MWE: I have a book of letters from blacks and whites and rich and
poor and Latinos and Jews. Everyone says the same thing: This is what my
parents taught me. We forgot what we used to know. We have got to get
back to some basics but at the same time recognize that those basics have
to be reflected not only in our private lives but in our public
lives.
You can't tell parents to teach children the value of work when we
don't have jobs and the jobs we have don't pay a decent wage. You can't
tell children to achieve and then let them go to broken-down schools with
teachers who don't care. We need a consistency of values in our public,
corporate, and private lives. That is the challenge of the
Nineties.
PT: Your book is full of conviction and faith. How much of it
informs what you've done personally?
MWE: It's everything. I grew up in a very religious family and it
is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had
adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other
people and doing the best you can do. The world wasn't so wonderful back
then, with segregated rule in the South. But we were never hopeless and
we never despaired because we had adults out there struggling with us,
being there for us, and buffering us.
It gave you an inner sense of who you are and of making a
difference-whether or not the world pays attention to it. Self-worth was
internally rather than externally driven. You didn't shoot people to have
a jacket. What is that about? Our kids are really the manifestation of
the breakdown of internal, spiritual, and community values all around
us.
We really have to have a fundamental sea change in values. The
Church has lost its bearings as well. It is very clear from our
Judeo-Christian tradition that it is wrong to kill children. But we need
the church to rediscover its deepest values and to say "it is wrong to
let children go hungry in the wealthiest nation in our world." "It is
wrong to have children mowed down on street corners, with guns." "Or to
have children orphaned by AIDS without the community coming together to
do something about it." So, the church is going to have to reexamine its
faith and see what its faith dictates. Until you build a strong moral
base you cannot have a mass movement for a just society.
PT: You had the privilege of knowing Martin Luther King. What is
his single most memorable characteristic, looking back.
MWE: He helped me a lot in my adult life. He was an adult who was a
great public figure but who was never afraid to show his vulnerability. I
remember the times when he was absolutely terrified or uncertain about
what the next step was.
PT. Did he talk about it?
MWE: I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with
adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That
feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human
being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I've gotten
from so many of the adult elders. I remember Martin Luther King
describing how afraid he was in Cicero and in Chicago.
PT: Physically afraid?
MWE: Physically afraid, which simply means he was a totally human
being. I remember many conversations about him being absolutely depressed
and not knowing where he was going to go next. The Dr. Kings and all the
others who went through extraordinary trials were always scared but
functioning, not paralyzed.
You had a community of support and you had a positive purpose-a
sense that you were going to be able to carry on. That is again what's so
different about the world for kids today. I try to sense what it must be
like to be seven or 11 years old and to be walking in today's
neighborhoods with gunfire and drug addicts and gangs and no community
support, no sense of positive purpose, no hope that things can be
different, no vision that things can be different, nobody that you can
turn to. What must it be like to live like that?
We have to get back into the struggle into connectedness with
adults who are going to get out and fight with them. I knew Robert
Kennedy in the last stages of his life and, again, I saw the
vulnerability and conviction-and an ability to struggle. Both King and
Kennedy were intensely human and intensely connected with kids and
listened to them. They were not afraid to be vulnerable and to take
risks. They were men of faith who had a sense of right and wrong and an
instinctive sense of outrage. The lack of instinctive outrage is the most
troublesome thing about American culture today.
PT: Can you name specifically the five or so things you would most
like to accomplish in the next year or two?
MWE: What I want to do before the turn of the century is eliminate
child and family poverty in this country and place children first. This
year, get a comprehensive immunization plan off the ground as a first
step towards comprehensive health insurance. Immunization is not a
one-term thing. You have to put kids in ongoing primary care. You have to
get the health care system in place.
Secondly, I want to build a high-quality, early-childhood system
for every parent, and revamp high-quality, full-day, full-year Head Start
programs. It's got the framework for comprehensive services; its quality
needs to be improved. It needs to be adjusted to take into account the
changing family lives today.
PT: Would you broaden Head Start to all children?
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
