From a prison in Thailand comes a letter by the hand of Janet Leigh Dettler, the young woman from Middle River who is serving a life sentence for smuggling heroin. Dettler was arrested in February 1992 at the Bangkok airport after being caught with two suitcases containing about 16 pounds of heroin. She has insisted she did not know she was carrying the dope; she says she was the unwitting courier -- in the drug trade, the "mule" -- for a Nigerian man who showered her with gifts and claimed to want to marry her. Someone mailed Dettler an October This Just In column about international drug mules and the stupidity required for their job. Dettler responds: "Yes, I am a mule, and yes, I am stupid. But [I am] an unknowing mule, a very scared mule." A 10,000-miles-away-from-home mule. In her letter, Dettler reports that an appellate court in Thailand upheld her life sentence on Sept. 24. She will now appeal to the nation's highest court. Her family just mailed Dettler a holiday package; this will be her third Christmas in prison.
And then there was one
Another setback for Hunt Valley Mall: The Sir Walter Raleigh Inn closed over the weekend; there's a goodbye-and-thank-you sign on the restaurant's door. Last year at this time, the Sir Wally in Ellicott City closed after 16 years. The inn at White Marsh remains open.
Stoneleigh sinks water slide
Stoneleigh, that well-groomed, arboreous suburban community of slate-roofed colonials located just to the right of the "Stoneleigh" sign on York Road, has endured one of its hottest family arguments in years. Not since the great debate over whether to include residents of the 7200 block of Oxford Road in its community association has Stoneleigh seen such rancor. The issue? Crime? A group home proposal? Tree blight? No, it was this: Whether a state-of-the-art water slide should be installed in the community pool. I am not making this up! Some Stoneleightonianites wanted to spend the $30,000 needed for the "sliding board" to make a summer outing at the pool all the more fun for kids. Other residents felt the pool should remain in its current classic condition. The arguing was quite emotional, and those engaged were not above name-calling and even scare tactics. "For the first time, I was embarrassed to say I lived here," said a woman too embarrassed to attach her name to that quote. The slide was voted down in close balloting -- almost as close as Sauerbrey-Glendening -- at a crowded meeting at Stoneleigh Elementary Wednesday night. Some think the turnout rivaled Election Day's.
Referendum on welfare?
It turns out that the 1994 election was a referendum on welfare. I hadn't realized our focus was so laserlike. Newt Gingrich and other Republicans claim that the nation's voters have ordered them to do now what Ronald Reagan could not do on the scale he had intended -- strip back welfare and other social programs that "cause more problems than they solve."
That is a popular theory, made to sound reasonable by such theorists as Charles Murray, and embraced by politicians who know how to push the buttons of cynical voters. America is stuck. Nothing works. Blame welfare. Blame the poor. Villainize them. The way some ideologues talk, you'd think that most poor people are on welfare, and that poverty would disappear if the programs created to eradicate it would go first. Break the cycle of dependency and, wow, the leeches will turn to worker bees.
Actually, most of the poor are not on welfare. I called the Census Bureau for some numbers. Check this out: There were about 40 million Americans living in poverty in 1993. (Annual income of $14,763 for a family of four is considered poverty.) Subtract such groups as the elderly, the disabled and the working poor, and you find that just 14 million Americans were receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (welfare). And 9 million of those were children. So we're talking about five million adults, a fraction of the total poor, on the dole.
No doubt, welfare fuels a cycle of dependency on government. That dependency is ripe for attack. But it is a relatively minor problem. The big picture shows a nation in economic and social transformation -- with poor Americans experiencing the most severe setbacks in jobs and wages, the middle class losing ground and the nation's wealthiest 20 percent growing substantially more affluent. That's not my description of class dynamics in America. That's the Census Bureau's.
People such as Charles Murray -- he actually gave an in-flight interview to the New York Times while sipping champagne in first-class -- argue, essentially, that the nation should cut its losses. "It's not as if there's a large economic cost from letting the inner cities go," was his take on the question of government aid after the Los Angeles riots.
That attitude prevails among practitioners of the politics of polarization. When Newt Gingrich attacks welfare -- this past week he has made it seem like the No. 1 issue facing America -- he is practicing that kind of politics. All reasonable people should agree that welfare reform is needed. But far more important is the need for new enterprise and jobs in cities and towns that were hardest hit by the seismic economic transformations of the last three decades. That's a complicated problem and a huge task. That's why we don't hear fast-talking demagogues say much about it.