HARD TIMES, HARDER HEARTS

AS AMERICA'S CITIES LOOK MORE AND MORE LIKE CALCUTTA, OUR CIVIC COMPASSION SHRIVELS

IT'S 6:30 A.M. at McPherson Square, two blocks from the White House. In the gray, cool September dawn that forewarns of winter, the park is littered with shoeless people wrapped in filthy blankets, some on park benches, some beneath bushes strewn with mulch, candy wrappers and old newspapers. At the subway entrance across the street stands a man, his hand out. He takes halting steps toward every other person coming off the escalator, grumbling something, but clearly begging. On the sidewalk beyond the subway more beggars and homeless people form a maze of desperation. Signs and voices call out to those walking by: "Help Me!" -- "I'm Hungry" -- "Vietnam Veteran" One woman raises the emotional stakes. She huddles with her daughter and slowly mouths the words, "Mother and child."

The federal workers exiting the station hustle by the scene. Most look away. Some are clearly irritated by the harangues of the more aggressive beggars. A few come up the escalator with coins in hand and choose one sad case for a donation. But fear predominates among the commuters, fear that one of these people might touch, might spit, might breathe, might hit, might curse them.

The scene's horror is in its ordinariness.

Call it Calcutta comes to Washington.

Third World images of poverty and desperation are on daily display across from the White House in Lafayette Park, in downtown business areas, around bars in Georgetown, at stop lights on Dupont Circle, at bus shelters on H Street NE, at the food truck that stops at Connecticut and M in the late afternoon.

And the scene is repeated around the nation. Beggars are a permanent fixture outside the flossy stores on New York's Fifth Ave. They loiter amid the limousines on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. In El Paso, a group got together to put up a billboard asking people not to give to panhandlers because the charity encourages begging. In New York City, Mayor Koch added to his legend by urging people not to give to beggars lest it encourage their begging. And both presidential candidates talk about the poor and homeless as if they were debating points, rather than human beings. Yet there they are every morning as we emerge from the subway.

We can see with our eyes what the beggars' plight is doing to them. But what is it doing to us?

To get a sense of where we may be heading, you need only travel to a city where misery and callousness have become a way of life, a city like Cairo, Mexico City or even Kingston, Jamaica. Outside hotels, casinos, on any street are the dying, the diseased, in a swirl of dirty-faced children, all shrieking for a coin. Their presence becomes a background noise -- to be ignored as easily as the sound of passing cars.

David Waldman, a psychotherapist, observes that a person walking down a Washington street typically reacts to beggars in two ways. First, there is a sense that this person is a victim. But as the number of beggars grows, a passerby begins to cement the feeling that "I'm not like these people." And then a new reaction sets in, notes Waldman: The person says, "I'm taking care of myself and I'm not giving them a dime because I'm not going to end up like them."

"People say to themselves there is only so much of the pie and I'm going to make sure I get my share," says Waldman. "They lose the feeling that the beggar is a victim and become callous to his pain. In their mind the beggar is not fully human any longer because they can no longer identify with the beggar."

Pressures on working people can add to this indifference. "With the intensification of the rat-race among those who are not poor, there begins a stronger aversion to poverty, said C. Margaret Hall, chairman of the department of sociology at Georgetown University. "As the sight of poverty becomes more common and more stark in contrast to wealth, there grows an anger at signs of poverty because it becomes so threatening. Our darkest fear is there before us as we walk down the street. It is an unknown, and all people fear the unknown."

One can even find moral support for refusing beggars. According to social workers and others who have devoted their own lives to helping the needy, begging encourages more begging and keeps needy people from going to programs that could give them better and more permanent help.

So it is not surprising, maybe not even wrong, to refuse a beggar . . . . Just make sure you still feel guilty about it.

Guilt can be a healthy thing, according to Prof. James Fishkin, chairman of the government department of the University of Texas at Austin. He has argued in various studies that guilt makes us think about moral choices. If we pass a beggar by, the uneasy feeling we carry away may prompt us to other acts of personal or collective charity. The danger is that we may grow immune to the guilt impulse as well. Some experts see signs that has already happened. They worry that the American instinct toward generosity and caring is beginning to diminish in the face of the overwhelming assault of voices crying for help.

If that's so, it would not be the first failure of charitable instinct on the American scene. While America has built a well-deserved reputation for generous behavior around the globe during much of this century, it was not always thus.

"American attitudes toward the poor go through periods of greater and lesser hostility," says Michael Katz, a University of Pennsylvania professor and author of "In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America." "In the late 1800s, between 1878 and 1890, there was tremendous public outrage towards beggars, just as there is now. Beggars were outlawed in 10 of the 40 major cities. The pendulum has swung back to that point."

Katz notes that until the Great Society programs of the late 1960s, the national, state and local governments provided little assistance to anyone in poverty. And since 1980, at least, a backlash has curbed spending on social programs. Interest in the issue has picked up somewhat in this election year, as in the debate over the welfare-workfare reform passed by Congress and argument on increasing the minimum wage. But public-opinion polls, Katz says, show Americans still want more cuts in welfare spending. Only if they are asked if people should be allowed to starve and be homeless do a majority of Americans finally say no.

Explanations vary as to why there are so many people living on the street. Some say homelessness results from laws passed in the '70s to deinstitutionalize disturbed people. Others blame the loss of cheap housing in many cities, due to urban renewal and the high cost of new housing. Administration opponents point to cuts in social spending during the Reagan years.

But Katz and others are suggesting that hidden behind all the protestations of charitable concern for the homeless and the prescriptions of politicians and policy makers may be the bald truth that the nation really doesn't give a damn about the poor -- except to the extent that they occasion fear or inconvenience.

"There is no will to support the poor -- in fact there is hostility," contends Katz. "The hostility is generated by the perception that the poor are getting a free ride. As real wages are falling in the nation, as prospects for home ownership are declining for young people, there is less comfort in facing the needs of others. There has never been a good time to be poor in America and this is definitely one of the worse."

Is the traditional well-spring of American generosity, the recollection that "If not for the grace of God there go I," drying up? Some experts see evidence of an increasing public conviction that beggars are responsible for their own plight and, further, that they are an imposition on middle-class people who are, themselves, struggling to stay out of poverty.

In Washington-as-Calcutta, the city we may be becoming, people view the beggars as a social problem, a crime problem, even a civic disgrace -- but less and less as fellow humans. That tendency to dehumanize the poor can already be seen in the pronouncements of our political leaders.

"The cost of poverty and homelessness is poorly understood in this society," says Judith Porter, who teaches a course in the sociology of poverty at Bryn Mawr College. "Bush and Dukakis don't talk to them {the needy} -- they talk about them. Bush portrays the homeless as deinstitutionalized. Dukakis sees them as evidence of a housing shortage. Both camps stigmatize these people as failures -- they make them objects."

"If you think about the big demographic divide in this country, it has traditionally been between capital and labor," says Douglas Rae, chairman of the political science department at Yale University. "Now the division has become between labor and non-labor. Our answer to people in poverty is not charity but workfare. We'll help you if you join the workforce.

"A human not in the workforce," he continues, "has no status. There's evidence in the behavior of both presidential candidates that they think the part of the electorate near or below the poverty line is to be ignored, even disparaged, to appeal to those with money and their anger at the poor. That's why Dukakis sounds so bloodless. He's a liberal who doesn't talk about the poor."

Reinforcing political and social indifference to poverty is the renewed strength of the belief -- no newcomer to either American thought or its British antecedents -- that the poor have only themselves to blame for their plight. The leading edge of this argument was recently advanced by journalist Myron Magnet in an essay in Fortune. Magnet argues that the high rate of illegitimate births, the family disorganization, the drug taking and live-for-the-moment behavior that characterize much of ghetto life are the direct legacy of '60s-style sexual liberation. Welfare programs are also to blame for offering "incentives for the least competent women to become the mothers of the next generation."

Magnet further alleges that these loose mores have moved out of the black ghetto to infect the white teen-age population, thereby adding to the disorder on our city streets. His conclusion is that poverty is not something that happens to people so much as something people choose by adopting the wrong values. The best hope is not charity or renewed social commitment by the governemnt but to change the poor's values so they understand that "everyone is responsible for his fate . . . ."

Magnet is right that for too many people, the concept of hard work and sacrfice leading to prosperity has been lost. But that is not the whole story.

Totally absent from this calculus is recognition that the objective facts of this nation's history and its current structure have fostered and reinforced these individual failings and that collective action -- through organized charity or government programs -- can aid in remedying them.

"It is easier to talk about the failures of individuals than it is to talk about the structural problems facing the society," says poverty sociologist Porter of Bryn Mawr. "The American myth is that opportunity is out there for anyone, but no one feels they can confront limits on opportunity even when limits are evident."

The cost of purposefully closing our eyes to the human misery we see each morning on our way to work is not simply the guilt feelings that we may suffer as we step over or around the unemployed. The real cost is that, in time, even those guilt feelings will be suppressed. As we build more defenses against poverty and homelessness, we may eventually lose our national sense of moral rightness and obligation.

Juan Williams is a writer for The Washington Post Magazine and author of "Eyes on the Prize."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.