Putnam's Our Kids

I just finished the audiobook version of Robert Putnam's highly praised book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. In his concluding chapter, in which he offers myriad rationale for 'why we should care about any of this' and policy suggestions admirably borrowed from both the political right and the left, Putnam offers an enthusiastic nod to the moral leadership of Pope Francis:  

The most important service that Pope Francis has rendered to men and women of all faiths and of no faith at all is to remind us of our deep moral obligation to care for our neighbors and especially for poor kids. 'Almost without being aware of it,' [Pope Francis] said in 2013, 'we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people's pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else's responsibility and not our own. when we isolate young people, we do them an injustice: young people belong to a family, a country, a culture, a faith. They really are the future of a people.'

There is much we could read to help us live out this Year of Mercy well. I'd highly suggest Our Kids, for Putnam's (mostly) non-ideological cast on a central issue of our time, presenting evidence both for 'family structure'/'cultural' causes of poverty in American and economic ones too. But I'd mostly suggest it to experience the gripping stories of 'our kids.'

My father and step-mother both spent their careers working in schools for the most disadvantaged. They've been a remarkable example to me--and I pray I can adequately witness to the responsibility we have for the 'least among us' to my own children. But as many great minds from Putnam, to Charles Murray, to Arthur Brooks, have revealed these last few years, the growing socioeconomic divide in our country today is notably distinct from other eras of American history. Our Lord told us, 'The poor will always be among us," but these days, the poor are scarcely among 'us' (for Putnam, all college educated are considered, for simplicity, 'upper-middle class'). We live in different worlds: different family circumstances and different schools and communities. This, in itself, is troublesome. Putnam is right, and we Catholics know this quite well: we have a deep moral obligation to care for the poor, but today, they may not be in our kid's schools, our neighborhoods, our parishes. This makes the exercise of our obligation much more difficult for us than it was in the past, difficult to seek out ways to serve, but also difficult to bring our own children into community with the more disadvantaged; recognizing this, in itself, may be just the grace we need to act.