Perhaps the most cutting edge mainstream media across the Ditch is multi-cultural TV channel SBS. Over the last few weeks it showed a short three part dokko entitled Struggle Street, exploring the lives of the urban underclass. Dismissed by some as “poverty porn”, and certainly risking the criticism of being voyeuristic, Struggle Street took the risk of taking the audience (by and large tertiary educated left-wing professionals, once dismissed by an Australian Prime Minister as “the latte set”) into the quite unsalutary home context of those at the bottom of the heap.
The sort of homes Jesus would visit.
Obviously I can’t watch the programme this side of the Ditch but the gist is clear. SBS shows the lives of those who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, turned their lived around, become wonderful examples of how hardship can be transcended. The response in the blogosphere was a collective outpouring of sympathy, of ooohs and ahhs of sympathy for those in Struggle Street until the final instalment. Then, when a clearly sub-functional family was shown wrestling with drug addiction, pregnancy, police-attention and all the ugly signs of life-gone-wrong, the blogosphere, twittersphere, instant-opinionspheres turned toxic.
What sort of home would Jesus visit?
Because poverty is so romantic while it is all big picture, distanced, nuanced. When the reality of a bong-smoking nine month pregnant teen-age mother becomes a reality, sympathy, empathy and compassion collectively expire.
Big picture compassion is tidy, sanitised and uplifting. Public statements, letters to politicians, hand– and hanky-wringing public or private meetings sometimes achieve a little, occasionally achieve much, often achieve nothing. Significantly, if we can extrapolate from another culture and another time, Jesus was not overly known for attending strategic gabfests.
Jesus visited homes.
Weeping, grieving homes, about to be stoned victims’ homes, lepers’ homes, tax-collectors’ wealthy but hated homes. I doubt Jesus blogged spewings of hatred directed at a bong-smoking nine month pregnant teen-age mother. I suspect he held her hand.
Or would have, had he been there. But, given that he has called us to be his hands and his feet, his body and his blood in down-town Napier, from Maraenui to Poraiti [1] it maybe that he wasn’t. Few of us are comfortable when we are confronted with the image of God in a bong-smoking nine month pregnant teen-age mother. I include myself. I have a feeling most of us fall short of the glory of God when faced with the realities, rather than the romance, of poverty. Struggle Street is ugly.
[1] Locales chosen strictly on the basis of statistical income returns for the City of Napier, 2013.
