As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor by Shorris, Earl: Uses of a Liberal Education
AS A WEAPON IN TH
E HANDS OF THE RESTLESS POO
Title: AS A WEAPON IN THE HANDS OF THE RESTLESS POOR , By: Shorris, Earl, Harper's Magazine, 0017789X, Sep97, Vol. 295, Issue 1768
ON THE USES OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION
AS A WEAPON IN THE HANDS OF THE RESTLESS POOR
Next month I will publish a book about poverty in America, but not the book I intended. The world took me by surprise--not once, but again and again. The poor themselves led me in directions I could not have imagined, especially the one that came out of a conversation in a maximum-security prison for women that is set, incongruously, in a lush Westchester suburb fifty miles north of New York City.
I had been working on the book for about three years when I went to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for the first time. The staff and inmates had developed a program to deal with family violence, and I wanted to see how their ideas fit with what I had learned about poverty.
Numerous forces--hunger, isolation, illness, landlords, police, abuse, neighbors, drugs, criminals, and racism, among many others--exert themselves on the poor at all times and enclose them, making up a "surround of force" from which, it seems, they cannot escape. I had come to understand that this was what kept the poor from being political and that the absence of politics in their lives was what kept them poor. I don't mean "political" in the sense of voting in an election but in the way Thucydides used the word: to mean activity with other people at every level, from the family to the neighborhood to the broader community to the city-state.
By the time I got to Bedford Hills, I had listened to more than six hundred people, some of them over the course of two or three years. Although my method is that of the bricoleur, the tinkerer who assembles a thesis of the bric-a-brac he finds in the world, I did not think there would be any more surprises. But I had not counted on what Viniece Walker was to say.
It is
E HANDS OF THE RESTLESS POO
Title: AS A WEAPON IN THE HANDS OF THE RESTLESS POOR , By: Shorris, Earl, Harper's Magazine, 0017789X, Sep97, Vol. 295, Issue 1768
ON THE USES OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION
AS A WEAPON IN THE HANDS OF THE RESTLESS POOR
Next month I will publish a book about poverty in America, but not the book I intended. The world took me by surprise--not once, but again and again. The poor themselves led me in directions I could not have imagined, especially the one that came out of a conversation in a maximum-security prison for women that is set, incongruously, in a lush Westchester suburb fifty miles north of New York City.
I had been working on the book for about three years when I went to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for the first time. The staff and inmates had developed a program to deal with family violence, and I wanted to see how their ideas fit with what I had learned about poverty.
Numerous forces--hunger, isolation, illness, landlords, police, abuse, neighbors, drugs, criminals, and racism, among many others--exert themselves on the poor at all times and enclose them, making up a "surround of force" from which, it seems, they cannot escape. I had come to understand that this was what kept the poor from being political and that the absence of politics in their lives was what kept them poor. I don't mean "political" in the sense of voting in an election but in the way Thucydides used the word: to mean activity with other people at every level, from the family to the neighborhood to the broader community to the city-state.
By the time I got to Bedford Hills, I had listened to more than six hundred people, some of them over the course of two or three years. Although my method is that of the bricoleur, the tinkerer who assembles a thesis of the bric-a-brac he finds in the world, I did not think there would be any more surprises. But I had not counted on what Viniece Walker was to say.
It is