Character, choice, and the reality of personal responsibility

To spend time working closely with poor and working-class young people is to be struck by two things at once: how close and yet how far away are the solutions to the economic and often psychological malaise that grips so very many American communities.

How close are the solutions? Sometimes they seem very close indeed. I remember my friend Brian (not his real name). He was a young man in crisis. The child of a broken home, the son of an alcoholic father, he had just graduated from high school, and he was slipping away. He didn’t have a place …