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Citation: Time Dec 11 1995, v146, n24, p96(1)
Author: Kozol, Jonathan
Title: Spare us the cheap grace. (rights for poor children
are ignored)(Column) by Jonathan Kozol
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COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1995
IT IS HARD TO SAY WHAT WAS MORE SHOCKING ABOUT THE death of Elisa
Izquierdo--the endless savagery inflicted on her body and mind, or the
stubborn inaction of the New York City agencies that were repeatedly informed
of her peril. But while the murder of Elisa by her mother is appalling, it is
hardly unexpected. In the death zones of America's postmodern ghetto, stripped
of jobs and human services and sanitation, plagued by AIDS, tuberculosis,
pediatric asthma and endemic clinical depression, largely abandoned by
American physicians and devoid of the psychiatric services familiar in most
middle-class communities, deaths like these are part of a predictable
scenario.
After the headlines of recrimination and pretended shock wear off, we go back
to our ordinary lives. Before long, we forget the victims' names. They weren't
our children or the children of our neighbors. We do not need to mourn them
for too long. But do we have the right to mourn at all? What does it mean when
those whom we elect to public office cut back elemental services of life
protection for poor children and then show up at the victim's funeral to pay
condolence to the relatives and friends? At what point do those of us who have
the power to prevent these deaths forfeit the entitlement of mourners?
It is not as if we do not know what might have saved some of these children's
lives. We know that intervention programs work when well-trained social
workers have a lot of time to dedicate to each and every child. We know that
crisis hot lines work best when half of their employees do not burn out and
quit each year, and that social workers do a better job when records are
computerized instead of being piled up, lost and forgotten on the floor of a
back room. We know that when a drug-addicted mother asks for help, as many
mothers do, it is essential to provide the help she needs without delay, not
after a waiting period of six months to a year, as is common in poor urban
neighborhoods.
All these remedies are expensive, and we would demand them if our own
children's lives were at stake. And yet we don't demand them for poor
children. We wring our hands about the tabloid stories. We castigate the
mother. We condemn the social worker. We churn out the familiar criticisms of
"bureaucracy" but do not volunteer to use our cleverness to change it. Then
the next time an election comes, we vote against the taxes that might make
prevention programs possible, while favoring increased expenditures for
prisons to incarcerate the children who survive the worst that we have done to
them and grow up to be dangerous adults.
What makes this moral contradiction possible?
Can it be, despite our frequent protestations to the contrary, that our
society does not particularly value the essential human worth of certain
groups of children? Virtually all the victims we are speaking of are very poor
black and Hispanic children. We have been told that our economy no longer has
much need for people of their caste and color. Best-selling authors have, in
recent years, assured us of their limited intelligence and low degree of
"civilizational development." As a woman in Arizona said in regard to
immigrant kids from Mexico, "I didn't breed them. I don't want to feed
them"--a sentiment also heard in reference to black children on talk-radio
stations in New York and other cities. "Put them over there," a black teenager
told me once, speaking of the way he felt that he and other blacks were viewed
by our society. "Pack them tight. Don't think about them. Keep your hands
clean. Maybe they'll kill each other off."
I do not know how many people in our nation would confess such contemplations,
which offend the elemental mandates of our cultural beliefs and our religions.
No matter how severely some among us may condemn the parents of the poor, it
has been an axiom of faith in the U.S. that once a child is born, all
condemnations are to be set aside. If we now have chosen to betray this faith,
what consequences will this have for our collective spirit, for our soul as a
society?
There is an agreeable illusion, evidenced in much of the commentary about
Elisa, that those of us who witness the abuse of innocence--so long as we are
standing at a certain distance--need not feel complicit in these tragedies.
But this is the kind of ethical exemption that Dietrich Bonhoeffer called
"cheap grace." Knowledge carries with it certain theological imperatives. The
more we know, the harder it becomes to grant ourselves exemption. "Evil
exists," a student in the South Bronx told me in the course of a long
conversation about ethics and religion in the fall of 1993. "Somebody has
power. Pretending that they don't so they don't need to use it to help
people--that is my idea of evil."
Like most Americans, I do not tend to think of a society that has been good to
me and to my parents as "evil." But when he said that "somebody has power," it
was difficult to disagree. It is possible that icy equanimity and a
self-pacifying form of moral abdication by the powerful will take more lives
in the long run than any single drug-addicted and disordered parent. Elisa
Izquierdo's mother killed only one child. The seemingly anesthetized behavior
of the U.S. Congress may kill thousands. Now we are told we must "get tougher"
with the poor. How much tougher can we get with children who already have so
little? How cold is America prepared to be?
Jonathan Kozol is the author of Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the
Conscience of a Nation.
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