Work or get out

One of the biggest bombshells post-Katrina was the announcement by Oliver Thomas that public housing residents should get jobs or stay out.

At a meeting of the council's Housing Committee, City Council President Oliver Thomas said that for too long government programs and agencies have "pampered" rather than improved lives. Consequently, former residents who don't want "to roll up their sleeves" are better off staying away, he said in remarks that generated murmured agreement from some members of the audience in the council chambers.

"We don't need soap opera watchers right now," Thomas said. "We're going to target the people who are going to work. It's not that I'm fed up, but that at some point there has to be a whole new level of motivation, and people have got to stop blaming the government for something they ought to do."

He could have been a little more diplomatic in expressing his sentiment than to smear all public housing residents as "soap opera watchers." A great number of them do work. Still, I'm all for it. It's common sense, but there will be consequences for those who can't work. And what about child supervision while parents are working? What about skills deficits that create the need for public housing in the first place? Those problems don't go away just by talking tough.

As I've said elsewhere, the very dire problems coming out of the black community can't be solved by whites (a large segment of the black community doesn't listen to the white community) -- they have to be solved by blacks themselves. Thomas' statement, crude though it was, is a move in the right direction.