Welfare reality

In Creek County, Oklahoma, the rolls fell 30 percent even as the Legislature was still debating the law, a decline officials largely attributed to the mere rumors of what was coming. ... The late 1990s can be thought of as a bookend to the 1960s. One era, branding welfare a right, sent the rolls to sudden highs; the other, deeming welfare wrong, shrank them equally fast.

     The mass movement from welfare rolls to employment rolls is progress. But DeParle's unsentimental reporting offers scant confirmation of the welfare reformers' highest hope, that when former welfare mothers go to work, their example will transform the culture of their homes, breaking the chain of behaviors that passes poverty down the generations. On the street where Jobe lives today, almost every house is the home of a working mother with children but no husband.

     When Jobe was 13 her parents divorced and she went to live with her father, who let her roam Chicago's South Side streets. The father of the child she had at 17 is serving a 65-year prison sentence. And the wheel turns: Jobe's daughter Kesha got pregnant at 16. Kesha told the 14-year-old father at his eighth-grade graduation, and hardly heard from him again. Kesha, a checkout clerk at a grocery store, has two children and lives with a boyfriend.

     Jobe's house teems with life. During a recent visit there were two infants in diapers, and the 17-year-old girlfriend who lives there with Jobe's 18-year-old son.

     Milwaukee's mandatory self-esteem classes were part of the ``hassle factor'' designed to diminish welfare's appeal. But, says Jobe, ``There's nothing wrong with my self-esteem,'' the timbre of her voice validating the assertion. She is a 4-foot-9 geyser of pluck, humor, and compassion for her nursing home patients. She has no sense of entitlement. DeParle says of her and the other two women whose story he tells, ``When welfare was there for the taking, they got on the bus and took it; when it wasn't, they made other plans.''

     What of her future? Today she says, ``I don't think much about tomorrow.'' Complete absorption in the present is both a cause and a consequence of living a precarious and disorganized life, but so far her post-welfare story illustrates two truisms: People respond to strong social cues, as she did when she got on the bus, and later when she got off welfare. Second, poor people are more resilient -- and more resistant to fundamental behavior modification -- than their various would-be improvers suppose.