Life on the Street

The news is nothing but good on Wall Street, where life continues to be one wild, exciting ride. High-flying financiers fly a little higher with each surge of the Dow. Its periodic dips evoke gasps and muffled screams from market watchers, but the canny investor seizes the opportunity to cherry-pick new holdings at bargain prices and wait for the market's momentum to carry things upward again.

CEOs, eager to appease profit-hungry stockholders, cut costs by shifting production offshore. At home, payrolls are trimmed and workforces downsized. The number of costly, benefit-laden full-time jobs decrease, replaced by armies of part-timers and contract workers. Grateful corporations reward their hatchet men and women with huge bonuses. And more stock.

Speaking in the voice of what passes for God on Wall Street, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan pronounces himself pleased by reports that unemployment is up, thereby keeping inflation at bay and interest rates steady. Duly inspired, investors become ever more confident and indexes soar again. The bond market goes through the roof.

On other streets, the ride is equally wild, but far less lucrative.

Prosperity was not enough to prevent Congress and President Clinton from dismantling the welfare system and passing responsibility on to the states. Now, driven by varying timetables and social philosophies, governors and state legislators are dutifully unraveling the already inadequate safety nets that sought to give the poor, the old, the weak, and the vulnerable a modicum of protection.

Chanting the mantra of "welfare to work," Clinton has traveled the nation, celebrating the paper gains of welfare reduction programs and ignoring the human toll. Two thousand, 5,000, 10,000 people gone from the welfare rolls, the president exulted in his travels from state to state.

But where have they gone? Where are the jobs? And even where jobs exist, how can we be sure that the halt and the lame, the flawed, the troubled, and addicted can manage to keep them? Who will care for their children? Where are the benefits that will pay to treat their ills, fill their teeth, and provide the services that were provided by a society that once upon a time felt obliged to care for its weakest members?

THE TRUTH IS, once off welfare many people will simply have no place to go. Some will be swallowed in the shadows of the gray economy-at best, accepting under-the-table payment for casual work; at worst, lost to the drug trade, prostitution, grand and petty crime. They will join the ranks of the invisible in this society, the weak and broken people whom the affluent, in all their greed and moral blindness, have chosen not to see.

There already is a precedent for being flawed and invisible in this society. Once the mentally ill were cut loose in the Reagan era not only from the institutions that once housed them but also from the community treatment centers that might have helped them, they took to the streets of many American cities.

And there they remain: invisible; their misery apparent and largely ignored by all who pass them by. Their presence in most cities, including the nation's capital, is a fact of American life. It is also a prophecy of what lies ahead for the casualties of what our political leaders would have us believe is welfare reform.

If as a nation we have blinded ourselves to the homeless mentally ill, it is only a matter of time before we become equally blind to the ranks of unemployed or underemployed. We will choose not to see the homeless and hungry adults and children who once scraped by on welfare, but soon will have no place to go but the street.

On Wall Street, these long, cold, winter nights are a time of accounting. It is a time for cashing in last-minute profits; for toting up gains and losses; for clearing the books in anticipation of a new year. But for believers, it is a time of spiritual accounting.

And if a prayer can be said for Greenspan and those who follow his economic gospel; for stockholders and CEOs; and for all who celebrate and share in Wall Street's gains and for our own poor selves, the prayer is this: Deliver us, Lord, from our blindness. Allow us to see your face and show your mercy to all whom greed has driven to the street.

JOAN CONNELL is senior editor of Religion News Service. She also writes a weekly column on ethics and values in cyberspace for MSNBC on the Internet.