Testimony Delivered to the House and Senate Ways and Means Committee

Kip Tiernan
March 23, 2003

Senators, Representatives, Members of the House and Senate Ways and Means Committee, Honored Guests, Advocates, Brothers and Sisters

Thank you for the opportunity to share a few thoughts with you today. Over the years I have started, or helped to start, a number of alternative human services structures, when the ones we had in place so many years ago were no longer adequate for the growing need. This Easter, we at Rosie's Place will celebrate our 29th anniversary. We have yet to take a dime from the city, state or federal government, so I'm not here today to ask you for any money.

It seems to me we advocates, over the years, created an ethic to meet all those desperate and growing needs, rather than acknowledging the need for a more substantive ethic - one that would preclude the necessity for shelters and soup kitchens and other human services alternatives that became less and less of a priority to our government. How well I remember the Chair of Sociology at Emmanuel College saying to me, "Alleviating the suffering is OK, but as advocates, we must also help to eliminate the causes of the suffering." (I had, by then, started Rosie's Place and the Greater Boston Food Bank.) Hunger and homelessness were serious problems in the seventies. Administrations come and go, and, depending on their concerns and agendas, we find that the increasing needs of a larger number of people are not always being met, despite the rhetoric of "compassion" and "core mission." (Compassion is the deep feeling of sharing the pain of others, together with the inclination to show mercy.)

On a more pragmatic note, if you don't diagnose a disease early enough, it may metastasize into something much more complicated, and end up costing much more. This is the situation we find ourselves in today. It is the unintended consequences of our actions I am concerned about here today. I have learned to listen to those whose realities are created for them by those in power. You have that power - to give or take away, and, as elected officials, you must know your obligations as protectors of the public and, hopefully, as surrogates of the advocate community. Much of what you do or don't do has unintended consequences. For instance, what do we do now with the elderly who can't get glasses or hearing aids or prescriptions for their illnesses? Start still another alternative? What do we do with the traumatized kids who no longer have psychiatric care? What do we do with the fifty thousand citizens in Mass Health Care, who as of April 1, have no coverage? And, what do we do with a growing population of citizens who can't get into a shelter any more because they are not a priority?

Vaclav Havel, former prisoner of the Czech Republic, and later it's President, has this to say regarding civility: "The best laws and the best conceived democratic mechanisms will not, in and of themselves, guarantee legality and freedom or human rights if they are not underpinned by certain human and social values….in the somewhat chaotic provisional around the technical aspects of building the state, it will do us no harm to remind ourselves of the meaning of the state, which is, and must remain, truly human, which means it must be intellectual, spiritual and moral."

My dear sisters and brothers, where is it written that the quality of life and the quality of mercy must travel different paths, so as to construct a new, and maybe, questionable way of addressing and assessing the needs of the total community by state government? And, then, of course, the great lawyers' question, Cui Bono? Who benefits? And the accompanying question, who sets the terms of the debate. Here in Massachusetts, the so-called safety net has become instead, a funnel, through which thousands of our citizens are being hurled, and I think we have alot to atone for, and I certainly include myself, as a tax payer, for the legislated dismissal of hordes of vulnerable people, in the name of fiscal management. I have no illusions about the future of the already dismissed people who are suffering today. But I do have hope, which is the wellspring of all human activity. I also truly feel that if you don't stand up for something, you'll fall for anything. I believe that somehow you good people of the Commonwealth will see your way clear to asking the questions that have not been asked. I think somehow you and I will be delivered to the truth about what is happening in the name of fiscal restructuring. You have a responsibility to all of us. Our news and information is interpreted very largely with a bias toward the dominant powers of society, and many of us have become manipulated into an uncritical glob by the use of myths created by others. And once again, there will be no room at the inn for thousands - because they are too poor, too weak, too voiceless.

In these days of despair I tend to favor some of those old testament prophets - gutsy guys like Amos, who would refer to charity as the burnt offering he would refuse if presented. "No, let justice flow like a river that never runs dry." Or Jeremiah, the old curmudgeon who believed, as I do, that we are in a time of dying. He envisioned the death of a culture, a society, a tradition, and he felt the pain, but what pained him even more was the failure of his contemporaries to acknowledge or admit it. He couldn't determine if they were too stupid to understand or they were so dishonest that they engaged in an enormous cover-up.

We, too, are in a time of transition. We are too busy, too sure, too invested, too ideologically committed. The political forms and the economic models of the past are increasingly ineffective. The value systems, the shape of knowledge through which we have controlled our lives, our own destiny, are in great jeopardy, I believe. Capitalism and democracy are clashing. Our systems have begun to unravel. Your responsibilities, as members of the Ways and Means Committee, are awesome, and, I trust, you will listen to your hearts as you make decisions around the lives of those citizens entrusted to your care.

Thank you.

NOTE: Kip Tiernan is a longtime human services advocate, the Founder of Rosie's Place and The Boston Food Bank, Co-Founder of Health Car for the Homeless, Poor People's United Fund, Boston Women's Fund, Community Works, Victory House, Mass Coalition for the Homeless and several other human service alternatives.