PT Interview: Major personalities whohave influenced the national
mind
MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE MOST CONCERNED PARENT
IN AMERICA
As founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, Marian
Wright Edelman has kept her eye on the nation's kids for the past 20
years-a time, she says, when few others were willing to do so. She's sort
of the nation's top mom, with friends in high places like the White
House. And, as parents are wont to do, she used the occasion more to
deliver a lecture than to engage in a discussion.
PT: The statistics on children in poverty today are pretty
startling. From the mental health establishment also comes some pretty
grim evidence. In a reversal of traditional trends, young kids are
getting depressed. Adolescents are killing each other and themselves. By
any measure that we take, our kids are in deep trouble. What's gone
wrong?
MWE: We've really had a breakdown in community and family values in
this nation. We've obviously had very altered priorities in the last 12
years that basically gave us permission to be our worst selves rather
than our best selves. The slow progress on children that began in the
Sixties, with the establishment of new political and civil rights, didn't
last long enough.
As we began to realize that we don't have endless resources and
have to make some choices, a backlash began, combined with less committed
leadership. All the great expansions in food stamps and child nutrition
came from the Nixon years, but his ringing veto of the child-development
bill left a residue of fear about government interference in family life
that took us 20 years to overcome. Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush said in effect
that it was okay to be selfish and cater to racism. We began to scapegoat
each other rather than figure ways of coming together.
Instead of being considered as national investment priorities,
families, children, the poor, and minorities were deemed not important.
We had a transfer of resources away from domestic needs-families, job
creation, the economy, investing in housing-to the rich. There are
extraordinary tax breaks for non-needy corporations and non-needy
individuals, so that as the income of people at the top went up
dramatically, the income of those at the bottom eroded, while the middle
stagnated.
We have had a decade or so of very painful division by race, by
age, and by class, and children were the true victims. Children are now
the poorest Americans. Young families of all races suffered an
extraordinary decline in earnings-these are the parents of young
children, the cradle of nurture for the next generation. We're paying for
the results of that. And now we have three other plagues.
PT: Crack. AIDS....
MWE: And violence. All are unprecedented and occurred at a time
when our public health infrastructure was eroding and more and more
people were becoming uninsured. So we have this spectacle of the
wealthiest nation on Earth-though we're the greatest debtor nation-not
even skillfully immunizing our kids. We have to get children
immunized.
PT: Back to basics.
MWE: Ninety-five percent of children in China are immunized. Here
in our nation's capital only 43 percent of preschool children are fully
immunized. That shows you how far we have dropped. Psychologically our
threshold of tolerance for totally morally unacceptable things has been
lowered. A child is murdered every three hours. A gun is produced every
20 seconds and a million folks are walking around with semiautomatic
weapons.
PT: Have we made any progress with children in 20 years?
MWE: Children are now visible. People are beginning to
understand-unfortunately, it has to come out of tragedy-that the things
we thought happened only to other people's children are happening to all
of our children.
PT: We now have a new administration and public mood, but do we
have the resources to make the investments we need?
MWE. Well, we've got to do what we've got to do to save ourselves
and save our children, who are criminally transformed in values.The
casing for all that has happened over the last years in America has been
a shift to defining success by external things. You are powerful if you
have a gun or if you have lots of things or lots of money. These
externally driven market values have been allowed to consume us all. One
of the first things we are going to have to do is make some hard choices
and some hard sacrifices. We do have a $4 trillion deficit that children
didn't cause. We're going to have to recognize that there are some things
that a decent society has to do. And one of them is to say some things
are wrong and unacceptable-killing children, shooting children, letting
children be shot, letting children not be safe in their homes or on the
street.
We need sensible deficit reduction, but we also have a human
investment deficit. You can't solve all of one without investing in the
other-in early childhood, Head Start, immunization, and the Women,
Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC). If you don't invest in
your people, your children, and your schools, then you're not going to
have a productive economy in the future.
While we do have the plagues of violence, economic insecurity, and
racial intolerance, there is a readiness and a new activism that you can
feel. People are beginning to understand that we've got to come back
together.
PT: How do You account for this change?
Tags:
backlash,
child nutrition,
children,
children in poverty,
deep trouble,
endless resources,
expansions,
family,
family values,
food stamps,
friends in high places,
government interference,
grim evidence,
immunization,
investment priorities,
Marian Wright Edelman,
mr bush,
national investment,
poverty,
slow progress,
veto,
young kids
