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From The Cradle...

My brother-in-law reminds me that I haven't written an essay in 6 months. For those of you who might have been looking forward to my columns, I am sorry for the absence. I can only say that since September 11th, I have been so disturbed by the direction that my country has taken, that I haven't known what to say.

For those of you that would like a quick fix of Sarah Byam my graphic novel, Billi 99, was recently reprinted by Dark Horse Comics, which is not a shameless plug, as they have printed as many copies as they are going to print. But it would be nice to support the publisher and your local bookstore. Or you can do a search under Billi 99 by Sarah Byam at www.Amazon.com.

So I have decided that, if I am going to say anything, I may as well start at the beginning. I live in a country that is so vast, it is hard to generalise about it. Perhaps it is impossible to govern it. And yet huge things are done and not done in our name, and there is a new war about to happen, as near as I can tell, to take the national attention off the domestic agenda and the fact that the Republican dominated government we now enjoy is not as pro-family as it claims to be. In fact, it is not in any way pro-family at all. And if we weren't worrying about foreign terrorists, we might notice that.

Let us start out with the fact that, in Korea, women in concentration camps are forced to have abortions in their 8th and 9th month of pregnancy because their fathers or grandfathers may have made some innocuous comment about the robust Japanese economy. This should outrage, at the very least, our political right and its pro-life wing that is trying to stop the rest of the world from getting decent birth control. And President Bush ignores Nasi-like conditions, and nuclear weapons, on one end of the world - while chasing after the oil rich soils of a poor nation that so little threatens us that it can barely afford to feed its own children.

And let us consider, for a moment, that we might want to take the mote out of our own eye before we take the cinder out of the other guy's eyes. What about the conditions that exist in our country? I would like someone to make the argument for me that Iraq is somehow more of a threat to the life and limb of a large number of Americans than current American policy is?

There are 33 million people living below the poverty line in the United States right now. That's more than ten percent of our population. That's a small country. So lets look at our National Security, from the ground up, one step at a time.

Let's start at the beginning, with infant mortality - which again, should be something that concerns both right and left wing governing halves of our country and seems to concern no one:

Right now, the United States runs about last in infant mortality rates among industrial countries, we lose about 7 babies per thousand. According to the CIA figures for 2002, we lose at least almost two children per thousand more than Canada, and three more per thousand than Scandinavian countries and Japan.

At the minimum, that's about 6,000 babies we're losing for no good reason. That's over twice as many people as died in the September 11th tragedy. Every year.

And we are doing that to ourselves.

It gets a little worse, because there are many Americas. If you live in non-white America, the infant mortality rate per thousand looks more like 14 children, not 7.

So if you aren't white in America, you can expect to live in worse conditions than, say Costa Rica, at 10.87 deaths per 1000. Or Cuba, at 7.27 deaths per 1,000. Or the Czech Republic at 5.46 deaths per 1,000. Not places where you would expect to get better medical care than in the US.

What are those policies? Well, cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, so that women who cannot afford to get pregnant don't get prenatal care, that's one place to look. Another place to look is the cutting of state subsidies to programs like state health insurance programs. Even the local political climate for public health is losing ground. More liberal states, such as Washington and Oregon, that had inexpensive healthcare programs for their underclass citisens, are hoping to cut their health care budgets by as much as 80% in the coming fiscal year. And the latest welfare reform programs call for women to leave their children as soon as they possibly can to return to work, even if they have been abandoned by a spouse who does not pay child support, or have run away from a spouse who abuses them. (Half the families who live on welfare are victims of domestic violence, by the way.)

That doesn't take into consideration the new devastation that is going to occur from the recently rising unemployment rates - but that is a discussion for another column. What I will say is that while America may be the richest country in the world, the poor in America are not the richest poor in the world. We have people living in holes in the ground, without running water, without food from day to day. And food bank use in the U.S has doubled since so-called "welfare reform".

I have heard reports of ill children being brought into schools and day care, and nurses being overwhelmed with them - sending them home, sometimes alone - because the schools have no mechanism to care for ill children. They are sent home to thrive or perish, on their own.

So, what may be more impactful on our society is not the children who die, but the ones who almost die. Lack of health care not only contributes to infant mortality rate, but low birth weight babies, birth defects, delayed childhood development, and permanent losses from minor illnesses untreated that create damage such as hearing loss, sight loss, nerve damage, brain damage, spinal damage -- third world country conditions, right in our own backyard.

When these children get to school, what kind of students will they be?

Inadequate care begets frustration, frustration begets abuse, abuse begets violence, and 47% of violent offenders were abused or neglected children. And then examining that cycle, does anybody want to take a look at the toll that takes on our National Security?

We lose coming and going. We lose our productive citizens as dying children, and then we lose another round of them as adults, and then we lose the damage to life and property that the violent offenders create. These are not new concepts - but maybe I should repeat them. I heard recently that American students graduating from high school don't know that trees are made out of carbon. (We'll talk about the state of our schools later - except to say that starting salary for a teacher in California is about 30,000 a year, in an area of the country where owning your own shack costs a half a million dollars and a home costs twice that.) So maybe most people don't actually know that it costs perhaps $10,000 to see that a child has a good start in life - and more than $50,000 a year to house a criminal in prison. If half of those abused and neglected kids go into the prison system for four years each - why we could have saved those kids ten times over - plus saved the taxpayers grief and created productive, and might I add, taxpaying, citisens to boot.

The math isn't that hard to figure out - so what's our problem - rather pay later than pay now? Well, I suppose if you wait 20 years, it may be your kid's problem to deal with and not yours.

But here's something else that is fairly obvious for the relatively comfortable Baby Boomer generation to consider. (In case you didn't know, wealth distribution is not just on a sliding economic scale in the U.S. It's on a sliding age scale. Simply put, in the U.S. the older you are, the more likely you are to be wealthy.) If too many of the shrinking number of children being born in this country grow up disenfranchised, instead of healthy, proud, productive members of society: Who's going to take care of you when you're old? Who's going to pay for the social security that you need? Who's going to perform your hip replacement? Who's going to provide for the nursing care that you need? Who's going to provide your dental care? Your home repair? Your financial management?

During the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there were four famous freedoms he said were the pillars of our great country. During the September 11th catastrophe, New York politicians were brave enough to quote FDR, but not one of them was brave enough to include "Freedom from Want" in his speech.

We fought our way out of a long, hard, depressive history to create a social security system that included subsidies for American retirement, unemployment, homes, food, education, care of children and, if necessary, basic survival. Since the 1980's that safety net has been gradually, systematically dismantled.

What is not taken into consideration is that the adults currently making those decisions to dismantle their children's inheritance, were themselves the beneficiaries of that very support that they are denying current and future generations. Our nation has a pitifully short memory. Oh yeah, we need more tax cuts for the rich like we need town square firing squads just plain shooting at the next generation. Of course the history of labour rights and the economic progress of the working and middle classes is rarely taught in American school systems. You know, the history of how people tried to force Americans to work for make-a-dying wages with hired guns. The days when the Irish were paid less than it cost them to feed themselves, and they starved to death working. The days when "not having a Chinaman's chance" came from the fact that the Chinese laborers were cheaper to replace than the explosives they handled - too closely, too often -- to build the railroads. The hay day of Robber Baron capitalism that we are so quick to rush our way back to. No, we get the American Revolution, World War II and if we are lucky, the Civil Rights Movement - you know, things we can all be proud of.

Remember those little bumper stickers that said "I'm spending my children's inheritance"?

I guess they meant it. Listen to any Eminem lately? He's not the poster child for family forgiveness - but he is who your children are identifying with. Poor. White. And Angry. There will be less of us than there are of you. So you'd better hope that we're in a generous mood. America is not a bad country. Almost every American I know is a kind, decent, generous person. Is it that we are such a young country that we will be forced to learn these lessons over and over again, until we are done with them - as our European neighbors are? To learn that our fates our intrinsically linked to our neighbors, and that we cannot be, as Hillel warned, "for ourselves only."

We have had moments of greatness, when we lived up to the idea of what it means to be an American, in addition to the power. Boiled to its root, being American means being fair: With Liberty and Justice for All. That's what we pledge our allegiance to. Not oil, not corrupt CEOs, not to those who have received their education by entitlement. What a country we could be, if we strove to be not just a powerful nation - but a just one. It is our legacy. It is the promise of our heritage - the framing of our constitution is based on the assumption that we will be better tomorrow than we were yesterday.

Is it inevitable that we must go backward before we go forward again? For all our sakes, I hope not.

"In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear -- which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-- anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear. Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change -- in a perpetual peaceful revolution -- a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions -- without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilised society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory."

From Congressional Record, 1941, Vol. 87, Pt. I
Franklin D. Roosevelt

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