CHAPTER FIVE: A POLITICS OF LOVE

American Youth: Equal Rights for Angels

CHAPTER 5:
AMERICAN YOUTH: EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ANGELS

Often when I look at a small child, I feel like I’m looking at an angel.

Yet if children are angels, as a country we’re sure not treating them that way. Unseen by most of us, America has a terrible underbelly of millions of suffering children. Health crisis. Hunger crisis. Addiction crisis. Safety crisis. Education crisis. Traumatic stress crisis. So many of America’s children are endangered either physically or emotionally, it should be seen as a humanitarian emergency.

Obviously, the problem isn’t that we don’t love our children. But the love that will save the world is not just love for our own children. It is also love for children on the other side of town and the other side of the world. For every problem, whether personal or societal, the solution lies in the realization of our oneness and the expansion of our love.

The economic system of the United States was invented at a time when women did not yet have a public voice. The care of children was considered “women’s work.” But today we do have a voice, and it should be raised loudly on behalf of every woman’s child. Women have a unique role to play in addressing what is in essence systemic child neglect.

It took more than a hundred years of feminism to root out of Western consciousness the idea that women are the property of men. But in the arduous struggle for women’s equality over the years, perhaps we did not attend enough to the concomitant needs of children to be freed from the yoke of ancient injustices. While we have evolved as a society beyond the idea that women are the property of men, we have not fully evolved beyond the notion that children are the property of adults.

Children are not our property. They have their own rights of citizenship. If a child is a born or naturalized citizen of the United States, then he or she is legally accorded all the rights thereof.

If every citizen is given by God unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” then government theoretically owes children more, not less, than adults because adults can more fully provide for themselves. A small child cannot feed, clothe, or educate himself or herself. Children cannot vote against special interests that profit financially off activities that harm their health, or that deny them education through the leeching of financial resources, or that profit off their problems through unjust punishment.

Few people want to actively harm a child, and there is certainly a universal consensus among us that such behavior should not be tolerated. We are certainly willing to hold an individual accountable for hurting one child. But as a society, we are neglecting millions of them. Most Americans probably don’t appreciate the level of chronic trauma now suffered by children in our midst.

Due mainly to economically disadvantaged parents, millions of American children live in food-insecure households, lacking consistent access to sufficient and nutritious food. Millions of our children go to school each day in schools that do not meet safety standards. Almost four million children lack health care coverage. Millions go to schools where there are not the required school supplies to reasonably expect a child to learn to read. And when children can’t learn to read by eight years old, the chances of them graduating from high school are greatly reduced and the chances of incarceration are increased.

And what are they to do? They are not old enough to vote; therefore they have no voter influence. They’re not old enough to work; therefore they have no financial leverage. They can’t afford highly paid lobbyists to stroll the halls of Congress to advocate on their behalf. Who is to speak for them, if not us?

And that is why politics matters. It’s not something “over there” to people whose lives must bear the impact of policies that work against their interests every day. An issue shouldn’t spark us only if it happens to impact us personally. Politics shouldn’t be just about you and yours, or me and mine. It’s about we and ours. Politics is the purview of our collective sensibilities and our collective decision-making. It should be a place where we address more than just what we want for ourselves; it should be a place where we come together to consider hould be a place where we come together to consider what is right for America. There’s a bigger question in life than “How am I doing?” And that’s “How are we doing?”

Millions of children living in chronic distress in the richest country in the world is a form of collective child neglect. And that should matter to all of us.

THE COST OF CHRONIC TRAUMA

The crisis of American children is multidimensional, with manifestations in our economic system, health system, educational system, justice system, and mental health care system.

Seventy-eight percent of incarcerated inmates in America came out of the child welfare system. Sex trafficking of American girls is a $91 billion business, making us number one among sex-trafficking countries around the world. Some 120,000 girls were shipped into Minneapolis for last year’s Super Bowl, making it arguably the largest sex-trafficking event in the world.

Obviously, the primary problem here cannot be reduced to any one issue. Poverty is a problem. Opioids are a problem. The breakdown of the family is a problem. The ease with which fathers can avoid making child care payments is a problem. Lack of education, particularly among low-income populations, is a problem. An increase in the number of children sent to foster care is a problem. The fact that the sex-trafficking industry has infiltrated the network of foster-care parents and even hovers over schools is a problem. But perhaps the worst problem of all is how desensitized we are to the urgency of the problem.

More children have been killed by gunfire in the United States since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, than American soldiers have been killed in overseas combat since 9/11. From sex trafficking to a chronic pattern of school shootings to children torn from their parents’ arms as an act of immigration policy to millions of children living in chronic trauma, something has gone horribly wrong. And what child can stand up for himself or herself and say, “Enough is enough”?

Our system does not actively transgress against children. For the most part, the American legal system does its best to protect children from active measures that harm their well-being, though far too few resources are devoted to that purpose, to be sure. In a country whose government has increasingly aligned itself with the interests of corporate power before the needs of its people, it should surprise no one that the interests of children fall to the lowest spot on our political priority list. Teachers’ unions, youth advocacy groups, and nonprofit educational organizations such as the Children’s Defense Fund do important work, but they’re no match for the economic clout accorded to corporate interests.

The vital interests of children should be seen as our most important, not our least important, political concern—and then treated that way. We should massively realign the material resources of our country in the direction of children eight years old and younger. If we were thinking about genuine long-range economic planning—not to mention securing the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to every citizen—then there would be not one American in early childhood with anything less than the best-quality health care, the best-quality education, the best-quality access to the arts, and the best-quality food.

Why should a child’s basic rights as an American be tended to less just because the circumstances of his or her birth were less fortunate? Where in our Constitution does it say that rich children should have greater access to the fruits of liberty? If we’re going to take the “God gave all men inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” part of the Declaration of Independence and declare it no longer operative, if we’re going to take the “governments are instituted among men to secure those rights” phrase and simply declare it null and void, then shouldn’t we at least have a conversation about it first?

We’re the only country in the world that funds our educational system through property taxes, guaranteeing that children of well-to-do parents have a good chance of a quality education while children of less-well-to-do parents do not. It is astonishing to look online and see all the ways in which teachers ask for help getting their students basic school supplies, just so that they can learn. This points out a basic flaw in our political perspective: care for our children should not be a charity issue, but a justice issue. And at the deepest level, a human issue.

It’s grossly cynical to tell people to climb the ladder of success when, as children, they weren’t put onto the first rung by those who are older. As Martin Luther King Jr. would say, you can’t tell someone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they don’t even have any boots. Often we read of people who “escaped” a childhood of poverty in America, but all of us should ask ourselves: in the richest nation in the world, why should so many children be in need of “escape”?

The health and well-being of American children should be top on our list of national priorities. The means of self-actualization through education and culture should be available to every child, regardless of what neighborhood they live in. Their libraries should be fully funded temples of arts and literacy. Their schools should be palaces of learning and joy. Their neighborhoods should all have safe and beautiful parks for them to play in.

To ask for those things doesn’t mean we’re asking for too much. Not asking for them means we are asking for too little. There is no lack of money to do this. This is simply too much money going elsewhere.

Americans have become so habituated to skewed natural priorities that we’re almost programmed to ask, “But where would the money come from?”

“How would we pay for all that education and culture, health and safety?” ask those who have no problem whatsoever paying for ill-begotten wars and tax cuts for the extremely wealthy. Such a question should be met by laughter from those who were never consulted as to how we would pay for a $2 trillion war in Iraq (which, among other things, created ISIS) or a $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest among us (which, among other things, is already adding to our wealth inequality).

Let’s ask instead what price we’re paying by not doing more to help our children. Or to be more exact, the price that our children are paying and will continue to pay. When it comes to our children, we should protect them from the ravages of poverty no differently than we would protect them from the ravages of a natural disaster.

According to the most recent poverty data from the US Census Bureau, almost 13 million children in the United States lived in poverty in 2017. Most of those children went to school hungry each day. Hunger diminished both their capacity to learn and the statistical probability of their future success, both educationally and professionally.

If everyone who reads this will simply put down your book for a moment, close your eyes, and try to imagine what it means that 13 million children in this country go to school hungry each day, then we will be a better nation for it.

In her book On Becoming, Michelle Obama describes in some detail the admirable efforts she made while living in the East Wing on behalf of America’s disadvantaged children. I couldn’t help wondering while reading it, however, why the plight of those children didn’t get more attention in the West Wing.

In the words of Nelson Mandela, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Yet the United States ranks at the bottom, or near the bottom, on almost every indicator when it comes to governmental policies toward children. In the United States, youth homicide rates are more than ten times the rates of other leading industrialized nations. Social scientists and psychologists describe our own “war zones”—areas in some of our more violently charged homes, communities, and inner cities—where levels of trauma and post-traumatic stress among children are similar to those experienced by returning vets. But there is nothing “post” about their traumatic stress, because it is triggered and retriggered every day. We have simply normalized their despair.

Americans have become enamored of the idea that our government should be run like a business, but that idea is flawed. In fact, our problem is that too often our government is run like a business—the wrong kind of business. It gives precedence to the gains of corporate shareholders while often ignoring the needs of the average stakeholder, which in this case is every citizen. And what business can long endure that pays out dividends to its shareholders but ignores the development of new products?

The US government should not be run like a business; it should be run like a family. Millions of years of evolution prove that no natural system can survive and thrive that does not first take care of its young. New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ahern, in a speech to the United Nations in 2018, said that her goal is to make her country the best place in the world to be a child. Americans should ask for no less.

Over 74 million people in the United States are under the age of eighteen.* And every one of them could have a world-class education, starting in preschool and going through college or technical school. Every dollar spent on the health, education, and general welfare of our young will multiply mightily in the form of the creativity, health, and economic vitality of the adults they will become. And every dollar we withhold from them is stolen many times over from our economy and social vitality in the future.

The relative neglect of the needs of this segment of our population is a threat to the security of our country, because it is a threat to our future. How dare those of us who do not statistically stand to be around in fifty years live our lives in such a way as to make the lives of those who will still be here more difficult? Such thinking derives from an economic system that views children as dispensable because they add no immediate economic value to that system. It is true that they add no short-term value to our economy, but they are critical to the long-term possibility of survival—the survival not only of our democracy, but possibly of life on earth.

INVESTING IN NEW BEGINNINGS

In Proverbs 22:6, it is written, “Start children off in the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.” This is not just a religious scripture; it is a scientific fact. There is no greater human potential than that provided by the brain capacity and neuroplasticity of children under the age of eight. We now know in ways that were not scientifically established a century ago that a child’s brain is infinitely more flexible, more emotionally intelligent, and more capable of learning and retaining information than an adult’s.

As the iconic filmmaker Billy Wilder once said, “If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.” The most sophisticated kind of long-term planning focuses on getting things right at the beginning.

This country is standing on top of millions of tiny gold mines. Enter any kindergarten and you’ll see an unlimited amount of unmined energy, creativity, and genius. Every American elementary school student has potential talent and intelligence unmatched by any technological, financial, or institutional power. Nothing humanity has created can begin to rival the potential of the human brain, and no human brain carries more potential than the brain of the child. The greatest fuel for twenty-first-century abundance comes not from the oil or gas in our ground, but from the genius in our elementary schools.

Our political system is the product of a time when children were basically thought of as little adults-in-waiting. The fields of psychology, neurology, and sociology are relatively new compared to the economic and social theorizing from which our modern society emerged. Stuck in twentieth-century and even nineteenth-century models of social theorizing, we’ve viewed children as charges to be taken care of, yet never factoring their intellectual, emotional, cultural, and physical development into our long-term view of progress. The beginning of any system is all-important, and that is what childhood is—not only for an individual but for a society. Once a beginning is set, things are far more difficult to change afterwards. In its low rankings on prenatal care, maternal health, and the psychological and emotional care of new parents, the US government fails not only mothers and children but also the country at large.

We’re one of very few advanced democracies, for instance, that don’t provide federally funded parental leave. It’s ironic that this failure stems from sectors of the business community insisting that they can’t afford it; in fact, the time spent by a newborn child in the arms of a parent statistically increases the child’s productivity in later years, as well as the parent’s productivity when they return to work unencumbered by the sadness of going back to work too soon. The idea of helping people has been propagandistically turned into some twisted vision of a nanny state—like it’s some enabling, codependent, fuzzy-minded thinking as opposed to what it really is: action that aligns us with our spiritual nature, the laws of the universe, and the ultimate well-being of all.

As long as there was a dearth of women in positions of political, social, and economic power, this chronic skewing of American priorities in the direction of short-term economic interests as opposed to humanitarian values was understandable. As long as women were basically invisible, children were invisible as well. But women are invisible no longer, and neither should our children be.

Of course, we should teach our children reading, writing, and arithmetic. But our educational system should expand to include a more whole-person vision of what it takes to prepare a child for self-actualized life in the twenty-first century. We should help our children develop the emotional and psychological skills to navigate life in what has become an extremely complex world. Until we do that, our educational system will remain inadequate despite whatever funding we put into it.

Are we preparing American children to grow up to be cogs in the wheel of a vast economic machine—designed to protect the advantaged ones, picking out the most talented ones to fill the ranks of the elite—or are we committed to the development of the full potential of every child to be their most creative, empowered best? The former—basically the educational model we follow now—is the legacy of an aristocratic worldview, while the latter is the actualization of democracy.

We should do more than educate children so they’re prepared to get a job. We should educate children so they’re prepared for greatness. We should educate them to realize that each of them has the potential to be anyone and anything they want, and that their opportunities are limitless. That is the American Dream.

Every child in America could have a world-class education, starting in preschool and going through college or technical school. No American child should go to a school in which class size makes teaching more a matter of crowd control than the cultivation of young minds. Every American child should learn civics and history, for only then are they adequately prepared for the responsibility of citizen leadership in a democracy.

Children should be taught not only what to think—as in science and math—but also how to think, as in honing their critical thought processes so they know how to think for themselves. America’s educational system should be the crown jewel of America’s investment portfolio, our greatest asset in producing creativity and progress. In the words of the poet William Butler Yeats, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

DEMANDING CHANGE

A kindergartener in a disadvantaged neighborhood has the same inner fire as a kindergartener in an advantaged neighborhood. No child in America should be denied a world-class education because his or her parents are poor. Such disparity perpetuates our slide toward a veiled aristocratic system. Access to the finest education remaining in the hands of a few is the way an unjust system ensures that power remains in the hands of a few. That’s why the failure to provide the highest-quality education to every American child is a passive attack on our democracy.

Millions of American children, born as innocent children of God with unlimited human potential, fall through the cracks in our society ever year. They do so without the level of support they need to function as healthy, productive members of society, neglected not just by their families but by our society. Failure to provide this support drives up the incidence of violence, drug addiction, and other dysfunctions among our young people, only adding to the size and entrenchment of America’s permanent underclass. And how do we pay for that? With our blood and treasure.

Children growing up in homes riddled by trauma—much of it the result of the scourge of poverty and racism—are likely to be clinically diagnosable with mental health disorders. The high statistical probability of their taking a path along what the author Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, has termed the “cradle to prison” pipeline is a moral scourge upon our country. When the richest nation in the world fails to address the hunger in the stomachs of its children and the hunger for learning in their minds, we as a nation are in danger of reaping desperate consequences.

Are we not already? Of the incarcerated 2.3 million Americans—more per capita than any other nation in the world—does any serious person think this represents only personal failure on the part of those imprisoned? Is there nothing there for us to look at as a society, not only in terms of our criminal justice system but also in terms of our failure to prepare more of our children for a productive, successful life?

We the people can rise up and stand for a massive change. Trauma-informed education and community wraparound services are needed and should be adequately funded. From playgrounds to parks to libraries, from better-paid teachers to upgraded schools, from music to dance to art, from social and emotional learning schools to nonviolent communication skills, from health care and mindfulness techniques to whole-family support services, we should upgrade our commitment to children not just a little, not just incrementally, but fundamentally. Most important, we should connect the dots between economic disadvantage as it affects a parent and the almost inevitable trauma it imposes on a child. With nearly a third of all Americans living in near-poverty conditions, you don’t have to be an economist to know that something is wrong with this picture.

The economic formulas of a bygone era are morally neutral and essentially heartless. They leave out women, they leave out mothering, they leave out children, and they leave out love.

No wonder we’re so fractured as a society, given that we’re so fractured from our own essential nature. No system thrives that doesn’t prepare its continuation. We’re a generation more aware of our own childhood wounds than any generation before, yet neglectful of the multiple wounds to the hearts and minds and bodies of America’s children today. Only when we awaken spiritually to our responsibility to our young will we be creating a more sustainable future. By allowing so many desperate children to wallow in despair, we’re creating a future in which we will inevitably be wallowing in our own.

What’s impressive about American young people is that despite the odds that are pitted against so many of them, they continue to strive for the American Dream. What all of us should ask ourselves is why our society is invested in making it so hard. Governmental action should help people thrive, not make it more difficult for them to do so.

About 40 million Americans hold student loans, and about 70 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients graduate with debt.* The size of student debt is staggering, with 44 million people owing $1.5 trillion in student loans. Most of those loans are held by the federal government, which could ameliorate those debts if it chose. Instead, it has essentially created among America’s youth a new form of bondage that exists only because our young are trying to better themselves. The average student in the class of 2016 graduated with a student loan debt of between $28,000 and $37,000. Millions of young Americans would love nothing more than to participate in a free-market economy by having enough discretionary spending money to build a website and start their own company. How ironic that our capitalist system now works so hard to keep them out, when all they want is just a chance to be let in!

Nothing holds more promise for the twenty-first century than a radical rethinking of our responsibility to children and young adults. This country should undertake a massive realignment of our resources in the direction of the young. We should make college or technical school available to everyone. We should cancel most college debts. And why should we do all these things? To unshackle the American spirit, to release the chains that bind our circumstances, to liberate the potential in every citizen . . . and then to watch this country soar! America’s problem is the problem of a constricted heart. As individuals we are a good and decent people, but as a society we have become rather mean. It is time to reconsider. It is time to self-correct.

Chapter 6 will be emailed tomorrow!

Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love

Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot

Chapter 3: Love and Conflict: Disagreeing with Love

Chapter 4: An Economics of Love: A New Bottom Line