They’re
calling
Columbia, South Carolina, “the new Southern hot spot.” It’s buzzing with new
business. The coveted economic revival has arrived.
So naturally it’s time to get rid of the
homeless. They blemish the pretty cityscape.
New
York Times staffer Alan Blinder reported the eviction story and noted that
homelessness in the county rose 43 percent in the last two years. He stated
that some of the county’s roughly 1,500 unfortunates idle on Columbia’s streets
and frighten some citizens.
Mr. Blinder quoted
luggage store owner Richard Balser, who said:
“People
are afraid to get out of their cars when they see a homeless person. They haven’t
been a problem. They just scare people.”
As the city’s conservative city fathers
and business leaders see it, the best remedy for the situation is to shoo the
derelicts out of town--and maybe set up a shelter some 15 miles away.
The
city council voted unanimously for the eviction. They apparently dismissed
entirely the protest of Jaja Akair, one of the rootless ones. Mr. Akair told
the council:
“You’ve
got to get to the root of the problem—why we’re homeless. You can’t just knock
us to the side like we’re a piece of meat or a piece of paper.”
Now,
you might regard Columbia’s action as cruel disregard for vulnerable and needy
fellow citizens. You might conclude Columbians failed to consider the moral
implications of their decision.
And you’d be right.
The Columbians have
done this when lack of morality among our leaders at all government levels has
become an issue among academic and religious leaders. They note the disregard
for the “common good”—or “people’s good”—that’s so glaring especially in the
Halls of the U.S. Congress and many state legislatures.
In
recent months articles on the common good have appeared widely. The 57-year old
Evangelical Christian publication Christianity
Today has run an article and similar articles appeared in Time Magazine’s
on-line edition, in the Seattle Times, in Jim Wallis’ evangelical Sojourner Magazine, and even in the
publication of the Organic Consumers Association.
The
“common good” concept has been around for thousands of years. Put most simply,
the phrase refers to policies, actions, or items the citizens of a city, state,
or nation, say, would recognize as desirable and beneficial for everyone.
Aristotle is
more precise. A common good, he stated, is “a good proper to and attainable
only by a community, yet individually shared by its individuals.”
The once ancient and widely
accepted concept was seldom discussed prior to the GOP takeover in 2001. In
1999 Political Scientist Thomas W. Smith of Villanova University wrote in the American Political Science Review:
“Talk about the common
good has been all but abandoned. In the twentieth Century only Catholic social
and political theory still clings to the concept.”
Professor Smith noted
that the common good was “a central problem in political theory” because it
provided a way to distinguish between a politician’s personal interests and the
interests of the community.
It
also provides a way for a group of politicians like Columbia’s city council or GOP
Tea Partiers to distinguish between their collective interests and the public’s
interest.
As if they cared.
True, people disagree
on what is “good” or what is good for a community and shared by each
individual.
The practical way to
overcome that hitch is follow the urgings of philosophers John Mill and Jeremy
Bentham. In essence they said it is right to do the maximum good for the most
people.
It’s
even easier to adopt a rule we all know: Do to others what you would want done
to you—the “Golden Rule.”
If state governors followed
that rule they wouldn’t bar their state’s poor from the health care mandated by
Obamacare. Were national and state legislators to follow that rule they would
raise the minimum wage, preserve food stamps, and absolutely resist shutting
down the government.
But back to Columbia,
SC.
You might ask what its citizens could do about their homeless brethren.
That’s simple. Help
them.
----Gus Gribbin
Note: Mr. Alan Blinder’s New York Times
article appeared on Monday, August 26, 2013.
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