Poverty War College

Poverty War College

The war on poverty will probably remain a mere holding action until many more affluent Americans feel the dirt, know the hurt and get mad enough to fight. Last week a group of 100 unimpoverished individuals paid $45 each in tuition to learn that motivation. The educational effort was the work, appropriately enough, of a Franciscan priest who sent businessmen, skilled laborers, housewives and church workers into the slums of one of the nation's otherwise most serenely sunny cities, Phoenix. The Rev. Gavin Griffith, 31, ran his poverty war college with the strategic aim of simply stirring the conscience of his students. Some of the outsiders shed their uniforms (ties and suits), strolled the streets on the wrong side of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks, where rickety houses lean against each other, and whiffed the foul breath of penury. Nine businessmen rode with cops as they checked vagrants in "the Deuce," a neighborhood of filthy flophouses. Some men mingled with drunks along the downtown Tenderloin skid row. Several housewives spent a day just sitting in the Greyhound bus terminal, where they saw weary, worried mothers board buses with broods of children to start life somewhere else. Other poverty students vicariously shared the pain of knife, gun and mugging victims in the emergency room of the County Hospital, or walked the brawling bar beat with patrolmen. Shaken by their experiences, the students retreated for a day of barbecue and Fourth of July fun at the Franciscan Order's comfortable Casa de Paz y Bien (House of Peace and Good Will) in suburban Paradise Valley. But each evening and in one day-long concluding session, Father Gavin divided them into small groups, confined them to a room for tension-producing "sensitivity training" in which the only conversation permitted was the emotional reaction to their experiences. Mrs. Robert McCarty, wife of a Phoenix thrift-store-chain manager, said that she had thought she "wouldn't want to sit and eat with unshaven, dirty people." But in doing so at a mission for derelicts, she had discovered that "they're not really so different--just worse off." Otis Garnand, an auto-parts dealer, was moved by his night among the vagrants. "I thought there'd be camaraderie on skid row, like in a neighborhood bar," he said. "But I was wrong. There's deep hostility there, and it touched me --I wish I knew what could be done."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.