As we try to appreciate and give thanks this weekend — and digest and snarf up leftovers — I, too, will look over my personal landscape to find sources of joy. First and foremost are my lovely wife, my sweet daughters, my sister and brother, their kids, my friends, my sources — my editors, even. On the farm, our bees struggled through the drought and produced plenty of honey; we still have greens and beets in the garden, peppers preserved on the shelves. We have health, though wealth for a writer is elusive.
Amen, on the personal side.
On the writing side, I must give thanks to Marion Barry. For this journalist and many more, Barry is the gift that keeps on giving. Who could make Marion up?
In the last two weeks Barry tried to remake himself. He came to D.C. in 1965 as the hip civil rights militant, a bullet as an amulet around his neck, his heart and soul with the poor. As an elected official for most of the past 40 years, including 16 as mayor, he has talked a great game about lifting poor folks — even as he established and presided over a city that kept the city’s poor uneducated, unhealthy, unsafe and unprepared for life beyond welfare.
Yet here was the new and improved Marion Barry last week suggesting that the District end welfare for life.
“My legislation, while imperfect and incomplete, is intended to start a serious dialogue on how to break the cycle of generational poverty, government dependency and economic disparity in the city,” he wrote.
His bill would limit a family’s time on welfare to five years. That would throw about 8,000 families off the dole, if the bill were to take effect now.
Debate on Barry’s bill will divide on usual lines: Conservatives will cheer; liberals will object.
But what blows my mind is Barry’s unabashed hypocrisy.
“Unfortunately,” he explains, “in our city, we have elected officials, members of the media, advocates and residents who seem to prefer to keep [welfare recipients] enslaved, without jobs and without hope.”
For God’s sake, Barry is that “elected official” who has “enslaved” thousands of D.C. residents. He created the nonfunctioning job-training system that has failed for decades. He ignored a public school system that failed to educate generations of poor Washingtonians.
I was trying to wrap my arms around Barry’s latest version of himself when he reverted to form. He ordered $26,000 worth of turkeys from Giant Food stores so he could give them away at Union Temple Church before Thanksgiving. But he didn’t pay for them; he was $9,000 short. Giant declined to deliver the birds. Instead of forking over the dough, Barry called Giant “heartless.”
Barry, the sudden welfare reformer, wanted a handout.
And the truth will set us free.
Thanks again, Marion, for being yourself.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
