AN ADOPTION ABORTED

Like many people, I have a warm spot in my heart for adoptions. I have a niece who’s adopted and a godchild who’s adopted. A large fraction of my friends have adopted children. And despite the fact that I know better than to have any more kids, I even wonder from time to time about what it would be like to adopt a kid of my own.

I especially appreciate seeing gay people adopt. It’s not that they’re better parents than anyone else. Most of us stink at parenting – gay or straight. It’s just that I enjoy almost any conduct that gives the finger to those who have misread the Declaration of Independence. I feel quite comfortable in assuming that if Jefferson were alive today – not Jefferson the plantation squire, but Jefferson the statesman – he’d favor same-sex adoptions. And speaking of sex, that’s the only downside of adoptions: there’s no period of time when your spouse feels compelled to have sex with you just because of the need for a child. Too bad for adopting fathers.

It was this time last year when adoptions were on everyone’s mind. We weren’t talking, though, about adopting a baby. We were talking about adopting a city.

That’s right, this time last year, America sat in horror as we watched a city known for French chefs, jazz musicians and visiting hedonists turn into a spectacle of floating bodies and fecal liquid. Now I’m not going to go through the whole Megillah of Brownie bashing again. That’s too easy – as easy as shooting crawfish in a barrel. I want to talk about something else: our initial impulse to adopt the city, and our ultimate decision to forget all about it and go back to the apathy from whence we came.

After the horrors of the first week or two, I actually became intrigued by the prospect that we were assuming responsibility for a whole city of poor Americans. Remember all the empathy that disaster created? Remember the President’s speech when he pledged so much assistance? Remember the talking heads on TV predicting that we’d be throwing gobs of money at the problem? There would obviously be a lot of waste, I thought, but there would also be a great opportunity for us to learn which anti-poverty measures worked and which ones didn’t, and to replicate elsewhere all the lessons we learned. In other words, the New Orleans poor would be guinea pigs, but I saw that as a large step up from being orphans.

For the first time in decades, Americans were coming to grips with the fact that poor people live right here on these shores -- that poverty isn’t the sole province of Africans like South Park’s Starvin’ Marvin. It’s sad that people were so clueless, but wisdom comes better late than never. And what was particularly fascinating was that even though we quickly became aware of the enormity of our poverty problem, we seemed determined to solve it – at least in New Orleans. We also had to face one of the great truths about widespread poverty: that the private sector can’t solve it alone. The poor souls trapped in or around the Big Easy might not share the skin color of the guys who, for example, give out the trophies at the PGA Championship, but everyone agreed that they were victims of a great American tragedy and merited our help. More to the point, we understood that we could take the combined charitable contributions of every scratch golfer in America, and it still wouldn’t be enough to give these people the money they needed to enjoy the American dream. Only public support could do that. A New New Deal of sorts. A return to FDR.

Well, it never materialized. And the opportunity has now slipped away.

Recently, amidst all the stories about a city that remains neglected, I noticed that a bunch of the Katrina victims have descended upon Houston, thereby causing the crime rate in that city to increase materially. I can just see some of the law-abiding people of Houston shaking their heads, wondering if these people have any shame.

I suspect they do. The criminal life is indeed a shameful one. And justice requires that we catch the criminals and punish them for their acts. But then again, criminals don’t have a monopoly on shame. It’s shameful for the rest of us to live in a country and a world that combines massive affluence with massive poverty.

I was raised in a culture in which the holy books tell us not only that justice is a fundamental good, but also that it means the same thing as charity – as in, without the latter there can be none of the former. That teaching has always rung true to me. It also seems like an ideal that we love to enunciate but find oh so difficult to honor in practice.

The truth is that there never was any better reason to adopt New Orleans than Detroit, Camden or Watts. These places are all more or less the same: filled with people who ultimately aren’t very different from you and me, and who need our compassion, our attention and a fair bit of our resources. People love to talk about the need to clean up the crime in these city, and well they should, but where is our charity? Where is our concern? Where are our programmatic measures to help them help themselves break away from the flood plains and tenements?

Victims of Katrina might have thought they’d be treated differently than other poor Americans. Maybe they believed the promises, much like the orphan who always trusts that the next bright-eyed couple they meet will be their new mom and dad. The reality is, though, that it’s going to take a lot more than a storm to cause our Congress to throw big dollars at any group of Americans – other than the very rich. But at least Katrina accomplished something important. No longer can anyone think of poverty as the exclusive province of the “third world.” Clearly, it’s part of our own national heritage, just like the Mardi Gras and jazz.