated my space, and he chose to put my family at risk.  What if he didn’t realize it but there was someone home?  Is he going to leave peacefully, is going to violently confront?  Is he a sexual predator who would hurt my wife or daughter?  I don’t know, and that is precisely the problem.  I don’t know what he is capable of, but I know he made a choice, the same one my cousin Billy made, but what will happen to him because of his choice.  A judge will set bail at a level he can afford, which the Judge will say is the law.  A bail bondsmen will take a slight fee, ten percent of Judge’s bail recommendation and provide a bond allowing him to be released from jail.  In three hours he will be back in the neighborhood, without a butt whipping, or any other consequence that would have meaning to him.   His life of crime will continue, and within days if not hours, another hard working family in the neighborhood will have become his victim.  If he is caught at all this is the worst he has to fear.  And if he makes the news it will be his mother or some other relative saying what a good boy he was, and how he doesn’t need to go to jail because of someone’s tv, like the tv is all that mattered.

I have been robbed before, and recently.  The side door to our home was kicked in, and worthless pricks, who are too lazy to work for their own living, ransacked our house, and touched places that are only meant for my family.  I do not have empathy for those that do this, they are low life, lazy and disrespectful of everything good and decent.  The thief may be able to be bailed out in hours, but the victim at a minimum will spend the rest of the night trying to physically secure their home, and marching the halls making sure the lowlifes don’t come back, not to mention months trying to assure shaken family members that our home is still safe and the bad guys are not going to come back and hurt us.

Okay I understand that we cannot give these pukes a butt whipping no matter how much we might like to, or how much good it might do, but we ought to be able to do something.  I suggest work camps as a condition of bail.  Either provide proof of full time employment, or you a are required by law to report to the work camps daily, where you will do hard labor, and be drug tested.  If you fail to fulfill your obligation, your bond is revoked, and your butt is brought back to the jail.  For many of these lazy low lifes that have never worked a day in their lives, other than trying to take what others have worked hard for, it is possible that a hard day’s work will be worse than a butt whipping.  Give them something shameful to wear too, like a t-shirt that says, “I’m here because my sorry ass tried to rob somebody.”

My cousin Billy eventually went off and joined the Air Force where he served for more than twenty years.  After his retirement he went back to Mobile and he now works for the ship yards.  He would be the first to tell you that without the tough love when he was sixteen, it aint no telling how his life might have turned out.  Compassion is a good thing, but it seems too often misdirected these days.  Being a criminal is a choice, being a victim is not.  One way to reduce crime is to reduce our empathy for the criminal, who is criminal by choice, and try to remember the real victims that low life criminals create.  Or at least that’t the way I see it.

(In addition to being a long time columnist with the Birmingham Times, Hollis Wormsby is the former host of Talkback on 98.7 and the current host of Real Talk on 101.9 WENN FM.  Real Talk can be heard on Sunday evenings from 9 to 10 pm.  Responses  to this blog are sometimes shared on the air.)

Workfare Not Welfare

The Way I See It by Hollis Wormsby, Jr.

Workfare Not Welfare

One of the greatest failures of our current welfare system is that it encourages too many people to live without having to invest in meaningful work efforts.  Whenever welfare programs are criticized, those that defend them will be quick to point out the percentage of recipients that are elderly, or disabled, or working, and the public feels differently about assisting these groups.  But there is a hard cold reality that you see if you live in any urban community, and that is the programs allow a lot of people not to work at all.

It is important to remember that welfare programs were not designed by poor people, and that it is even questionable as to whether or not helping poor people is their primary objective.  Having worked in poverty programming for most of my career, I am of the opinion that our poverty programs have become a profit center for individuals and corporations that are growing fat off of programs whose premise is that the best way to help people is to pay others to do everything for them.

Let us look at housing as a simple example.  Every homeowner gets a housing subsidy, each time they file their tax return.  The mortgage interest you pay on your home is tax deductible, and this is a deduction that has no limit, and no income.  So the higher your mortgage payment the larger your housing subsidy from the federal government is.  The difference is that the government trusts you to manage your own housing subsidy, and so they just give it to you in your tax return.  But for low income persons the government has created a kind of caretaker society, such that the tax subsidy doesn’t go to the low income family, but rather more money goes to a caretaker provider to provide the service on behalf of the family that is rated as not capable of managing their own housing need.

Let us look at food stamps as another example.  When you or I purchase groceries with a credit card the grocery store pays anywhere from 2-3 percent of our purchase as an exchange fee to the credit card provider.  However, when a food stamp card user purchases at the same store the store is given a fee of 2-3 percent for accepting the food stamp card.  This means that the store sees a 4-6 percent difference in net income in the transaction when they engage in a subsidized transaction via the food stamp card, as compared to serving a customer with a conventional card.

Our welfare system is based on a caretaker mentality that makes those providing service rich, while encouraging the underdevelopment of families in the system.  Even as to the idea of welfare instead of workfare.  Labor unions have been the entities most resistant to workfare over the years.  Labor unions feared that if workfare, or subsidized work for welfare recipients was allowed then ultimately it would lower the wages of all workers.  And primarily for this reason workfare initiatives have never received much support.  But the sad truth is that the failure of our caretaker welfare system to effectively integrate recipient families into the work place is probably the number one factor in the decline of our urban communities.

If you add up the value of a section 8 certificate, food stamps, free health insurance, and the basic welfare payment, you have a transfer value that is the equivalent to the purchasing power of a $25,000 a year job.  Trouble is you have given the home the purchasing power, but no obligation to do anything to earn or maintain the purchasing power.   And so we have a litany of males, who live off the resources the state provides to their mama’s, baby mama’s and grandmama’s, while selling drugs and doing petty crimes for pocket money and rims.  Is this all recipients?  The answer is no, but the cold hard truth is that Birmingham, and most urban cities, are becoming the home of last resort to populations that are benefit dependent, and that do not generate enough local taxes to support the services that will need to be provided on their behalf.

We must create an immediate change in policy where if you are in need of assistance we offer you a public job, instead of welfare.  We could create tax credits for certain jobs like nursing assistants, and let hospitals compete for them, and then use these credits to provide entry level employment to people on welfare.  The money to pay for these jobs would be coming from money currently used to pay the same people to sit and do nothing.  We could create public daycare centers and train welfare recipients to run 24 hour affordable day care centers.  This would address one of the greatest impediments many low income families have to returning to work, and that is access to affordable day care.  Again most of the money going to pay the day care workers would be the money you were formally giving them to sit on the porch.

We need public works jobs for disengaged youth.  Whether it is cleaning up the parks or painting a public facility, we need available job training, and we need job training that can be assigned as a condition of bail.

Crime is bad in our communities in part because there are too many people wondering our communities without employment.  We must change the emphasis of our subsidy programs immediately.  We must end the caretaker state that allows individuals and corporations to profit off of the poverty, and allows too many individuals the freedom to indulge in irresponsible behavior while being subsidized on the public dime.  We must restore the perceived value of doing a hard day’s work in the parts of our communities where it has been lost.  Or at least that’s the way I see it.

A Religious Butt Kicking

I took what could only be described as a religious butt kicking the other day in response to some comments I made in a guest appearance on a talk show on WAGG regarding the separation of church and state.  I understood at the time the intensity of emotion that my comments drew, but left frustrated that the discussion was limited to the emotions of the callers, and we could never really get into a discussion on the issue itself, because my viewpoint made the callers angry.  My motivation for sitting down and writing this column after months of absence was the frustration I felt at the end of the discussion.

The unpopular viewpoint that I expressed was that I do not believe that schools are the appropriate place to teach our children about faith, and by extension do not believe in mandatory prayer in schools.  I am a Christian, I take personal responsibility for teaching my children what I believe, just as the generation before me took personal responsibility for teaching me what they believed.  I would go one step further even, and note that my mother worked a full time job to generate the money to send my brothers and me to Catholic School, even though we weren’t Catholic.  And that at Saint Jude High School we prayed every morning and went to mass every Friday, and we were the better for it.

Saint Jude was a private school that my parents made the choice to send me to.  That is the important distinction, that my parents chose.  When our founding fathers embedded the concept of separation of church and state into our constitution it was not done to limit religious freedom, it was done to secure religious freedom.  Our founding fathers immigrated here from European nations where religious persecution was common place, the separation of church and state embedded in our constitution was not placed there to limit religious freedom, it was placed there to insure it.

During the debate I participated in, the host of the program noted that she did not mind prayer in school in general, but she would not want her child to have to pray a Muslim prayer.  Well so the Muslim child would not want to be compelled to say a Christian prayer, or the Jewish child would not want to be forced to bow to Budha.  She made the point for separation of church and state, if religion is not presented by the state, then the state cannot limit your freedoms.

A number of the callers indicated that they felt that removing God from the Schools is the reason for the decline in our communities.  I don’t agree with this point either.  As I noted on the air, I did not learn my religious values primarily from a school, or a school teacher.  I learned my values first of all from my parents, and then from my grandfather and the other elder members of my family.  They tried to insure that the seeds of faith that they planted had fertile soil to grow good roots in.  In my mind if we put God in school for five minutes and that is the only exposure that some youth get, then at best we will be planting seeds in shallow soil, and when they return to dysfunctional homes without Christ, their roots will soon expire as will what little faith they have been exposed to.

Unless those who feel that way, feel so strongly they are willing to pursue a constitutional amendment to change the definition of separation of church and state that has sustained this country since independence, then the question should not be how do get God back in our schools, it should be how do we get God back in, or in dysfunctional homes.

Lets look at this from one last angle before I let it go for now.  Schools are an extension of the state.  If we surrender the responsibility for teaching values to the schools, then we are surrendering the responsibility for teaching our children values to the state.  Parents of all income levels are already spending less and lesss time teaching their children anything of significance, or monitoring what the schools are teaching.  So because of a class of dysfunctional homes, do we all want to surrender to the state, the responsibility and the right to define the values our children will be taught?  My answer to that is a resounding no.  Welfare is the state program to enhance our families, anybody believe that the families in that system are stronger than two parent families functioning on their own?  Anybody believe the family unit is stronger because of welfare policies?  Anybody believe there is less crime in our communities because of the values taught by the state, through the welfare system?  I do not.  And I do not want to surrender to the state, the responsibility to teach my child what to believe in.  That is one my most sacred rights as a parent.

Jesus did not teach in a school.  For the most part he taught in open fields or wherever folks would come to him.  It is right as Christians to want to spread the word of the healing power of our faith, and of the redemptive nature of our Saviour, but it is our responsibility to find a way to spread this word of joy that does not impose on the freedoms or choices of others.

I would be very supportive of non-secular education on societal values and responsibilities being provided in our schools.   In my time these were called civics classes.  I have no objections to churches being allowed to recruit for after school programs.   I am proud of churches that provide counseling to at risk families.  But just as I have cautioned against unquestioned expansion of police and state powers in response to the fears of terrorism after 911, I would scream loudly against any efforts to impose religion into our school system as a short term fix.  We certainly need to fight to keep Christ in the lives of our children, I just think that fight is a personal responsibility that should not be delegated to the state.  And further I feel strongly that the problem is not that Christ is not in our schools, the problem is that he is not in our homes.  I believe the fight should be to reinforce traditional family values, and to return Christ to a position of prominence in our homes and communities.  I believe we have already tried too hard to replace family with state, and the welfare system is a flaming example of the failure of this way of thinking.  Or at least that’s the way  I see it.

(In addition to being a long time columnist with the Birmingham Times, Hollis Wormsby is the former host of Talkback on 98.7 and the current host of Real Talk on 101.9 WENN FM.  Real Talk can be heard on Sunday evenings from 9 to 10 pm.  Responses  to this blog are sometimes shared on the air.)