THE RECTORY phone rings. I pick it up.
"Hello," says a small boy. "Is Johnny there?"
"I think you've got the wrong number," I reply.
"My name is Reggie. I'm 7."
"That's nice. What number are you calling?"
"I called this number."
"Yeah, I know that, but your little friend Johnny is not here."
"He's not there?" Reggie asks.
"No, he's not here," I answer.
Reggie pauses and then asks, "Will you be my friend?"
After telling Reggie he really ought to talk to his mother before he makes friends over the phone with someone he doesn't know, I tell him he's a nice kid and wish him well. He tells me he lives in North Camden. I invite him to come to Holy Name Church with his parents and, yes, we can be friends.
As I hang up, I wonder how many people really want to be friends with kids like Reggie. House Speaker Newt Gingrich's post-election rhetoric does not promise Reggie many friends in Washington. Nor do I think that many of our political leaders will be making extra efforts to help the Reggies of our nation.
Around Christmastime, churches get many calls from people looking for places to donate toys to kids like Reggie -- children who live in such areas as North Camden where the per capita income is $4,728 (in nearby Moorestown, N.J., it's $27,822). People have no problem giving Reggie a Power Ranger for Christmas. But an angry electorate wants to take away all the supposedly lavish, welfare money the Reggies are extorting from the taxpayer.
A woman in North Camden with three kids gets $488 a month from Aid to Families with Dependent Children or welfare. Another monthly $375 in food stamps adds up to a yearly income of $10,356 ($14,763 is considered poverty level for a family of four). Given those numbers, it is easy to understand that 55 percent of those eligible for welfare don't even bother to apply for the meager amount of money. Of those on welfare, half will stay for two years or less. Some 85 percent of all recipients are off in eight years. Contrary to popular rhetoric, i.e., loud Limbaughian lies, real benefits to those allegedly picking the taxpayers' pockets have radically decreased in the past 15 years. The $13 billion spent on AFDC in 1992 was only 1 percent of federal spending. That's one third of Harvard's $39 billion annual budget. Americans spend $20 billion more on weight loss programs ($33 billion) than they do on AFDC.
Which leads to the ugly reality facing our Republican-dominated Congress: 40.1 percent of the 39.3 million people in poverty are children, the highest level since 1964. Don't blame poverty on single mothers: 45 percent of poor children live in two-parent homes. In America, the land of the free and the home of the hungry, 1-in-8 children doesn't get enough to eat.
Making ourselves feel good by donating a toy that a tot doesn't really need, is not what Christianity is about.
Reggie needs friends. Friends who will stand up against the rhetoric which blames the poor for the pain of poverty. Friends who will speak out against the mean spirited and hard-hearted folks who count and begrudge each penny spent on Reggie, but ignore the growing gap between rich and poor.
It's inequality and injustice, stupid! If the middle class, those living near the median income line of $31,241, want to "get theirs," it would make more sense to go after the top, not the bottom. After taxes, the top 20 percent have more than the bottom 80 percent combined. The 1980s saw "The Overclass," the top 1 percent of Americans, augment their take of the nation's total wealth from 31 percent to 37 percent. The rich, not the Reggies, have the money. But members of the new bottom-line oriented Congress are not about to take money away from the people who bought them their seats in the capital. Nor will Gingrich's Grinches, the greasers of the gears of gridlock, do much to protect little Reggie.
Rev. Richard G. Malloy, S.J., writes from Camden, N.J.