For the first time ever I watched an entire “Phil Donahue Show” on TV, and it was a classic. The topic of the day, “crack babies,” followed up sensational reports in the New York Post and Wall Street Journal on the latest social problem to terrify the American public.
First, the Post reporters were brought out to explain the problem: Between one and four million babies have been born to users of the drug “crack,” an exceptionally potent form of cocaine. The babies, born addicted and underweight, often develop severe physical and emotional problems.
The oldest of these offspring are now entering the first-grade classrooms of public schools, which have a hard enough time handling “normal” children. Crack children have an impossibly low attention span, exhibit hostile behavior, and show few signs of a moral conscience.
In short, the United States is being invaded from within by a large group of young citizens who will further strain health and education resources, and who give every indication of one day adding to the burdens of juvenile and adult detention centers. The reporters predicted that crack children would become the number-one social problem in the United States.
No Hickory Sticks
Donahue’s producers had managed to persuade two crack mothers—one black, one white—to appear on the show, and after the Post reporters outlined the scope of the problem, Donahue introduced the two. Audience tension visibly increased. The middle-class, mostly female spectators, who had just heard that drug users were unleashing a plague on their society, now had a chance to face down in person two real-life carriers of that plague.
The white crack mother seemed on drugs at that very moment. Slumping down in her chair behind the protective shield of dark glasses, she gave slurred, sluggish responses to questions. The black woman, currently pregnant with her second crack baby, proved unusually articulate. “I’ve been clean for two days now,” she said. “Somebody was nice to me and showed me some respect. They put me up in a hotel room for two nights and treated me like a person, and for the first time I wanted to change. I wanted to be better. And so I didn’t have to use the crack.”
Loud applause.
Donahue jumped in with a homily. “See, these women need compassion,” he said, holding out an open hand. “We’ve got to get off our ‘hickory stick’ morality. What good will it do to punish these women?”
More applause.
Then he turned to the black woman and asked a question that was undoubtedly lurking in the minds of most of the audience. “Now, help us out here. We’re trying to understand. You had one crack baby already, right? And you saw the physical problems that child went through. Yet you got pregnant again. Why?”
She thought for a moment. “Well, all I can say is, accidents do happen,” she said at last. With that, she lost her sympathetic audience. Some booed and hissed. Others shook their heads angrily. As taxpayers, they would soon be asked to contribute tens of billions of dollars to pay for the problems presented by crack babies. Accidents may happen—but one to four million accidents?
Clearly, the audience had used up its reservoir of compassion. “Why should I have to pay for their irresponsible behavior?” asked one woman, trembling with anger. “Shouldn’t they be the ones to face the consequences? And it’s not just themselves they’re hurting—what about all those innocent babies!”
Another suggested sterilizing any woman who delivered a crack baby. Donahue seized on her suggestion: “And should we sterilize alcohol-abusing mothers? Tobacco-abusing mothers? Should we turn the police loose to knock on doors and sniff out any mothers unfit to bear children?” The woman appeared confused, but stood by her original suggestion. Something must be done.
The Education Temptation
Indeed, what can be done? Education is the answer, said the Post reporters. Yes, education, echoed a social worker. The articulate crack mother nodded in agreement; the sluggish one simply nodded.
I was watching Donahue in a friend’s living room and happened to be sitting next to a doctor from Chicago’s Cook County Hospital emergency room. He smiled at their faith in education as the fix-all. “The addicts I treat educate me about their condition,” he said. “They like to portray themselves as poor, ignorant victims, but I’ve found many of them can interpret the charts on blood count and other vital stats better than most health workers.”
If education were the simple answer, would crack have made such inroads among the literate middle class? If education were the answer, wouldn’t the pregnant woman on the panel have given up her habit after she bore her first child—or at least used a fail-safe birth control method? If education alone were the answer, smokers and alcoholics would now be extinct in America.
Alcoholics Anonymous found long ago that the only path toward cure involves more than a quick-fix, simple solution based on increased knowledge. In fact, it involves a change that seems more theological than educational. Somehow the “victim” of addictive behavior must regain an underlying sense of human dignity and choice, a profound reawakening that usually requires much time, attention, and love.
AA members recite their creed at every meeting, a creed that renounces the notion that any of us are helpless, ignorant victims of overwhelming forces. I am a human being, morally responsible, and the choices I make affect not only me but also my family and society all around me. I will need help—from my friends and family, from fellow abusers, from a Higher Power—but at the outset, I must own my capability of moral choice.
I have long been impressed by the unique way Alcoholics Anonymous combines seeming opposites: compassion that still insists on moral responsibility; community support that somehow fosters individual dignity; self-actualization that comes from dependence on a Higher Power. It is only natural that these concepts sound like Christian theology, since AA was founded by evangelical Christians. But such ideas are rather difficult to communicate to a whole society—let alone to get across on the “Phil Donahue Show.”
