Hungry child,
I didn’t make this world for you.
You didn’t buy any stock in my railroad.
You didn’t invest in my corporation.
Where are your shares in standard oil?
I made the world for the rich
And the will-be-rich
And the have-always-been-rich.
Not for you,
Hungry child. 

-Langston Hughes, “God to Hungry Child”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Protestant theologian, who was executed for opposing Hitler’s holocaust, believed that the test of the morality of a society is how it treats its children. I agree and am deeply ashamed that the United States of America flunks Bonhoeffer’s test every hour of every day as our policies and priorities permit 16.1 million children — more than 1 in 5 — to live in poverty in the richest nation on earth and 7.3 million to live in extreme poverty according to the new Census poverty data.

Children under five are our poorest age group with one in four infants, toddlers and preschoolers — who did not choose their parents — poor during their years of greatest brain development. The U.S. Agriculture Department recently reported that a record number of families in America are struggling to put enough food on the table and that one in five children live in a food insecure household. Millions of Americans, many of them hard working parents, have only food stamps to keep the wolves of hunger from their door.

Yet, the Ryan budget passed by the House of Representatives not only would do nothing to decrease epidemic poverty, hunger and homelessness during this time of economic downturn and parental joblessness, it would increase their struggles by taking away food and other essential supports. Ryanomics is an all-out assault on our poorest children while asking not a dime of sacrifice from the richest 2 percent of Americans or from wealthy corporations.

Ryanomics slashes hundreds of millions of dollars from child and family nutrition, health, child care, education, and child protection services, in order to extend and add to the massive Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, creating revenue loss of $5 trillion over 10 years. On top of making the Bush tax cuts permanent, the top-income bracket would get an additional 10 percent tax cut. Millionaires and billionaires would on average keep at least an additional quarter of a million dollars each year and possibly as much as $400,000 a year, according to the Citizens for Tax Justice.

The Ryan budget does not name or touch any of the many expensive tax incentives, tax loopholes or tax subsidies that help the powerful and the wealthy. It doesn’t close tax loopholes or reign in incentives to corporations investing or taking jobs overseas, several of which alone could generate $129 billion over 10 years. It doesn’t touch the tax advantage for private equity partners that now provides a $15 billion windfall over 10 years or the tax preferences for oil and gas companies that cost about $40 billion a year.

Ryanomics widens the already huge wealth and income chasm in our nation and only benefits the richest Americans and powerful corporations while ripping apart already porous safety nets for vulnerable children. Ryanomics masquerades as a fiscally responsible deficit-reducing budget plan to preserve our children’s future. In reality, it is Robin Hood in reverse — stealing from babies to benefit billionaires and increasing the deficit.

To come up with a portion of the Ryan budget’s savings requirements, the House Agriculture committee chose to cut more than $33 billion from food stamps but left subsidies to large profitable corporate farms intact. By reducing benefits and changing food stamp eligibility rules nearly 2 million children would lose benefits, about 22 million children would be in households with reduced benefits, and 280,000 low-income children would lose free breakfast and lunch at school. Ryanomics equals more hungry poor children.

Ryanomics has no trouble naming cuts to programs helping poor children and families to pay for massive government handouts for the wealthiest. It:

• Does away with child tax credits 5 ½ million low income children, primarily in immigrant families because of a new requirement that taxpayers must include their Social Security number on tax returns to claim the child tax credit. Working families with incomes averaging $21,000 a year would see their taxes raised about $1,800;
• Eliminates the $1.7 billion Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) that funds critical services for the most vulnerable populations, primarily low and moderate income children and adults who are elderly or disabled. SSBG serves roughly 23 million people, about half of whom are children. If SSBG is repealed, 4 million children would lose child care and child protective services for 1.7 million children and child abuse prevention and intervention for 640,000 children would be disrupted;
• Repeals the Affordable Care Act that prevents insurance companies from denying coverage for children with pre-existing conditions, rescinding coverage when children get sick, and ensures young adults can stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26. The repeal would put 14 million children at risk for losing health coverage by ending the maintenance of effort protections that prevent states from cutting children from the Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program rolls;
• Turns Medicaid over to the states in the form of a federal block grant and cuts spending by $810 billion over 10 years, giving states the power to slash eligibility, benefits, and payments to doctors and hospitals while raising costs on the poor. Today, Medicaid provides comprehensive health and mental health coverage to nearly 36 million children and has helped to reduce the number of uninsured children as employer sponsored coverage has eroded and families have struggled during the economic down turn.

Ryanomics is not only poor arithmetic, it is also poor morality and gross injustice that turns upside down the requirements of all great faiths to protect the poor and vulnerable. The U.S. Catholic Bishops in a letter to every member of Congress on May 8, 2012, said: “Deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility efforts must protect and not undermine the needs of poor and vulnerable people” and declared that the proposed cuts in the House budget “fail this basic moral test.” The much-publicized “Nuns on the Bus,” Catholic Sisters committed to fighting poverty, challenged Ryanomics declaring: “We insist on a Faithful Budget that affirms the life of all God’s children — not just the wealthiest few.” And Albert Camus, Nobel Laureate, speaking at a Dominican monastery in 1948 said: “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.” He described our responsibility as human beings “if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it” and “to refuse to consent to conditions which torture innocents.” He said, “I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.”

And so must all of us including our political leaders of all parties. — (NNPA)

Marian Wright Edelman is president of the Children’s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.

Every 29 seconds, a child is born into poverty in America. Every 29 seconds. One hundred and twenty-four children every hour. Children such as 10-year-old Tyler, 5-year-old Keiris and 4-year-old Jerimiah, who live with their mother, Christina Wyatt, 24, in Middletown, Ohio. In the summer of 2011, the family moved into the Center of Hope for Women and Children, a homeless shelter, after their apartment was robbed and they were evicted. Their only income at that point was a Social Security disability check for Tyler, who has Down syndrome. “I had to, really,” Christina said about moving into the shelter. “We didn’t have anywhere to go.”

When Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Julia Cass met the family there while on assignment for the Children’s Defense Fund, Christina’s voice broke as she described her determination to “get it back together” and build a life for her children different from her own: “I don’t want them to experience even a little bit of what I did. I want to give them the childhood I never had.”

Christina’s own childhood in the Cincinnati area included a mother who didn’t seem to want her, a father who she says didn’t take good care of her, and occasional stays in foster homes. “I sort of took care of myself from about 12,” Christina said. She went to school and made money babysitting. But when she was 14, the father of two girls she babysat for raped her. “I was really scared,” she said. “I didn’t tell anyone. Then I got sick and found out I was pregnant.”

She continued to go to school for a while but quit because she was “harassed by other kids at the school who really didn’t understand my situation.” When she found out the baby had Down syndrome, she considered giving him up for adoption but “something told me to keep him. He was a gift from God.” As she spoke, Tyler bounded into the family’s spartan room at the shelter, smiled broadly and clowned around, demonstrating his ability to do the Michael Jackson moonwalk. He goes to a regular school but is taken out for speech and physical therapy. “Tyler is actually a very intelligent young man,” Christina said. “He has trouble speaking clearly but he gets his point across.” She said that his teachers and “everybody he meets” love him. “He’s got that joy,” she said. “He’s very special.”

She had to fight to keep him. After he was born, they both lived in a special foster home for teenage mothers and their babies, where Christina noticed a pattern: “After a couple months, the girls lost custody of their children.” Out of fear of losing Tyler to strangers, she asked her mother to take temporary custody of him. At 17, the foster care system set Christina up in an apartment, paid her expenses and gave her allowance, but at 18 she was “emancipated” from foster care and on her own. She got custody of Tyler back. Soon after, she moved in with the man who is Keiris and Jerimiah’s father, but “he wasn’t a good person.” Christina paused and declared in a strong voice, “Everything I’ve been through I learned from. I would never put up with anything like that again. I know I’m more than somebody’s punching bag.”

For most of her children’s lives Christina has supported the family with food stamps and minimum wage jobs — McDonald’s, Subway, a factory that produced products for Procter and Gamble, waitressing at the country club — and with cash assistance (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) between jobs. Christina moved to Middletown, where her mother lives, two years ago. She got an apartment and a job at a gas station and made a deal with her former stepfather, a recovering alcoholic: he could live in the apartment in exchange for helping out a little bit financially and babysitting the children while she worked. But that ended when he moved to Florida. Then Christina got sick, lost her job, and fell behind in the rent. During the same tough times the apartment was robbed.

Christina also lost the Medicaid and food stamps she and the children had been receiving. The system in Middletown now involves a telephone interview rather than a personal one, but Christina said she didn’t get the notice about the phone appointment, and in any case, she had no phone. Finally, they got evicted. That’s when she asked her mother to drive her and the children to the Center of Hope with a backpack of their clothes and a book bag filled with a few toys.

Christina also brought along some hopes of her own: She deeply wants to get her GED and then go to college — not a vocational/technical school or online school but a real college. She can’t explain why, but she wants to be a lawyer. She also has a passion for writing: “I feel like I can do better than a minimum wage job. I’d be a lot happier if I were in school and moving forward to something better. That is the only answer, in my eyes, for us to have any kind of life.” Christina is still determined to give her children a better childhood than she had, and though her own childhood gave her few road maps, she wants to find a way to keep moving forward. I truly hope she succeeds. — (NNPA)

Marian Wright Edelman is president of the Children’s Defense Fund.

I often say to people who come to the Schomburg that the crisis of today is a consequence of not one, but two generations born after the Civil Rights Movement who have been deliberately kept from their history.

— Khalil Gibran Muhammad, June 2012

When Khalil Muhammad speaks people listen. He is a scholar, historian, and the director of the New York Public Library’s renowned Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Muhammad knows a lot about the importance of being mindful of learning from history. When he spoke about equality of opportunity to 1800 young leaders at a Children’s Defense Fund’s Haley Farm leadership training session in June, he explained that our nation is testing the old saying: “Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

He said: “Because of individual Black achievement, some today believe that we have finally reached the promised land of a colorblind equal opportunity America, and yet — and here’s the history lesson — this is the not the first time we’ve been to the mountaintop. Five generations ago, many Americans believed that the heavy lifting of building racial democracy had been completed. What better proof, they claimed, than the election of more than a dozen African Americans to the United States Congress? From the 1870s through the turn of the 20th century, 14 Black men served in the U.S. House of Representatives and two Black men served in the U.S. Senate. Undeniably these were historic times, watershed events and moments for great optimism.”

As it turned out, the golden Reconstruction Era just after the Civil War was just the beginning in a long string of false hopes that eventually became unfulfilled expectations. Muhammad noted that observers have continued to make the same mistake of unfounded optimism about racial equality over and over in the decades since then. Meanwhile, children are not being taught about past battles in the struggle for equality, even relatively recent ones — as shown by the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress that found only 2 percent of the nation’s high school seniors demonstrated basic knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement, including Brown v. Board of Education.

Many students don’t learn about other pieces of the Black experience such as the full horror of slavery at all, and “by the time they enter college they don’t recall much Black history that wasn’t about Rosa Parks’ tired feet or King’s dream.” History is being re-written and kept from our children, replaced by a hazy and sanitized version of events that can make it sound as if the fight for racial equality is already over with a happy ending rather than a continuing struggle demanding continuing vigilance.

Muhammad warned that we gloss over the truth about our history at our peril. Slavery, for example, “cannot slip into the dark recesses of our collective memories because it’s too painful or we worry our kids will lose hope for the future . . . Every generation should know what we are capable of doing to one another.”

He insisted, “Too often in this country change and progress have been short-lived and history has been forgotten . . . We must have a firm commitment to teaching young people the history of racism — not as a static, unchanging evil, but as a constantly evolving system of beliefs, practices, and policies that are capable of adapting to new circumstances, including a Black president. Each generation must relearn the past in light of the present, and each generation must discern for itself the relative challenges that discrimination and inequality present for its survival. . . This rise and fall, this two steps forward for three steps backward, is not inevitable unless we choose to forget the lessons we’ve learned from the past.”

So many of the formidable threats millions of poor children of all races, but especially Black children, face today are actually dangerous steps backwards. The Cradle to Prison Pipeline, which places one in three Black boys (and one in six Latino boys) born in 2001 at risk of imprisonment. Mass incarceration of people of color – especially Black males. “Stop and frisk” racial profiling in policing. Huge racial disparities in often harsh arbitrary zero tolerance school discipline policies that deny countless children of essential education and push them into the criminal justice system. Massive attacks on voting rights with new identification –  “show your papers” or get new papers policies – and cost burden [“poll tax”] requirements which especially impact the poor, minority groups, the elderly, the disabled, and the young. Re-segregating and substandard schools denying millions of poor Black and Latino children skills they will need to work in our increasingly competitive globalized economy. All of these are siren calls for attentive action.

We are once again at a critical turning point for our children and nation. Despite all the harsh lessons of the past and all the lofty rhetoric about who we want and need to be as a 21st century multicultural nation in a multiracial and multicultural world, we’re heading in the wrong direction — backwards into a second Post-Reconstruction Era. We need to correct course and challenge the huge and interlocking economic and racial inequality that threaten the very idea of America.

Muhammad said, “We’ve heard so much from people over these last couple of years wanting to ‘take the country back’—prompting many of us, of course, to think, ‘Back to what?’ . . . If you hadn’t heard, Black and Brown babies are being born for the first time in American history at faster rates than White babies. The challenge here is to make sure that we don’t move towards apartheid, with a White minority running a majority Black and Brown country.” Are we up to that challenge? When it comes to racial inequality will we keep taking two steps forward and three back? Or, will America continue to move forward to ensure a level playing field for every child of every color and every income regardless of the lottery of birth? — (NNPA)

Marian Wright Edelman is president of the Children’s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.

When news broke of the murders at the Sikh temple of Wisconsin on August 5, people of all faiths and backgrounds and the first responders who came to the scene to help were horrified by the ambush on men and women as they prepared for worship services. Leaders across the country quickly denounced the hate crime and the FBI immediately began investigating the attack as a possible case of domestic terrorism. But as easy as it was for all of us to be outraged by another senseless attack and heartbroken by the congregation’s stories, it was difficult to be surprised by how it took place again in a nation unwilling to curb guns designed just to kill lots of people in the hands of lawless people. Would this have happened without a semi-automatic gun and high-capacity clips of bullets?

The shootings at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin came only two weeks after James Holmes killed 12 people and injured 58 others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in one of the worst mass shootings in American history. Would this have happened without an AR-15 assault rifle, a Remington 870 12-gauge shot gun, and a semi-automatic handgun with high-capacity clips of bullets? After the Aurora massacre, the Denver Post published an interactive timeline listing some of the others:

• August 1966, University of Texas at Austin, Texas: 16 people killed, 31 hurt.

• July 1985, a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, Calif.: 21 people killed, 19 hurt.

• October 1991, a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas: 23 people killed, 22 hurt.

• May 1998, the community of Springfield, Ore.: four people killed, 21 hurt.

• April 1999, Columbine High School, Colo.: 13 people killed, 26 hurt.

• April 2007, Virginia Tech University, Va.: 32 people killed, 27 hurt.

• Feb. 2008, Northern Illinois University, Illinois: five people killed, 16 hurt.

• March 2009, Coffee and Geneva counties in Alabama: 10 people killed, six hurt.

• April 2009, a community center in Binghamton, New York: 13 people killed, four hurt. November 2009, Fort Hood, Texas: 13 people killed, 24 hurt. Other shootings, like the January 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, that killed six people and injured 13, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, could be added to this list. Would any of this devastation have happened without semi-automatic guns and high capacity clips of bullets?

Every time another mass shooting happens in the United States, the debate over gun control comes fleetingly to the forefront — until political fear paralyzes courage and action. Inevitably, some people repeat the argument that the solution to preventing mass shootings is not better gun control laws — even control of assault weapons which have no place in nonmilitary hands — but getting even more Americans armed. The apparent fantasy result would be something straight out of Hollywood where every single time a bad person stands up with a gun a good person with their own gun would quickly rise up out of the crowd, shoot the bad person, and save the day.

But arguments like this ignore both common sense and scientific evidence about the connection between the ready availability of guns — including assault weapons and guns with large ammunition capacity — and the epidemic of gun violence in America.

Daniel W. Webster, professor and co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and a panelist at the Children’s Defense Fund’s recent conference, wrote after the Aurora shootings: “We should not brush aside discussions of gun policy as too politically difficult to expect meaningful change, or ‘the price for our freedoms.’ Instead, we should reflect on why the U.S. has a murder rate that is nearly seven times higher than the average murder rate in other high-income countries and a nearly 20 times higher murder rate with guns. And we should consider how flaws in current gun policies contribute to this disparity ... Following mass shootings, gun control opponents have not been bashful about pushing for laws to remove restrictions on carrying guns in schools, bars and churches. Indeed, calls for removing restrictions on carrying concealed firearms will not stop mass shootings. Research indicates that so-called right-to-carry laws don’t reduce violence, and may increase aggravated assaults. But studies I have conducted indicate that stricter regulations of gun sales, whether by retail dealers or by private sellers, are associated with fewer guns diverted to criminals. Moreover, national surveys show that a large majority of citizens favor these reforms to our gun laws, including most gun owners.”

It is way past time for common-sense gun law reform in America. Many of the victims of mass shootings have been strangers — sometimes children — who were personally unknown to the shooters but were simply in “the wrong place at the wrong time,” even if the “wrong place” turned out to be going to class, attending a worship service on a Sunday morning, or going to the local movie theater on a summer evening. In other words, they could have been any one of us.

What will it take for us to do something about it?

Marian Wright Edelman is president of the Children’s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information, go to www.childrensdefense.org.

Our nation’s democracy is in a crisis. We are facing the biggest challenge to our nation since its inception. No, there is not an armed rebellion going on, but, oh, is there a war — a silent, insidious, invidious, nefarious, absolutely downright ugly war. And the war is on the right to vote for American citizens.

– Barbara Arnwine, July 2012

At the Children’s Defense Fund’s recent national conference, Barbara Arnwine, the executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a leader of Election Protection, the nation’s largest nonpartisan voter protection coalition, issued an urgent call to action. Right now assaults on voting rights across the country in advance of the 2012 elections are keeping her very busy.

Arwine said 25 million Americans who had voted in 2008 did not vote in the 2010 midterm elections, and when new state legislators came into power after those elections, their first priority was figuring out how to keep those 25 million people from returning to the polls. Legislators in 35 states quickly drafted bills making it harder for people to vote: “everything from photo ID laws, to laws restricting early voting, to laws making it harder for third party registration groups to register people to vote, to laws making it harder for people to vote on Sundays because in many states that’s when Latinos and African Americans voted the heaviest, to laws restricting student voting.” Arnwine said the lawmakers behind these bills were counting on the targeted voters not noticing what was happening until it was too late.

But, she said, “They forgot that we stand on the shoulders of giants who we will never let down ... we get up in the morning and we say that we cannot negate the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer; that we will never forget the legacy of Cesar Chavez; that we never will negate the legacy of Mr. Korematsu; that we never can sit back and let rights be stolen.” Arnwine then shared her Map of Shame: Voter Suppression Legislation by state, which shows all of us who are ready to fight back exactly where the battlegrounds are.

The map’s original title was the Map of Voter Suppression in the United States, but one day as Arnwine was studying an early version she heard her late father’s voice in her head saying what he always did when he saw something wrong: “That’s a sin and a shame.” It’s a sin and a shame that in 2012 we are still fighting the same battles for voting rights that have been going on since the nation was founded and facing some of the same Jim Crow-era voter suppression tactics we hoped were dead and buried after the Civil Rights Movement. But as Frederick Douglass taught us, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” So the first step for every one of us is to become familiar with the Map of Shame, especially the current and proposed voting laws in our own states.

Then we each need a plan. Arnwine and her colleagues are doing their part by suing states whose proposed laws violate the Voting Rights Act. But Arnwine stressed that every person can do something to fight in this war on the right to vote, and we each need to decide now how we will execute our roles. Begin by using traditional networks and social networks to make sure every single person you know is a “V.I.P.”: they have verified their voter registration status; they have the right identification for their state; and they know their precinct.

The last is important, Arnwine said, “because the biggest devilment that goes on in these elections are what we call deceptive practices — people are going to get robocalls, and they’re going to get fliers that claim they’re from the NAACP and everything, telling people to go to the wrong polling place ... if they’re in the wrong polling places, in most states their vote will not count.” Securing “V.I.P.” status is critical to making sure people will not be disenfranchised on Election Day.

Next, Arnwine said, we need to counter the organized groups who are already planning to send “poll watchers” to African-American, Latino and student voting places to intimidate and harass voters, and we need to “get [our] friends to become poll workers, official poll workers, because that’s what they’re doing — they’re putting them inside of the polling places also, so they can challenge people on the inside and nobody will know what they’re doing. So we need good people sitting next to them, making sure that people have access to the ballot.” Now is the time to sign up for these roles.

We can also volunteer at Election Protection Coalition Command Centers to help watch out for local problems. Finally, on Election Day every one of us must do the basic job of helping other people get to the polls — as Arnwine says even “if you’re bedridden get up in the morning and call everybody you know: ‘Are you going to vote today?’”

Arnwine summed up this way: “There is a role for everybody. Don’t forget. If you forget everything that I said today, if you remember nothing, just remember this one thing: that we can only win this fight if you fight.” We cannot stand by and let the right to vote be taken away again on our watch. Every one of us must decide what we can do in the fight to protect voting rights today. There’s no time to waste. — (NNPA)

Marian Wright Edelman is president of the Children’s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information, go to www.childrensdefense.org.