Lanterns

by Marian Wright Edelman

  Never have we seen such incessant and crass marketing of violence, addictive substances, incivility, and material things to children as consumers. What values beyond money would lead anyone to produce games for the young called “You Are Going to Die” or “Doom” that portray killing as fun and desensitize children to cruelty and violence? How many of the producers or actors or underwriters of movies saturated with gratuitous violence would want their own children and grandchildren to see them? How many toy manufacturers think or care about whether their toys might encourage aggression? How many television leaders, writers, producers, stars, and advertisers think about the quality and content of their programming and whether it might have a harmful impact on young vulnerable minds?

  The average child has watched 5,478 hours of television by age five, the equivalent of 7½ months of twenty-four-hour days or fifteen months of twelve-hour days. Children spend more time watching television than doing homework and reading combined. The lines between make-believe and real life blur in some children’s rudderless lives unpeopled by enough caring adults transmitting positive values or helping them interpret what they see. Should it surprise us that a small percentage of alienated children carry out their fantasies about guns and violence in real life? Is it enough to tell parents to turn off the television set and carefully monitor the time and the shows their children watch? (Parents should!) Since a plethora of studies show that violent television is a risk factor that contributes to real violence, why would those who create violent shows hide behind the First Amendment to cover up their irresponsibility in caring for children and public safety?

  We all must put children at the center of our family and community lives. Employers and government at all levels must ask whether their policies and practices—from wages to health insurance to child care to parental leave and flex-time to volunteer opportunities—make it easier or harder for parents to meet their children’s needs and to balance work and family responsibilities. Educators must put children at the center of schools and be held accountable for teaching children to read, write, and learn math and science at grade level. Cultural leaders must rely more on creativity than on gore. Faith communities, schools, and other community institutions must engage with and connect children and youths to useful, purposeful, interesting service and action opportunities so that another generation of disengaged cynical citizens will not spell the death knell of American civic and spiritual life.

  We must act now to take guns out of the hands of children and those who kill children. Whether you are a hunter, NRA member, gun owner or not I hope you will agree that each citizen must do everything we can to prevent children from killing and being killed by guns. We all must join in working for responsible regulation of guns. An overwhelming majority of Americans favor gun control measures, including over 80 percent of gun owners. I hope voters, especially women voters, will insist that our leaders protect our children instead of guns. I hope they will hold coffee klatches, study groups, and prayer circles to study the facts about gun violence and children, the myths about the Second Amendment, and what can be done to keep our children safe.

  SECOND, IT IS TIME for all adults to stop our hypocrisy and double standards. Children need consistent adult guidance and moral example in their homes, congregations, schools, public life, media, and culture. We do not have a child and youth problem in our nation; we have an adult problem that we must confront if we are to put our children on a healthy and safe course. Adults must stop blaming children for acting out lessons we adults teach or have left children to figure out on their own from our overt and covert personal, professional, and cultural signals. And we adults should stop fingerpointing and blaming each other about who is causing the child neglect, youth violence, and alienation so evident in our schools and in every strata of American society. We all are responsible.

  Our children see us adults preach one thing and practice another. Today two out of every three Black and one-fifth of all White babies are born to never-married mothers. If it’s wrong for thirteen-year-old inner-city girls to have babies without the benefit of marriage, it’s wrong for rich celebrities and we ought to stop putting them on the cover of People magazine. If it is wrong for teens and children to abuse, bully, ridicule, and torment other children (and it is), then it is wrong for adults in the home, workplace, and political life to do so. It is adults who have engaged in epidemic abuse of children and of each other in our homes. It is adults who have taught children to kill and disrespect human life. It is adults who manufacture, market, and profit from the guns that have turned many neighborhoods and schools into war zones and the blood of children into profits.

  It is adults who have financed, produced, directed, and starred in the movies, television shows, and music that have made graphic violence ubiquitous in our culture. It is adults who have borne children and then left millions of them behind and alone without enough love and attention or moral guidance and millions more without basic health care, shelter, or food. It is adults who have taught our children to look for meaning outside rather than inside themselves, teaching them, in Dr. King’s words, “to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity.” It is adults who have passed on the poisons of racism and intolerance from generation to generation. And it is adults who have to stand up and be adults, examine our lives and values, and accept our responsibility to parent and protect the young.

  THIRD: WE CAN AFFIRM the individual worth and special strengths of each child and stop squeezing children into adult bureaucratic categories and boxes that stifle youthful creativity and potential. I love a parable I read first in a book by Dr. Howard Thurman and later in an Outward Bound Reader: “Once upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a ‘new world.’ So they organized a school. They adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming and flying. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all the subjects. The duck was excellent in swimming, in fact better than his instructor, but he made only passing grades in flying and was very poor in running. Since he was slow in running, he had to stay after school and also drop swimming in order to practice running. This was kept up until his web feet were badly worn and he was only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in school, so nobody worried about that except the duck. The rabbit started at the top of the class in running, but had a nervous breakdown because of so much make-up work in swimming. The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustration in the flying class, where his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the treetop down. He also developed ‘charlie horses’ from overexertion and got C in climbing and D in running. The eagle was a problem child and was disciplined severely. In the climbing class he beat all the others to the top of the tree, but insisted on using his own way to get there. At the end of the year an abnormal eel that could swim exceedingly well, and also run, climb, and fly a little, had the highest average and was valedictorian. The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum. They apprenticed their child to a badger and later joined the groundhog and gophers to start a successful private school.”

  Education reform is again at the forefront of public concern. As the last election of the twentieth century looms, politicians’ lips drip with talk about the need to teach our children to read and to reform our schools. But we have heard this song before when President Bush and all fifty governors, led by then governor Clinton of Arkansas, adopted achievable and important goals for the education of all of America’s children by the year 2000. Not a single one of the goals will be met including the cornerstone goal of getting every child ready for school. Round two of education reform must not be rhetorical; it must be real or children and the nation will lose profoundly.

  Too often lost in talk about education “re
form” is the simple fact that education is about one thing—children—whose needs must come first. Education is not about adult jobs or political interests or convenience. It is about preparing every child to become a confident, competent citizen. America’s public education system—the pillar of our democracy—needs revitalization and refocusing on the well-being of all students. A deep sense of urgency is necessary to face the challenge of preparing a new generation of children for the future.

  FOURTH: IT IS TIME for America to be fair to children and accord them the respect and priority worthy of a just, sensible, compassionate society. Is it fair that no school system of any size with any diversity of children has ever educated the vast majority or all of its children to high levels of achievement?

  Is it fair that poor children in the poorest neighborhoods have the poorest schools, the poorest prepared teachers, the poorest equipment, the poorest school buildings, libraries, laboratories, the fewest computers, counselors, school nurses, and enrichment programs, and the lowest expectations by teachers and a public that blame them for achieving poorly on the tests for which we have not prepared them?

  Is it fair that hard-working citizens who mold the future by caring for children are the least well-paid in our society? Is a full-time early-childhood educator whose median earnings in 1998 were $265 a week, about $13,250 a year with no health benefits, worth less to the community than a car-wash attendant who earned 20 percent more? Is a good elementary school teacher who earns $34,550 a year with some benefits really worth only three hours and twenty minutes of a $20.5 million annual compensation package for a CEO whose company produces cigarettes that addict millions of children and kill millions of human beings? Should a hairdresser or manicurist have required hours of training when a child care worker in many states has none?

  Is it fair that corporations drain tens of billions of taxpayer dollars every year in corporate welfare and special tax breaks while we have cut billions from safety net programs for children and poor families? Shamefully over six million poor children lived in families with incomes of less than half the poverty line of $6,401 for a family of three. That’s less than the military will spend each second if the Clinton administration’s budget proposals prevail and less than one hour of the compensation of the cigarette company CEO. Is it fair that senior citizens have a health and income safety net and children do not?

  FIFTH: HELP BUILD a powerful movement to protect and Leave No Child Behind, and ensure all children a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. America should lead not lag the world on key child indicators and on fundamental human rights and justice for children just as we now lead on military and monetary indexes. Countless youths in inner-city neighborhoods are imprisoned by poverty and lack of skills where “the future” means surviving the day and where living to eighteen is a triumph. And countless non-poor youths are imprisoned by affluenza—too many things with too little meaning—unaware that life is more than material goods or thrills that do not satisfy. They share a common deeper hunger for a food that fills their souls. Their neglect and marginalization by parents, schools, communities, and our nation turned them first to and then against each other in gangs and then against a society that would rather demonize, imprison, market to and profit from rather than educate, employ, and empower them. Our market culture tells poor children they must have designer sneakers, gold chains, and fancy cars to be somebody while denying them the jobs to buy them legally. Our rich children have these things but find them no substitute for love, attention, and purpose beyond self. So they are both easy marks for drug and gun dealers who hawk their harmful products to our young. Isn’t it time to commit to respecting children’s basic human rights affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed fifty years ago by many of the nations of the world with the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt? Isn’t it time for the U.S. to end the disgrace of being the only legally constituted government in the world that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child? Why should the U.S. not subscribe to the principle of protecting children? With U.S. ratification, this nonbinding commitment to children can become the first universally ascribed human rights treaty in the world and become a standard we and all nations of the world seek to and can achieve in the twenty-first century.

  Women, especially mothers and grandmothers, must be key catalysts in protecting children in the next era. Slave woman Sojourner Truth gave us our charge when she said: “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again.” We must speak up and organize against war and violence, poverty and illiteracy and intolerance at home and abroad. While men have to be full partners, it is time for women to lead the way in redefining national priorities, the meaning of success, and to leave an imperishable inheritance of activated compassion and love to our children.

  We are living at an incredible moral moment in history. Few human beings are blessed to anticipate or experience the beginning of both a new century and millennium. How will we say thanks for the life, earth, nation, and children God has entrusted to our care? What principles will we stand for, practice, and send to the future through our children to their children and to a spiritually confused, balkanized, and violent nation and world desperately hungering for moral leadership?

  How will progress be measured over the next thousand years if we survive them? By the kill power and number of our weapons, or by our willingness to shrink, indeed destroy, the nuclear and conventional arms prison we have constructed in the name of peace and security? Will we be remembered as one of the most violent nations in history or as the people who learned to relate to each other and to our world neighbors in nonviolent ways? Will America’s legacy be how many material things we produce, advertise, sell, and consume, or our rediscovery of more lasting nonmaterial measures of success—a new Dow-Jones for the purpose and quality of life? Will we be remembered by how rapidly corporate merger mania can render human beings and human work obsolete, or by our efforts to ensure a better balance between corporate profits and corporate caring for children, families, and communities?

  Will we be remembered for how much a few at the top can get at the expense of the many at the bottom and in the middle, or for our struggle for a concept of enough for all Americans and for the poor of the earth? Will we be remembered for the glitz, style, violence, and banality of much of our culture, or for the substance of our efforts to rekindle an ethic of caring, community, and justice in our world?

  Can our founding principle “that all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” withstand the test of time, the tempests of politics, and become deed and not just creed for every man, woman, and child? Is America’s dream big enough for every second child who is female, every fifth child who is poor, every sixth child who is Black, every seventh child who is Latino, and every eighth child who is mentally or physically challenged?

  Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore said that each child “comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.” I believe that our children can become the healing agents for our national and world transformation and that protecting children is the moral litmus test of our humanity and the overarching moral challenge in our nation and world.

  AFTERWORD

  A Parent’s Pledge and Twenty-Five More Lessons for Life

  WHEN MY OLDEST SON reached his twenty-first birthday, I wondered what I could give him at this important milestone that would have lasting value. I decided to write him a letter about his rich family heritage as a young Black man with a mixed racial and religious heritage trying to grow up in America.

  I shared twenty-five lessons for life that I had been taught by my parents and elders which later formed the core of The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and You
rs, for which my second son wrote the foreword. When my youngest son reached his twenty-first birthday, I began jotting down more lessons to share with him and his two brothers in a world that is ever more challenging. Like most young adults, they do not always welcome or follow parental lessons. But like most mothers, I keep sharing them anyway as lanterns of love I hope will lighten and enlighten their paths and that of their children and their children’s children.

  The overarching message of this book is not about what we tell our children; it is about what we adults do and value as parents, citizens, educators, religious, cultural, corporate, civic, and political leaders. It is about the need for adults to struggle to live what we preach, to say what we mean, to mean what we say, and to be what we seem. While parents have first and primary responsibility for their children, the ability to exercise that responsibility requires the support of every sector including government at every level. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops stated, “The undeniable fact is that our children’s future is shaped both by the values of their parents and the policies of our nation.”

  Like all adults, I sometimes pretend, lie, and make mistakes that hurt my children and others, and offend every hour and day when I would not. I marvel at the forgiving spirit of my children ever so aware of my foibles and lapses in following my own advice. But I don’t mind that they see my struggles as long as they also see that I can admit I was wrong and am earnestly trying to learn from my mistakes and do better. I hope our parents, teachers, preachers, citizens, and leaders will open our eyes and ears and shed our convenient ignorance and answer our children’s calls for help.