Emphasizing the need to show progress using the limited money and authority available to city government, the approach outlined in the memo is more business- and results-oriented than broader strategies used in the past, which relied on federal subsidies and entitlement programs to fight poverty at all levels.
“We must take what we have learned and fashion a realistic set of recommendations that will give more New Yorkers a chance to lift themselves out of poverty,” reads the memo, from Mr. Parsons, Mr. Canada and Deputy Mayor Linda I. Gibbs, who is overseeing the commission. “To have a more powerful impact, rather than spread efforts across the entire population,” the memo suggests focusing on children younger than 6, people 16 to 24, and the working poor.
To Cut Poverty, Panel Advises a Narrow Focus
By DIANE CARDWELL
Leaders of a mayoral commission charged with working to eradicate poverty in New York City are scaling back wider ambitions to instead focus on helping three distinct populations: young children, young adults and the working poor.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg formed the panel in January to draw up a template for his administration to attack chronic poverty. He described this as a key goal of his second term, much as overhauling the school system was during his first.
The panel has completed its fieldwork, and a memo from its leaders to its members, which was given to The New York Times by critics of the narrowed focus, indicates that the group is shelving suggestions to help populations like the elderly, men returning from prison, the unemployed and the homeless.
The Commission on Economic Opportunity, as the panel is named, is drawn from the upper echelons of the city’s business, nonprofit, academic and social services sectors, with Richard D. Parsons, the chairman of Time Warner, and Geoffrey Canada, who runs one of the most acclaimed antipoverty programs in the country, at its helm. Its leaders have traveled to the city’s poorest areas and even overseas to determine which strategies are most successful.
The memo urges the commission, as it prepares its final report to the mayor, to hone its recommendations to include only proven methods that will be most effective in combating poverty.
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I don't mean this as a
I don't mean this as a criticism but the city's approach could also be seen as a form of combining the practices of advanced and reverse triage. That is, helping those who appear to be among the most vulnerable victims of poverty while simultaneously giving them the assistance they need because, in the long run, they will be better equipped to move out of poverty and thereby minimize or significantly reduce the likelihood that their progeny will fall into poverty. Â
I'm watching.I understand
I'm watching.
I understand the need to prioritize. I don't like cutting off the very concept of help at a certain point.Â
I don't like the concept of
I don't like the concept of cutting off help either. This is probably an awful thing to write but we may have reached that terrible point that occurs at the end of Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" where Chief Bromden comes to understand that he can't let McMurphy's lobotimzed body continue to live and breathe on the ward any more because of the message it sends to those who are there and those who may still be placed on the ward. What the Chief does, however, is out of love for McMurphy and other human beings and a desire to resist what he calls the "Combine."Â
Never read the book or saw
Never read the book or saw the movie. Why did the chief let McMurphy be lobotomized?
McMurphy and Chief Bromden
McMurphy and Chief Bromden were both "patients" at a government run mental hospital. McMurphy had been placed there by court order and he kept challenging the rules and authority of those who ran the facility especially the Head Nurse whose last name was Ratched. Nurse Ratched is cruel, sadistic and sexually repressed. She values order and obediance above all else.
The pivotal scene in the book (as well as the play and film too) occurs when McMurphy leads the other patients to into throwing a party on the ward without Nurse Ratched's knowledge or permission. McMurphy adds a couple of women, probably prostitutes but with hearts of gold, to the mix. His intention is to ensure that one of the other patients, Billy, who stutters and seems kind of infantile in ways gets laid for the first time in his life.
Nurse Ratched finds out about the party and is outraged. What really sets her off, however, is her discovery that Billy had sex with a woman. She lays into Billy by telling him how greatly disappointed his mother will be when she finds out that he had sex with a woman and she doesn't let up. The relationship between Billy and his mother is quite strange with whiffs of unconsummated, perhaps, feelings of incest. Nurse Ratched's ability to play on these feelingss seems especially cruel. Billy, wracked by guilt and fear of facing his mother, commits suicide.
McMurphy loses it completely when this happens and assaults Nurse Ratched by grabbing the front of her nurse's uniform and ripping it open thereby exposing her breasts for everyone to see. McMurphy is grabbed by the attendants and taken away. Nurse Ratched is humiliated but she gets her revenge when McMurphy is declared to be a dangerous psychopath. His punishment: part of his brain is snipped away leaving him in a drooling, infantile and, more importantly, passive state.
Chief Bromden, who is a Native American who had become catatonic in the face of what he and his people had had to endure, decides that he can't leave McMurphy around as a reminder and warning to people of what could happen to them when they buck the system. He dearly loves McMurphy and so he decides that since McMurphy has, in effect, sacrificed himself for Bromden and the others that he must sacrifice himself for McMurphy. He gets a pillow and goes into the room where McMurphy is and places the pillow over McMurphy's face until he stops breathing.
I can't see me ever reaching
I can't see me ever reaching that point.
Chief Bromden probably
Chief Bromden probably didn't either. I gues I have had to keep in mind what the old folks used to tell me which was: you can always say what you haven't done but you can never say what you won't do.Â
you can always say what you
In this case, I can. That's a decision, not a prediction.
That's a decision, not a
That's a decision, not a prediction.
This is one of the reasons I like you.