EDITORIAL Building a movement for all children
The 1990s boomed -- 18 million new
jobs in the final six years, a 44 percent drop in welfare caseloads, 7.8
million new homeowners, and new millionaires almost too numerous to count.
The 2000s reveal some sobering realities -- 11 million children
with no health insurance, 12 million children not getting enough to eat, one
child in six living in poverty and three-quarters of those in working
families.
Millions of children live in worst case families when
it comes to housing needs: the 5.4 million households that pay more than half
their income for accommodations. Almost 8,000 children a day are reported at
risk for abuse or neglect, and 10 a day are killed by gunfire. Education? Need
we ask? The richest school districts spend 56 percent more per student than do
the poorest districts.
Veteran civil rights and child activist Marian Wright Edelman,
Childrens Defense Fund founder, launched a new legislative initiative May
23 (see story, page 8) supported by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Rep. George
Miller, D-Calif., that combines the best proposals and policy initiatives
into a single, comprehensive measure that serves as an agenda for
Americas children.
Edelman -- currently riding the commencement circuit with honors
and speeches at colleges as varied as the University of Oklahoma, Tulane, the
University of Ohio, West Virginia and Berea College in Kentucky -- doesnt
just propose. She probes.
She asks the questions for which there have been no answers in
more than two decades. How do we build the spiritual and civic will to achieve
what all children need for all children? How do we build a broad-based movement
that has the transforming power of the civil rights, anti-war and environmental
movements of the 1960s and 70s?
How do we evoke in the American people the same ingrained national
commitment for children that exists to protect elderly Americans from poverty,
hunger and social isolation? How do we move childrens needs to the top of
the national agenda, regardless of who is elected, and mobilize a critical mass
of Americans to demand action from policymakers? How do we present a bold,
visionary and comprehensive agenda that covers all the areas that need to be
addressed for children, rather than a piecemeal, fragmented series of
incremental steps that do not resonate beyond the Beltway, the state capitols
or policy analysts? How do we bring together disparate child advocates and
service providers with powerful mainstream networks -- faith, women, parents
and grandparents, youth, health professionals -- to support, strengthen and
achieve an inspiring big vision to protect the whole child and family?
Edelmans answers are the legislation she proposes, a call
for public demonstrations, a compelling moral and political call to action, and
making a lot of noise.
And, she assures us, were going to make a
lot of noise.
Edelman said shes using the parable of the widow and the
unjust judge. He didnt care anything about God or justice, but the
widow kept worrying him to death, saying, Give me justice. She wore
him down.
Its not just widows Edelman is after. Shes been
looking at womens witness in Chile and South Africa and elsewhere, and
said that part of the legislative push will be the launching of a new,
moral witness of women.
Edelman knows the odds against igniting nationwide moral
indignation, against rallying the students who need to be challenged, against
getting the grandmas (shes about to become one) and granddads enlivened
behind the issues of child and grandchild poverty.
What she doesnt know is how to stop trying.
National Catholic Reporter, June 1,
2001
|