WAR AGAINST CHILDREN

A great deal has been written critically about new anti-terrorist laws
passed in the name of "homeland security" that make it easier to undermine
those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and
potentially repressive government actions.

There is a thunderous silence, however, on the part of many parents,
educators and politicians regarding the ongoing insecurity and injustice
suffered by young people in this country.

There is a sense of moral and political indifference, if not cynicism,
about the forms of domestic terrorism suffered by children who are poor,
hungry, homeless, neglected, lack medical care or suffer physical abuse by
adults. This is especially evident in child services departments, such as
that in Florida, where children are continually abused by adults and in
some cases actually disappear.

Increasingly, children seem to have no standing in the public sphere as
citizens and, as such, are denied any sense of entitlement and agency.
Children have fewer rights than almost any other group; consequently, their
voices and needs are almost completely absent from our debates, policies
and legislative practices.

I believe that the United States is at war with young people. That is
especially so for those marginalized by class and color, but all youth are
targets. No longer seen as a crucial social investment for the future of a
democratic society, youth are now derided by politicians looking for
quick-fix solutions to crime and demonized by the popular media. In a
society deeply troubled by their presence, youth prompts in the public
imagination a rhetoric of fear, control and surveillance -- made all the
more visible with the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the
widespread use of random drug testing of public school students.

Moreover, this perception of fear and disdain is increasingly being
translated into social policies that signal the shrinking of democratic
public spheres, the hijacking of civic culture and the increasing
militarization of public space.

Instead of providing a decent education to poor young people, we offer them
the increasing potential of being incarcerated, buttressed by the fact that
the United States is the only industrialized country that sentences minors
to death. Instead of guaranteeing them food, decent health care and
shelter, we serve them more standardized tests. Instead of providing them
with vibrant public spheres, we offer them a commercialized culture in
which consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship.

But the hard currency of human suffering that affects children in this
country can also been seen in some of the astounding statistics that
suggest an improbable moral and political contradiction at the heart of the
United States, one the richest democracies in the world:

Twenty percent of children are poor during the first three years of life.

Nine million children lack health insurance.

Millions lack affordable child care and decent early childhood education;

In many states, more money is being spent on prison construction than on
education;

The infant mortality rate in the United States is the highest of any other
industrialized nation.

The United States ranks first in military technology, military exports,
defense expenditures and the number of millionaires and billionaires, but
it is ranked 18th in the gap between rich and poor children, 12th in the
percentage of children in poverty, 17th in the efforts to lift children out
of poverty, and 23rd in infant mortality. One of the most shameful figures
on youth reports that 1.4 million children are homeless in America for a
time in any given year, and these children make up 40 percent of the
nation's homeless population. In short, economically, politically and
culturally, the situation of youth in the United States is intolerable and
unforgivable.

Big government, recalled from exile after Sept. 11, is now popularly
presented as a guardian of security -- not in terms of providing adequate
health care or a social safety net, but in its increased role as a policing
force -- resulting in the ongoing abridgement of basic freedoms and
dissent, the criminalization of social problems, and the prioritizing of
penal methods over social investments.

As the Childrens' Defense Fund observes, what is often missed by
politicians, the media and others is that "the war on terrorism is no
excuse not to prevent and stop the domestic terrorism of child poverty,
hunger, homelessness, and abuse and neglect."

The greatest challenge Americans face does not come from crazed terrorists
but from the ongoing struggle to expand and deepen the principles of
justice, freedom, and democracy for all citizens -- especially young
people, who are quickly becoming an abandoned generation. This is not going
to take place through creating a phony notion of market-based choice,
eliminating democracy's most cherished rights and freedoms, or substituting
policies of containment for those that emphasize social investment,
especially in regards to our children's needs.

Any attempt to enact real patriotism -- if the pledge to "liberty and
justice for all" is to mean anything at all -- must begin with the current
state of crisis among youth rather than the jingoistic posturing currently
fashionable among U.S. lawmakers and the acolytes in the press who have
spent the last decade peddling market moralities and mentalities at the
expense of democratic values.