Gardens

Poor people have terrible nutrition.  They apparently prefer processed food to more healthful fare.  Part of the reason is that they supposedly live in “food desserts” where the few available groceries specialize in providing junk food.  The resultant diet impairs their health and that of their children.

This appalls Liberals.  They fear that this will prevent the less well off from competing with the more well off.  Inequality will thus be perpetuated because those at a financial disadvantage will also be at an intellectual and physiological disadvantage.

As it their wont, progressives rush to provide programs to overcome this dilemma.  In this case, they have sought to improve the diet of the poor.  More specifically, they have sought to enhance their nutrition by getting them to eat more fruits and vegetables.

Among the solutions attempted has been encouraging the poor to grow vegetable gardens.  This way they will have access to wholesome foods even if greedy merchants refuse to stock them.  Farmers have also been urged to bring their produce directly to their neighborhoods.

What has been the consequence?  Recent evaluation research in the Atlanta area indicates that the benefits are nil.  Why?  The answer is simple.  It is primarily residents who already have a healthy diet that participate in these projects.  The targets, the ill nourished, stay away.  They are happy with their junk food.

I was not surprised.  When I was involved with the War on Poverty about a half-century ago, similar plans had already been tried.  What was more, they worked no better then than they do now.

This put me in mind of a famous quote from Talleyrand.  After the Bourbon kings had been resorted to the throne upon the downfall of Napoleon, he opined that “they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”  The same seems to be true of liberals.

Liberals pride themselves on their intellectualism.  They believe they are smarter and better educated than their conservative adversaries.  Nonetheless, they clearly have a blind spot.  When it comes to their own agenda, they never profit from negative experience.

Virtually every article of the progressive program has been implemented and found wanting.  The latest example is compassionate policing.  When the Baltimore cops were ordered not to confront the rioters, this was expected to assuage the demonstrators’ wrath.  It did the opposite.

But anyone who paid attention to the results liberal police reforms in the 60’s and 70’s could have predicted the outcome.  Coddling wrongdoers had soon led to an explosion of crime that became unbearable by the 80’s.  Only then did politicians like Giuliani clamp down.  Criminality, of course, was quickly contained.

Or how about education.  Progressive ways of teaching, coupled with reduced class size, were going to vault our students into the front ranks of international instruction.  Except that they didn’t.  American students continued to fall behind.

So what was the liberal response?  They continued to throw money at the problem.  If smaller classes hadn’t worked, surely even smaller ones would.  It did not matter that sociological research proved resources were not correlated with results.  Evidently, if the reformers had read this research, they did not believe it.

As for international peace, when Ronald Reagan built up the military and called the USSR an Evil Empire, he was condemned as a muddle headed cowboy.  Even after communism went into retreat, progressives refused to credit him with having contributed to this conclusion.

Indeed, Barack Obama is so committed to the idea that if we play nice, our adversaries will also play nice, he refuses to call ISIS Islamic or Putin an unregenerate aggressor.

And where has this gotten us.  By virtually all accounts, except that of the Obama administration, international affairs are a mess.  The dangers keep rising, but our leaders keep their heads buried in the sand.

The gardens turn out to be symptomatic.   Liberals never learn from their mistakes.  As rigid ideologues, they never allow the facts to get in the way of their aspirations.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University