Belfast Telegraph

"In the USA, if your get up and go has got up and gone, you might as well lay down and die, for there ain't anybody going to help you."

Shame of US shanty towns

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Anyway, it turns out that the bad weather that has blighted northern Europe this summer has hit New York as well. I had no idea. Though I would like to see the sun at least once more before I die, I am glad of some relief from the high humidity that tends to build up at this time of year.

Brooklyn during a heatwave is more like the Caribbean. Everybody who doesn't work in Wall Street wears baggy shorts and loose shirts, often in garish colours. Kids cluster around fire hydrants which, with a miscreant's hammer blow, are rendered into instant street fountains. At the same time, hot air blasts out from a million air-conditioners, raising the heat on the sidewalks to levels more associated with Mexico City than the Northeast of the United States. But it turns out we're the lucky ones. According to an article in the New York Times, some 400,000 Mexican- Americans are living in squalor this summer, and every summer, in the southern counties of Texas. There, we are informed, in the so- called Colonias, people live in plywood shacks, patched-together caravans and, in some cases, packing cases, surrounded by dirt roads, with neither water, sewerage or electricity.

What is remarkable is that these are US citizens, not illegals, who have been abandoned by the State of Texas and left to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Poor people are supposed to live like this in Bolivia, or in the favellas of Brazil, not in the richest country on Earth. What does it say about George W Bush's adopted state - of which he was governor for six years - that for decades it has tolerated the fact that nearly half a million of its citizens lived in shanty towns?

Yet, tellingly, the story is not one of unrelieved despair. The Times reports that "through frugality and hard work, in a process known as incremental building that is rare in the United States but common in the Third World, families are transforming hovels into homes, one wall and window at a time".

It would appear that the Colonias, with little help from the outside, will soon have achieved a status not unlike that of Soweto, the most famous township in South Africa, where there is such drive and energy that a new class of rich, entrepreneurial blacks has developed who live next to, if not in the same conditions as, the poor.

I would not be surprised to learn that Soweto is in fact the model for what is going on in Texas. The authorities in the Lone Star State are, after all, much too engaged day-to-day in putting prisoners to death to give hope or leadership to the deserving poor.

Mind you, it has always been like this in America. If any of you are fans of Deadwood, the superbly written and acted story of a Wild West frontier town in the 1870s, you will have noticed that everything begins and ends in squalor. The characters may talk in a kind of elevated poetry, mixed in with the most astonishing profanities, but their physical lives are dominated by mud, horse dung and disease. Nobody gives nobody nuthin in Deadwood. If you don't make it through, it's because you're useless and don't deserve to live.

I'm not saying that that is the official attitude towards poverty and need in modern-day America, but I'm not saying that it isn't either. Think of New Orleans two years on from Hurricane Katrina. What little has been done there for the dispossessed has for the most part been done by ordinary people.

In the USA, if your get up and go has got up and gone, you might as well lay down and die, for there ain't anybody going to help you.

I have mentioned the scandal of health care a number of times in this column – the fact that 45m Americans cannot afford health cover. But now consider education.

In Guilford County, North Carolina, the turnover of teachers has become so severe in some high-poverty areas that principals are hiring new teachers for nearly every class, every term. So disenchanted are so many teachers with the system in which they are expected to operate that they are being offered recruitment bonuses of as much as $$10,000 simply to take on the task.

"We had schools where we didn't have a single certified math teacher," Terry Grier, the Guilford schools superintendent, told the Times. "We needed an incentive, because we couldn't convince teachers to go to these schools without one."

New York, with the nation's largest school system, faces a widespread flight from the profession by teachers of all ages. To deal with the exodus, it has hurriedly recruited 5,000 new teachers, especially those certified in math, science and special education, by offering incentives that can include $$5,000 for a down payment on an apartment.

"This is an acute problem that is becoming a crisis," one leading educator has said. But, hey, it's still August.

The fish are a-jumpin' and the cotton is high. So let's all look forward to the Fall.

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