Daily News, Sunday, May 15, 1994

I have seen the future, and, frankly, it makes me sick. I just went down to County/USC hospital to visit an artist friend who suffered an early and untimely stroke and just being down there made me half-sick myself and not only for her but for the future of America.

The place was so rundown, oppressive and depressing - sticky littered streets under a hot, hazy white sky; a man urinating in the bushes next to my car; guards at every entrance; angry, shirtless men in handcuffs waiting to be taken to the jail ward; officious head nurses with 50-inch bosoms; fifth-floor windows covered with spider web street gang names etched in the glass.

When I went to use the restroom, I discovered that people had wiped their bowel movements with paper towels and thrown them on the floor. Then when I tried to leave, I found the door couldn't be unlocked from the inside. I felt as if I were trapped in some dinky little third-world country run by dictators or Marxist bureaucrats, which is to say, someplace with too many rules, too little talent, no money and no hope.

The problem hardly is limited to the county hospital. Two weeks ago, I went back home to western Pennsylvania, and once again I was reminded what a great place it was to grow up - rolling green hills in the spring; rabbits running down country roads in your headlights; ringnecks strutting through the corn stubble on crisp fall days.

When I was a kid, there was so little crime in Westmoreland County that my father used to park the car in the driveway when he got home from work and leave the keys in the ignition so he wouldn't have to look for them the next day.

Well, nowadays my mother parks her car in a locked garage, locks the car and puts an anti-theft club on the steering wheel. People take drugs, have babies without the benefit of marriage, go on welfare and steal cars. If there were a murder in my hometown when we were kids, we'd talk about it for the next six months.

Now, my mother tells me there seems to be one in the paper virtually every day. Rapes, too. And you can't blame this one on inner-city minorities. Westmoreland County is 98 percent white. It's our values.

We used to be a country of mostly self-sufficient, self-reliant people. Now the problem is that a significant number of us are growing up on welfare, on drugs, on alcohol, without jobs, unable to cope. The national illegitimacy rate is 22 percent for whites, 68 percent for blacks and upward of 80 percent for people who live in the inner city.

Here in Los Angeles, the welfare rolls are up 200 percent over the last four years. Currently, one out of every five people you meet on the street is receiving AFDC, general assistance, food stamps or Medi-Cal - a grand total of $3.1 billion a year.

Apologists for the current system are always saying that the problem is lack of jobs. Give the underclass jobs, and the problem will cure itself. But you can't give jobs to people who can barely read, have never worked, and who are likely to pull out a gun and shoot you if they think they're being dissed.

The only jobs they are qualified for are low-paid manual labor and our economy doesn't generate many of those, even if the underclass would take them, which many of them won't.

The only way to deal with an over-supply of unskilled hostile people is to cut off the supply at the source. A 14- or 15-year-old girl without a job, a husband, money or any marketable skills does not have the right to bring a kid in the world and expect someone else to pay for it. By the time you add up AFDC, housing allowances, food stamps and health care, you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next 18 years.

And yet, any time anyone says we have to stop kids from having babies they can't pay for, someone else complains that you're "blaming the victim," committing "racial genocide" and otherwise interfering with a woman's "reproductive freedom."

An unwed teen-age mother is interfering with the economic freedom of the rest of us when she has a baby that she has no way to pay for. But the fact is, the money is hardly the only problem. What hurts far more is the disastrous effect that illegitimacy and welfare dependency has on efforts to control crime, clean up our littered graffiti-filled streets and suppress the seething underclass.

When President Bush's press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, suggested a couple of years ago that the Great Society caused the Los Angeles Riots, he was hooted out of town by commentators in newspapers and on TV. But it's an economic fact of life. When you subsidize a behavior, you tend to get more of it.

Even so, the worst effects of soaring rates of illegitimacy and welfare aren't even that they cost a lot of money and cause crime - it's what they do to the national character. There was a time when it was considered shameful to be on welfare, shameful to let other people pay your bills, shameful to sit home when other people, similarly situated, were working 40, 50 and 60 hours a week.

My mother, who grew up during the Depression, still remembers with deep embarrassment the sight of her uncle walking down the street carrying a sack of government surplus flour on his shoulder, which probably cost a grand total of $2. Nowadays, teen-age girls happily accept welfare benefits which, over the entire adolescence of several children, easily could total a quarter of a million dollars, and think nothing of it, unless to complain that other people who work for a living unfairly have it better.

Recently, I complained on a computer bulletin board that the worst thing the government has done to us in the last 30 years is weakening the family in the name of helping us. And I got a note back from an apparently incredulous woman, asking in effect, "What on earth are you talking about?"

Exactly this. When there is no government program to subsidize teen-age girls who have children without a husband or the resources to care for the child themselves, one of two things happen: (1) either they are exceedingly careful not to get pregnant in the first place, which is the way it worked when I grew up in the '50s; or (2) the girl's family steps in and handles the problem. And if they couldn't handle it, they took the shotgun out from behind the kitchen door and marched the father of the child down the aisle so the baby wouldn't be born illegitimate.

Nowadays, people argue that this is crude, judgmental and fundamentally unfair. What if the girl can't remember who the father was? Besides, you can't get blood out of turnip. If the father doesn't have a job, what good does it to try and make him pay?

Well, point No. 1, what are we doing subsidizing someone so irresponsible she can't even remember the father of her child? And two, the point is not to get money out of a young man who doesn't have any, it's to make it so uncomfortable for him when he does father a child he can't support that he doesn't do it in the first place. This isn't harsh. This isn't oppressive. This is what we did back in the '50s, and no one can reasonably maintain our country was worse off then.

Besides, what are our options? Sticky littered streets, guards at the hospital doors and finding yourself locked in a fifth-floor restroom with shitty paper towels covering the floor?