MISSOURI WATCH: THE REVOLUTION NO ONE NOTICED

Maybe we have just been too busy to notice. There are so many distractions in today's world, from tragic plane crashes to exciting athletic contests to political conventions, that we often forget to notice more subtle events that are certain to affect, directly or indirectly, the course of our lives. We take account of these changes only when we begin to feel their effects; sometimes we ignore them for longer periods of time while practicing the art of skillful neglect.

I refer to the revolution, or perhaps it might be more properly labeled an evolution, taking place the other day in Washington that will affect the lives of Missourians from one corner of the state to the next. As important as the Olympic games may have seemed at the moment and regardless of how we react to this month's political conventions, the rewriting, revising and revamping of America's 60-year-old welfare system must surely rank as the governmental benchmark of the year. Perhaps even the benchmark of this decade.

Despite the potential and virtually certain changes that will soon begin occurring in Missouri, most citizens seem to have noted the dramatic alterations with little more than a shrug and an it's-about-time attitude. I suspect most of us never believed the promised changes would occur, and I suspect further that even if we thought some modifications were inevitable, we never really believed the lowly politicians in Washington would really approve such radical revisions in a system that was as old as Social Security and much, much older than Medicare and Medicaid. We Americans are not overly optimistic about the work habits of our elected officials, nor are we disillusioned in the slightest about the absence of political courage in our national and state capitals.

The only citizens who apparently recognized the full significance of the new federal-state partnership in caring for the poor were welfare recipients themselves. In recent days, I have received a number of phone calls, letters and voice mail messages from welfare clients in Missouri, some of them critical of my views on the reform act. One very angry welfare recipient from St. Louis went a step past criticism by suggesting that my fate should be terminal starvation, administered under the direction of the Missouri Department of Social Services.

In an effort to dissipate angry crowds outside my office, let me note that despite the views on both sides of this revolution, the taxpaying public will spend more money on the poor under the reform act than before Washington approved it. In Wisconsin, the state that has been the bellwether of a more comprehensive welfare system, the reforms will add another $102 million in state spending in the current year. Although generally ignored by both sides, the reform calls for training and educational programs that are quite expensive but, more importantly, will serve to better equip recipients for meeting the challenges of living in the 1990s.

Missouri is not unlike Wisconsin, and the Show-Me State will soon be spending even more than 29.7 percent of its total budget on the poor. The difference will be that this added cost will not be allocated to food or clothing or housing but rather to the key ingredient of improving lives through preparatory education and training. Recipients will have as long to acquire modern workplace skills as students now receive to acquire a law degree or an advanced economics degree. No one can convince me that even those who have spent a decade on public dole would rather visit the local welfare office than pick-up a living-wage check at his or her place of employment.

And no one can make me believe that the poor want to spend the remainder of their lives in crime-infested, dilapidated neighborhoods, where life is cheap and victims are innocent human beings who can become nameless victims even in their homes or front porches. Neither can anyone make me believe that entitlement recipients enjoy the lack of respect they receive from the rest of society nor the lack of respect they harbor for themselves.

Replacing the old system with a newer, more demanding one will not be easy, but this has less to do with the changes that will be made than the inherently damaging features of the system that began in the mid-1930s. The new reforms are not perfect but they offer the first hope of a better life for hundreds of thousands of Missourians in the future. That's what the first American Revolution was all about.

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of the Missouri News and Editorial Service.