One constant when driving in the Jackson area are panhandlers on busy intersection corners.
I give plenty of money to my church, and many other causes, but I don’t give money to panhandlers, although I see many Northsiders do so.
This causes me a bit of consternation, partly because of the Bible’s “Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man.”
The parable goes like this:
“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.
“The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’
“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.”
I wonder how many people giving money to the panhandlers are hedging their bets, given this parable.
I’m pretty sure Lazarus wasn’t panhandling for drug money, in which case, easy money would do more harm than good.
And I’m pretty sure Lazarus wasn’t an “urban actor” pretending to be homeless.
And I know Lazarus wasn’t posing a traffic danger to himself and others trying to panhandle in the midst of busy traffic and high-speed multi-ton vehicles.
I recall several years ago a local Jackson police captain speaking to the Rotary Club of North Jackson. He begged us not to give money to street corner panhandlers. “They park down the street and drive to their homes It’s all a fraud,” he told us.
No doubt some of these folks are mentally ill and homeless and deserving of sympathy.
For a long time, such panhandling was protected by a decision by the U. S. Supreme Court. That decision was recently reversed. As a result, there is a bill in the state legislature to make panhandling on busy intersections illegal. Let’s hope that the bill passes. Sooner or later, someone is going to get killed in an accident while panhandling.
The federal takeover of the Jackson water system is an example of how money can solve problems. The federal money allowed for the hiring of a top-notch water expert, Ted Henifin, who makes a whopping $400,000 a year. He is worth every penny and more.
Before Henifin, everybody thought we would have to spend billions to replace our old aging pipes. Turns out the main problem was the mismanagement of the water valves.
Over the years of incompetence and neglect, nobody in the water department knew where the valves were, much less how to turn them on and off. As a result, a small leak could take down the entire city.
Now, under Henifin, JXN Water has mapped all the valves and gotten them operational. That means a water leak can be isolated and water can be redirected around the leak by turning off and on the various valves, like rerouting traffic around a wreck.
This was just a simple case of having one competent person to be in charge. It’s why sports athletes and CEOs get paid so much money. They earn it.
Jackson citizens should learn from this. We need to hire a city manager at the $500,000 level. We would see similar progress and it would be money well spent. This is one reason Jackson should switch to a council-manager form of government.
State auditor Shad White spoke to the Stennis Capitol Press Forum at Hal & Mal’s. The Stennis Institute of Government operates under the auspices of Mississippi State.
Twenty years ago, the press forum was packed with dozens of local and state journalists. This past week there were maybe a half dozen at best. Local and state news is dying. This was recently made worse when Associated Press Mississippi reporter Emily Wagster Pettus took early retirement.
For decades, Emily has been a critical part of statewide reporting. Her retirement is another blow to journalism. Sooner or later the American people are going to wake up one day and realize that journalism has been destroyed. There are one-third the number of journalists today compared to 20 years ago, and most of the attrition is at the local and state level. This leads to corruption, as the Jody Owens and Chokwe Lumumba indictments show.
White started out his comments discussing an attempt by the state senate to defang the state auditor’s office by taking away its investigative powers. He blamed the state senate leadership for targeting him. White said he was saved by a groundswell of public opinion that stopped the bill from passing.
White is super smart. He received his bachelor’s in history and political science at Ole Miss, earned a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Oxford (in England) then went to Harvard Law. That’s an impeccable resume.
And White is a super smooth talker. He has total mastery of his subject matter and can talk extemporaneously forever on his feet. The man knows his stuff.
But a person’s main weakness is always the flipside of their main strength. White’s smarts can make him a little too sure of himself, which comes off as arrogance, especially when he gets into a mano-a-mano debate with someone he disagrees with.
This happened in the senate hearing with state senator John Polk, which was probably a factor in the bill to defang White’s office. He did it at the press forum, going head to head with Mississippi Today Bobby Harrison, a respected veteran journalist, over school choice.
Shad, we love you, but take my advice. Politics is also about being likable. We all know how smart you are. You will go further if you work on your warm and fuzzy. Watch some Reagan debates. Kiss some babies.
