Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 19, 1993 TAG: 9301190212
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
IF THE CHILD IS SAFE, THE AMERICAN DREAM CAN LIVE
In her NEW YORK TIMES best-seller Edelman offers her three sons - and all the nation's children - counsel about how to live a moral, compassionate life. The final part of the series offers a blueprint for reinstilling family and community values that America seems to have lost.
Ironically, as communism is collapsing all around the world, the American Dream is collapsing all around America for millions of children, youths and families in all racial and income groups.
American is pitted against American as economic uncertainty and downturn increase our fears, our business failures, our poverty rates, our racial divisions, and the dangers of political demagoguery. Family and community values and supports are disintegrating among all races and income groups, reflecting the spiritual as well as economic poverty of our nation. All our children are growing up today in an ethically polluted nation where instant sex without responsibility, instant gratification without effort, instant solutions without sacrifice, getting rather giving, and hoarding rather than sharing are the too-frequent signals of our mass media, business and political life.
Remember the children behind the statistics. All over America, they are the small human tragedies who will determine the quality and safety and economic security of America's future as much as your and my children will. If recent trends continue, by the end of the century poverty will overtake one in every four children, and the share of children living with single parents will also rise. One in every five births and more than one in three black births in the year 2000 will be to a mother who did not receive cost-effective prenatal care. One of every five 20-year-old women will be a mother, and more than four out of five of those young mothers will not be married.
If we do not act immediately to protect America's children and change the misguided national choices that leave too many of them unhealthy, unhoused, ill-fed and undereducated, during the next four years:
1,080,000 American babies will be born at low birth-weight, multiplying their risk of death or disability;
143,619 babies will die before their first birthday;
4,400,000 babies will be born to unmarried women;
2,000,000 babies will be born to teen mothers;
1,620,000 young people ages 16 to 24 will fail to complete high school;
599,076 children younger than 18 will be arrested for alcohol-related offenses, 359,600 for drug offenses, and 338,292 for violent crimes;
3,600,000 infants will be born into poverty.
It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans. Over 13 million children in our rich land go without the basic amenities of life - more than the total populations of Illinois, Pennsylvania or Florida. If every citizen in the state of Florida became poor, the president would declare a national disaster. Yet he and Congress have yet to recognize child and family poverty and financial insecurity as the national disaster it is and to attack it with a fraction of the zeal and shared commitment we now apply to digging out after a devastating hurricane or earthquake or fire.
It is a morally lost nation that is unable and unwilling to disarm our children and those who kill our children in their school buses, strollers, yards, and schools, in movie theaters and in McDonald's. Death stalks America's playgrounds and streets without a declaration of war - or even a sustained declaration of concern by our president, Congress, governors, state and local elected officials and citizens.
Every day, 135,000 children bring a gun to school. In 1987, 415,000 violent crimes occurred in and around schools. Some inner-city children are exposed to violence so routinely that they exhibit post-traumatic stress symptoms similar to those that plague many Vietnam combat veterans. Still, our country is unwilling to take semiautomatic machine guns out of the hands of its citizens.
Where are the moral guerrillas and protesters crying out that life at home is as precious as life abroad? Isn't it time for a critical mass of Americans to join our law enforcement agencies and force our political leaders to halt the proliferation of guns? Every day 23 teens and young adults are killed by firearms in America.
What do we really value as Americans when the president's 1992 budget proposed only $100 million to increase Head Start for one year and no addition for child care for working families but $500 million each day for Desert Storm, $90 million each day to bail out profligate savings and loan institutions, and hundreds of millions more to give capital-gains tax breaks to the rich?
Between 1979 and 1989, the average income (adjusted for inflation) of the bottom fifth of families dropped by 6 percent while that of the top fifth surged upward by 17 percent. The poorest fifth of American families with children lost 21 percent of their income.
It is an ethically confused nation that has allowed truth-telling and moral example to become devalued commodities. Too many of us hold to the philosophy that "government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem." If government is seen as an illegitimate enterprise, if the public purposes of one's job are not considered a high calling, and if government has no purpose other than its own destruction, the restraints against unethical behavior in both the public and private sectors quickly erode.
As a result, for every Michael Deaver and for every Elliott Abrams for the public sector, there is an Ivan Boesky or Rev. Jim Bakker in the private sector.
Isn't it time for us to hold our political leaders to their professional beliefs and promises about getting children ready for school and providing them health care and education?
It is a dangerously short-sighted nation that fantasizes absolute self-sufficiency as the only correct way of life. Throughout our history, we have given government help to our people and then have forgotten that fact when it came time to celebrate our people's achievements. Two hundred years ago, Congress granted federal lands to the states to help maintain public schools. In 1862, President Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Act, granting land for colleges.
The first food voucher and energy assistance programs came, not during the New Deal or the War on Poverty, but at the end of the Civil War, when Congress and President Lincoln created the Freedman's Bureau. Federal help for vaccinations, vocational education, and maternal health began, not with Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, but under Madison, Wilson and Harding, respectively.
The president and Congress and public must take the time and have the courage to make specific choices and not wield an indiscriminate budget ax or hide behind uniform but unjust freezes of current inequalities. They must also take time to distinguish between programs that work (like immunization, preventive health care and Head Start) and programs that don't (like the B2 Stealth bomber). They must apply the same standards of accountability for programs benefiting the rich and poor and middle class alike. They must hold the Pentagon to the same standards of efficiency as social programs. And isn't it time for the president and Congress to invest more in preventing rather than trying to mop up problems after the fact?
When the new century dawns with new global economic and military challenges, America will be ready to compete economically and lead morally only if we:
1. Stop cheating and neglecting our children for selfish, short-sighted, personal and political gain;
2. Stop clinging to our racial past and recognize that America's ideals, future and fate are as inextricably intertwined with the fate of its poor and non-white children as with its privileged and white ones;
3. Love our children more than we fear each other and our perceived or real external enemies;
4. Acquire the discipline to invest preventively and systematically in all of our children now in order to reap a better-trained work force and more stable future tomorrow;
5. Curb the desires of the overprivileged so that the survival needs of the less privileged may be met, and spend less on weapons of death and more on lifelines of constructive development for our citizens;
6. Set clear national, state, city, community and personal goals for child survival and development, and invest whatever leadership, commitment, time, money and sustained effort are needed to achieve them;
7. Struggle to begin to live our lives in less selfish and more purposeful ways, redefining success by national and individual character and service rather than by national consumption and the superficial barriers of race and class.
The mounting crisis of our children and families is a rebuke to everything America professes to be. While the cost of repairing our crumbling national foundation will be expensive in more ways than one, the cost of not repairing it, or of patching cosmetically, may be fatal. - Universal Press Syndicate