ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, January 24, 1996 TAG: 9601240011
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: EUGENIA KRIEGER LINDSEY
"AS TO my opinion how far one may go in a case of helping a poor, forsaken, sick creature, I can only repeat what I told you already; infinitely."
- Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo.
When describing his feelings of loss at the death of his father at the Buchenwald death camp in World War II, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel said, " I became paralyzed. I was alive outside but my mind, my spirit, the part of me that could think, that force, the soul that made me who I am, was gone. I moved through life as though I was dead." He continued, "I questioned how such a kind of humanity could exist that would inflict the kind of pain and hatred I witnessed."
I cannot imagine such destruction. How could one ever sleep again after having borne witness to the horrors inflicted on millions of people? As he described his pain at the loss of his father and told of the helplessness that engulfed him, I saw the faces of many children, victims of senseless violence and indifference to their suffering.
Yet, indifference to pain is relived daily by children who struggle to survive in urban poverty and violence. It is a different kind of measured death, a psychological and emotional bloodletting that will surely rob another generation of any semblance of humanity. Their voices are heard, eventually heard, in the anger of adolescence when violence rises out of the emptiness of their lost years.
And as this charade of balancing the budget by eliminating funding from antipoverty programs goes on, children continue to be born and raised in the hell of urban decay. More than 12 million children depend on government assistance to survive. One million children live in foster care subsidized by the government because they have parents who are unable to care for them.
I remember a 9-year-old girl, finally placed into protective foster care. Her mother was psychotic and subject to a wide range of delusions and depression. Whenever mother became catatonic, the little girl had to take care of herself and her infant sister. There were times when there was no food and the girls, being very young, could not go to the store or rely on neighbors for help. When I asked her if she was afraid, she said she was not because she knew she would get something to eat at her day-care center.
This concept of helping those less fortunate cuts both ways in our society. On one hand, we think ourselves an independent and freedom-loving people. It is difficult to discuss political realities in terms of class issues because we are raised in the belief that all people are created equal under God. This notion of equality is then confused with equal opportunity. Poverty is the price paid for failure to live up to that myth.
Yet, we also believe ourselves a God-fearing nation. And, therefore, some attention must be paid to the less fortunate. It would give us great heart to credit our national concern for the less fortunate as impetus for the creation of federal programs that assist the less fortunate, especially impoverished children. In fact, many of our welfare programs were initiated not as preventative programs but in response to catastrophic economic events.
For example, a national count of the birth rate was created out of a need to account for what happened over time to children as the growing population moved from rural to urban communities. It was an attempt to account for the hundreds of children left to die of hunger on the streets of the cities at the turn of the century, infants abandoned by mothers who could not feed them.
The present welfare benefits grew out of legislation created to deal with the aftermath of recurrent economic depression. The Mothers' Aid Act, precursor to Aid to Families With Dependent Children, was legislation enacted to protect the growing numbers of abandoned women and children during the three great recessions between World War I and World War II.
The fact is that children have always been the least represented group in our society. Children have no rights under the law. At best they have the right to protection from injury and death from their parents. This has been true only in the last 30 years. Representation for children continues to be a novel idea.
Those least represented are the children of the poor and working class. It is very easy to cut programs for them. They can't and won't fight back. Their parents certainly are not represented in the short-term plans of political constituencies who seek votes, favors and protection of benefits like tax loopholes for the wealthy.
Impoverished children wield more force than any arguments to eliminate assistance programs created to care and educate those children. No seven-year budget plan is more important than children. They are the future. We have the opportunity to create programs under which they may flourish or become immobilized by despair.
So, what are Gov. George Allen's credentials as architect of a state plan that mirrors the Republicans' national agenda and that will impact the lives of poor families in this region? A man born into affluence. One who has never known the pain of hunger or the humiliation of poverty. A man as disengaged from the people he seeks to limit as they are from the wealth he represents. He is nevertheless a representative of these people. And of their children.
Yet, the programs he argues should be cut are those that lift these children out of suffering. Programs affecting housing, nutrition, day care, education, mental health and medical care are on his chopping block. And it becomes apparent that "change" is a euphemism for dismantling programs that assist the poor, or, at best, increase their discomfort, if that is possible.
The great cellist Yo Yo Ma says, "Every person has his own music, his own voice." In this great debate over who will be worthy of our charity, the voices of children are silent. Their voices are drowned out by the rhetoric of a privileged few who attempt to persuade the rest of us that poverty is caused by individual failure and not by lack of educational or employment opportunity or the economy.
The Allen administration, using an argument from the French physiocrats of the 1700s, seeks to divide the poor into two camps: the worthy who deserve our limited assistance, and the unworthy who deserve nothing. We then allow the unworthy to become paralyzed in their own despair and defeat.
The sins of the father are vested onto the children. If they succumb to the violence they live in, so be it. We somehow have come to believe that they deserve it. As the children of poverty lose their future in the streets, we must know that we have lost ours as well. We have lost, as Wiesel explained, "the very essence of who we are ... our very soul."
Eugenia Krieger Lindsey of Roanoke is a licensed clinical social worker and mental-health consultant for Total Action Against Poverty's Head Start program and a therapist to traumatized children.
LENGTH: Long : 115 linesby CNB