America's Crisis of Values
A
Call for Transformation
By Marian Wright Edelman
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Let’s not
just transform those in need; we can also
find ways to transform those in power.
Unknown
First they
ignore you, then they laugh at you, then
they fight you, then you win. Mahatma
Gandhi |
Current national political rhetoric
and tax and budget choices tell us that the rich should
be pampered and the poor plundered; that poor children —
even neglected, abused and sick children — should lose
tens of billions of dollars in order to fund tax cuts of
hundreds of billions of dollars for the richest
Americans; and that our children should be left a
staggering future debt as a few greedily grab every
dollar they can today.
The $1.9 trillion in tax cuts, when
fully in effect, will give the richest one percent of
all tax payers $57 billion each year. This is enough to
provide health coverage to all 9 million uninsured
children or enough to end child poverty in America now.
Incredibly, President Bush and many in Congress want to
make these tax cuts permanent despite huge post-Katrina
needs, two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the
largest national budget and trade deficits and debt in
national history. Every child in America currently faces
a debt burden and birth tax of $27,661.
Current national rhetoric and
priorities also tell us “our own might is our God.”
President Bush’s 2007 military budget seeks $527.4
billion a year; $44 billion a month; $10.1 billion a
week; $1.4 billion a day; and $60 million an hour. Just
one month’s military expenditure is more than twice as
much as is needed to provide all 9 million uninsured
children health coverage. The President’s military
budget includes more than $10.4 billion for Star Wars —
the unproved (and not yet operational) Missile Defense
System.
That is enough money to lift 2.6
million children from poverty — every single poor child
in four hurricane-affected states: Mississippi,
Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas.
Is it really necessary for the U.S.
to spend seven times more on the military than either
China or Russia, the two next largest military spenders,
and more than 40 times the expenditures of Iran and
North Korea, the two remaining countries President Bush
has labeled the “axis of evil,” when so many children
are terrorized by sickness, poverty, illiteracy,
homelessness, and food insecurity at home?
Dwight David Eisenhower warned
repeatedly about the military industrial complex that
has reached extreme new heights. He also reminded us in
1953 of the stark life tradeoffs in our national
choices. He said: “Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final
sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in
arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the
sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the
hopes of its children.”
Children’s Defense Fund 5 Needed:
A New Civil Rights Movement for Children — Our Poorest
Group of Americans
It is time for a new civil rights
movement to reset America’s moral and social compass and
to restore hope, stability and a sense of future to
Katrina and all children in our lost nation. Katrina’s
children face specific emergency mental health, health
and education needs right now, but they and all children
need their families, communities and leaders to ensure
them a healthy and safe foundation in the early years
and a chance to reach productive self-sufficient
adulthood. They need families able to work at living
wages with health care. They need good schools. They
need equitable, quality integrated systems of care that
prepare them for the future.
It is a social catastrophe that 9
million children lack health and mental health coverage;
that 80 percent of Katrina’s children live in states
whose schools do not teach them to read at grade level
by the 4th grade and that 60 percent of White
and 80 percent of Black and Latino children nationally
cannot read at grade level in 4th grade. And it is
downright economically and socially foolish that the
only universal child policy our rich nation will
guarantee every child is a jail or detention cell after
a child gets into trouble. States spend over three times
as much on average per prisoner than per public school
pupil. It is time to reverse these perverse child and
nation destructive priorities.
Katrina’s children are America’s
opportunity — once again — to hear and heed God’s call
to protect the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the
vulnerable. Children are the transforming agents in our
fractured nation and world. Abraham, Moses, The Prophet
Muhammad, Jesus and His Mother Mary, Confucius, Buddha,
Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther
King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Cesar
Chavez, Chief Joseph, Mary McLeod Bethune, Eleanor
Roosevelt, Marie Curie, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Katrina
survivor children all share one thing in common. They,
like each of us, entered the world as
a baby — God’s gift of life, hope, love, immortality,
and messenger to the future. Our Creator sent babies in
an infinite variety of hues, sizes, shapes, places,
talents and faiths — each sacred. Dare we longer
mistreat, neglect, abuse, kill, and deny health care to
a single one of them? Dare we value one over another or
hold babies and children responsible for unwise adult
choices over which children had no control? Dare the
richest nation on earth — blessed to be a blessing —
continue its unjust playing field for children and
wantonly continue to widen the gap between the haves and
the have nots?
“We All Have a Dream”
The kindergarten class of New Orleans
West has a dream that can teach, lead and save us if we
will let it. Their dream was Dr. King’s dream, and it is
God’s dream for all the children of the nation and the
world. Can we each make it our dream too?
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I have a
dream that all red people, black people and
white people get together as one.
I have a
dream that people will not fight anymore,
that parents will not fight by their kids.
I have a
dream that everyone from Texas and everyone
from New Orleans stop shooting, that
everyone could be friends.
I have a
dream that everyone can be in school. I have
a dream, that we can always be learning.
I Have A
Dream
I have a
dream that I can go back to my home, that I
can go back to New Orleans.
I have a
dream, a dream filled with hopes.
I hope my
daddy is safe.
I hope we
can have a clean New Orleans again, that New
Orleans can go back to the way it was.
I hope that
all the people will be safe and protected.
I Have A
Dream
I have a
dream that my mommy can get me and my sister
and brother what we want.
I have a
dream that everyone would share, that no one
will fight over money.
I have a
dream that everyone is nice to each other.
I have a
dream, I have a dream
We All Have A Dream |
In 1968, in his last Sunday sermon at
Washington National Cathedral, Dr. King retold the
parable of Dives and Lazarus and reminded us that “A man
went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name
was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the
name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he
poor, he was sick.… But he managed to get to the gate of
Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that
would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about
it. Dives went to hell. Dives didn’t go to hell because
he was rich,” Dr. King said, but because “Dives didn’t
realize that his wealth was his opportunity to bridge
the gulf that separated him from his brother, Lazarus.…
He never really saw him. He went to hell because he
allowed his brother to become invisible and sought to be
a conscientious objector in the war against poverty. And
this could happen to America, the richest nation in the
world,” he warned.
“There is nothing new about poverty.
What is new is that we now have the techniques and the
resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is
whether we have the will!”
Dr. King’s warning and question about
America’s will to see and help its poorest and most
vulnerable is the defining question of our time. How
will we answer? How will you answer the question that
Katrina’s and America’s 13 million poor children are
asking? How will you use your voice, vote,
organizational, professional and personal time to build
the transforming movement our children need to live and
learn and thrive and embrace the future with hope?
Marian Wright Edelman
President, Children's Defense Fund
posted 7 April 2006
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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