'That's just the way God works."
The words are Mike Bloomberg's, issued in response to a reporter's question about a homeless girl featured in a recent New York Times series. Predictably, most mainstream media jumped on the remark as evidence that the outgoing billionaire mayor is callous, that his policies on the homeless reflect this, that he's in denial about how bad things are, and so on.
The truth is that Bloomberg has a point. The plight of Dasani, the girl in the Times series, is indeed heartwrenching. But the greatest obstacle in her life isn't a heartless mayor or an ungenerous city but a dysfunctional mother and a father who simply do not look after their children the way parents should.
So if the mayor seems defensive about his record here, we cut him a break. Dasani's case itself indicates that her problem isn't a Scrooge-like bureauracy: The child and her family — which includes eight siblings, a mother and a stepfather — has received as much as $1 million in city services between housing, drug rehabilitation, schooling, children's services interventions, etc. And that doesn't include federally provided food stamps and suchlike.
The tragedy of Dasani's life is that both her parents are drug addicts who have been unable to keep a job and unwilling to take the steps necessary to better their children's lives. And we'd all be better off if we could recognize that no government program can take the place of loving parents who put their children first. Not to mention the prominent role of mental illness at the root of so much homelessness.
This city should always be looking for better ways to help those in need get back on their feet or make its delivery of services more humane. But the mayor's remarks that Dasani "was dealt a bad hand" and "I don't know quite why" is less an effort to pin the blame on God than an honest way of re-stating a hard truth: There are limits to what government can do.
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