What's happening to America's poor in 1997? Sharon Daly, chief Washington lobbyist for Catholic Charities/USA, offers this description.

The first people most Americans are going to see on the streets, made destitute because of cuts in programs to the poor, are people who qualified for the SSI program because they were disabled by previous alcohol or drug use. Those people were no longer eligible for SSI as of January 1. A lot of those people are mentally ill, and they only survive in their little single-room occupancy because they get an SSI check and a Medicaid card to pay for their prescriptions. This bill doesn't provide any money for treatment, and so the very first group we're going to see on our streets are the new "lepers" of society: alcoholics, drug addicts, the mentally ill.

Next you will see immigrants who've lost welfare benefits. Then people who don't have children and don't get food stamps any more because they can't work. Finally, a year or two from now we'll begin seeing families with children on the streets, people who've lost their benefits because they couldn't work and they came up against a time limit.

The first people that Americans are likely to see on the streets are the least sympathetic-appearing people to society. The social service systems and emergency benefits are going to be so totally wiped out by the first groups that by the time we get to the families with children, the Salvation Army, Lutheran Social Services, the food pantries, the soup kitchens, the shelters are going to be so full to overflowing with such lines that there's not going to be anything left. It's going to look like the Depression.

We've all heard speeches about how the churches are going to pick up the slack. In this welfare bill, Congress cut $54 billion over five years, on average, just under $16 billion of cuts a year. All the private giving to programs for the poor in the whole country in a year totaled $11 billion. That includes all the money that's raised by United Way in every work place in America, and all the money raised by Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army, Lutheran Social Services, the Jewish Federation. So they are cutting more in a year -- almost one and a half times as much -- than is raised now by the whole human services network, secular and religious.

Make sure that you're part of a statewide advocacy network in your state -- because if you don't speak up, the 11 million people that the churches are serving now in emergency services around the country are going to be 22 million next year and 30 million soon.

It's important that church folks get to know poor people so that you can talk about people you know and not poor people in the abstract. Even in Jesus' time people liked to say that it was their own fault that people were poor, because they were bad. As Christians, we know better.

(Reprinted from Sojourners, March-April, 1997. Photo: Rick Reinhard)