When I see appalling statistics like the ones above I’m reminded of the story of the construction worker who had a reputation for loving children. One morning he lay down a fresh concrete sidewalk in front of a new building. He returned that afternoon to find a child’s footprints solidified in the sidewalk. He stormed through the neighborhood ringing doorbells and angrily demanding to know whose child had walked through the sidewalk.
“Why are you acting this way, one parent asked; people say that you love children?”
“I do love them,” the worker replied, “but I love them in the abstract, not in the concrete.”
We are living in a nation that seems to love its children more in the abstract than as actual human beings. How much longer can we continue to neglect our needy children and what will be the end result if this neglect is allowed to continue?
Let’s look at an actual example of what the life of a child living in poverty can lead to. Lots of people know of the tragic story of the end of Freddie Gray’s life. Few know the tragedy of his life before he was killed by police in Baltimore. Here is that story as described by Richard Rothstein to a group of future teachers at their Bank Street graduation ceremony.
“He was born prematurely to a heroin-addicted mother and spent months in the hospital before he weighed enough to come home to a dilapidated apartment where lead paint was flaking off the walls. By 22 months, his lead level was four times as great as the dangerous level associated with serious loss of cognitive ability—that’s right, four times as great. Such lead poisoning also predicts lessened ability to self-regulate and greater tendency to aggression. For girls, it predicts higher rates of teen pregnancy. Before dropping out of high school, Freddie Gray had spent years in special education. He and his two sisters, also lead-exposed, all suffered from attention deficit disorder. Their schools were filled with other children with similar problems”
But the problem of children living in poverty is not confined to inner cities and to African Americans. If you read JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy or Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, you learn that poverty with its attendant problems of hunger, dysfunctional families, wide-spread divorce, drug and alcohol addiction, low cognitive functioning in children is widespread in rural America as well. We have an epidemic of childhood poverty in American and we should be both ashamed of that and resolved to take steps to address that problem.
In the end, it isn’t just the children trapped in poverty who will suffer if we as a nation remain indifferent to their situation—we all will eventually suffer as the lesson from the following story illustrates.
A man came into a forest and asked the Trees to provide him a handle for his axe. The Trees consented to his request and gave him a young ash-tree.
No sooner had the man fitted a new handle to his axe from the young ash, than he began to use it to quickly fell the noblest giants of the forest.
An old oak, lamenting the destruction of his companions, said to a neighboring cedar, "If we had not given up the rights of the ash, we might yet have retained our own privileges and have stood for ages."
A nation which is willing to sacrifices its children, cannot continue to prosper.
That’s why all of us must work to ensure that they are not sacrificed.
Here are some ways that we as ordinary citizens can help address the problem of children living in poverty and demonstrate that we love them in the concrete, not just the abstract.
Write your Senators and Representative and encourage them to vote for the bi-partisan Child Nutrition Bill
Take the time to research and understand the influence of class in America and how it has contributed to the development and maintenance of poverty in America, how it separates and pits groups of poor (city vs rural, whites vs non-whites) against one another. (See above links). Develop some ideas about how we can curb the influence of class and mend the rifts between groups living in poverty. Share your ideas with others concerned about childhood poverty.
Read about the good jobs strategy and support businesses that use it. Refuse to support those that don’t. Let the latter business know why you don’t do business with them.
Support the programs and activities of organizations like:
Bread for the World http://www.bread.org/ [This organization has a political action activity that is easy for individuals to support]
Modest Needs Foundation https://www.modestneeds.org/index.asp
As parents, teachers and adult mentors, we should encourage young people to take on the challenge of eliminating poverty. Here is a linked that describes what some empowered young people are already doing.
http://michaelrconnollyjr.weebly.com/table-of-contents-young-enough-to-change-the-world.html