Heartaches by the numbers.

Has anyone noticed that we Americans are becoming increasingly hard-hearted? It isn't so much that we seem to be more often hostile to others, particularly those less fortunate than we, but that significantly we have become indifferent to others. "That's not my problem, man," as the saying unfortunately goes.

This spreading indifference was noticeable, for example, during the 1996 debate about welfare reform. Shockingly, to some at least, that debate was largely about numbers rather than people. We incorporated a perfectly legitimate business term, "cost-benefit analysis," and applied it to people, many of whom were caught in the welfare trap. The question became not whether people on welfare needed help from the government, but whether we (the rest of us) could afford that help. And most of the rest of us showed little concern while the numbers were being crunched.

No one can deny that in a federal, state, and local program as large as our welfare system, there were and are abuses, imbalances, and inefficiencies in the administration of these programs and abuses on the part of the recipients of them (although the later abuses were often exaggerated or sensationalized). And, arguably, welfare needed reform, and some of those reforms put in place have already brought about improvement.

The concern here, however, is not so much the programs themselves but our too prevalent "let them eat cake" attitude toward our fellow citizens who are dependent on government assistance for food, clothing, and shelter. Okay, some can support themselves by working if jobs they can fill are available as, thank God, they are at present. But what about those, the so-called hard core, who simply don't have the skills to fill even entry-level jobs--the physically challenged, the illiterate, those unfortunates whose brains aren't able to understand the simplest instructions? Do we care about them, or are they someone else's problem?

When we're reminded that Jesus taught us we must love our neighbors as ourselves, our response is, "of course." But in our minds we think, that's a high-class solution, one that too often we obey in absentia. The nitty-gritty is that we have our own fish to fry.

The recent and continuing brouhaha about immigration reform (there's that word again) is another case in point. And like the welfare debate it, too, is marked by an abundance of opinions and a minimum of understanding.

When immigration reform legislation was passed in 1996, some giant brain in Congress decided to take only one example: that beyond a specified date, immigrants who had not yet become U.S. citizens would have to return to their country of origin and apply through U.S. consulates there. This, despite the fact that there are, in many U.S. cities, backlogs of up to two years for processing applications for citizenship and that deporting immigrants would often split families apart when another family member is already a U.S. citizen.

During the immigration debate (if it can even be called such), the word illegal conjured up visions of men, women, and children fording the Rio Grande River, as some do. Use of the term undocumented was and is more appropriate. It describes those who are waiting for the processing of their applications or perhaps more often those who cannot pass the citizenship examination because they cannot write or even understand the English language.

The plight of many Laotian and Hmong people is especially touching. Many of them were recruited by the CIA to keep the Vietcong from overrunning their country during our ill-fated war in Vietnam and did valiant service with many casualties. Again and again they rescued U.S. airmen shot down and, at risk, returned them to safety. Often when captured by the Vietcong they were summarily executed.

Today, many of these heroic people and their families are being left high and dry. The elderly, especially (remember that our war in Southeast Asia ended more than 20 years ago) are unable to fulfill the letter of our helter-skelter immigration laws that have been cobbled together with less grace than children building a backyard hut. (Do children still build backyard huts?)

Our so-called immigration reform is so full of holes and contradictions that it makes a situation that was surely imperfect far worse. And why did this happen? It happened because our federal government, president, and Congress decided we the people wanted less money spent on "them" and that we didn't give a damn who was hurt in the process.

Were our leaders wrong in their assessment of our indifference? Did they read the signs incorrectly, or is it true that we really don't give a damn about our fellow citizens? Tough questions, no doubt. And our answers to them now and in the future will say a lot about the kind of people we are.