As we drive, we pass teenagers standing in the street--just to hang out Janice tells me, evident disapproval in her tone. At times, she tells me stories of adults selling their children's food stamps to support drug habits; at other times, there is a different story.

"I ask the young men, in some of the sessions that I lead, to tell me what they plan to be doing just think about it for a moment, 10 years down the road. I ask them for a goal.

"They look at me like I'm crazy; 'We aren't going to be alive 10 years from now.'

"I think about the plans I'm making now...for retirement and IRA, paying my home loan off in installments over the next few years...."

And I think about my plans: career, activities, even the plan of study that has to be submitted down to the details of which amusingly irrelevant Lit and Arts C I will be taking in the spring of my junior year.

I'm not equipped to pass judgment on human nature, and I'm suspicious of those who say they are. The people I met who were receiving welfare were like people anywhere else: They ran the spectrum of character and values. Most shared basic concerns with people I had met everywhere else--housing, families, economic stability. The biggest differences I noticed were not those of character; people were not unusually lazy or unintelligent, as many people seemed to believe, at least according to the news I'd been hearing all summer.

Rather the difference lay in opportunity. Were the women I saw really the economic parasites of the state they were portrayed as? Or was their misfortune rather to have belonged to a social group in which their position as non-wage earning mothers could not be justified with same title they might have earned elsewhere as housewives? Was the problem for people in their community that they were really less motivated? Or that they had grown up in a world bereft of evidence that hard work would make a difference?

One thing that did strike and surprise me about some of the people I met was their attitude towards the place where they lived. Despite all the instability, many of them still referred to their neighborhoods as communities. For them, the fragile ties of common interest and mundane existence had not yet been as totally shattered as I had been led to believe, given the circumstances of their lives.

Their use of the word made me think. How far did the bonds of that community reach? Did they include only the people who were united by a common circumstance of impoverishment, the people I was meeting now, who were commonly portrayed as a monolithic block in the news stories I heard--the "welfare population"? Or was that merely a device, a creation of an out-group, in order to make non-members feel that there was some real difference separating them, and thus absolving them of responsibility for a group of people who in reality, shared a common history, a common popular culture, and more basically, a set of characteristics of human nature-laziness and affection, ambition and despair--that were present everywhere that people live?

It is easy to dispose of a problem when you feel that it doesn't concern you., to say, "Go take care of it yourself everything that goes wrong is your fault."

It's not so easy when you realize that some of the causes for those problems lie in the same basic character traits that you possess yourself, and that given the same circumstances, you might not have acted so very differently.

Welfare recipients share with their wealthier neighbors the nation's cities and towns, its social mores and a part of its collective future as it hurtles to the close of the millennium. Perhaps before anyone decides that they are unworthy of assistance,, it would be worthwhile to take a harder look at the common fears, concerns and abilities that people on welfare share in common with all of the other citizens of their extended communities.