Abandoning Our Children

By Benjamin D. Grizzle

In two weeks, the United Nations will host a special session in New York to discuss the state of children on a global scale. The three-day meeting will be a gathering of nearly one-hundred heads of state, first spouses and more than 1000 other delegates representing governments and NGO’s world-wide to discuss and debate the state of children in the world and set goals for improving their conditions in the future.

Various nations’ progress in the last decade will be measured against the “Convention for the Rights of the Child,” produced at the 1990 World Summit for Children. Of the 193 member states, only the United States and Somalia have yet to sign this covenant to guarantee “the best possible start in life for all children, a good-quality basic education for all children [and] opportunities for all children, especially adolescents, for meaningful participation in their communities.”

The United States’ primary objections to attending this special session—the first international discussion about children in more than a decade—center on two primary concerns. Foremost is America’s unwillingness to cease executing people who committed crimes while they were children. The second reason is our unwillingness to report the true condition of America’s own children to the world. While the first reason may hold water, the second is certainly worthy of intense scrutiny.

If we want to be the international frontrunner on issues of human rights, why do we not—or more importantly why can we not—make ourselves the example that illustrates how children should grow up?

It is much more comfortable for us to point to children in India and Thailand who have beem sold into slavery for interest payments on family debt than to admit that 16.9%—one in six—American children today are growing up in poverty.

The Federal Poverty Line has hardly kept pace with changes in housing costs and inflation; a family of four is only considered poor if their income is less than $17,524 per year.

Certainly, we can agree that poverty is caused by a combination of social, structural and personal factors. But why are children being punished for the irresponsible decisions of their parents? And more important, why are children’s chances in the land of the American dream determined more by their zip code than by their character, intelligence or ability?

The UN has produced many seriously flawed documents and has limited authority to do anything substantive. Even so, there is no excuse for America dodging this political discussion.

We need not sign every treaty proposed by the UN, even when every other G8 and third world country in the world has signed onto it.

But there are certain issues that demand our attention and we should at least sit at the table and talk about how we can ensure a fair and decent start in life for all our children.

The fact is that our national unwillingness to participate in an international discussion is indicative of the silence in our political dialogue on the issue of poverty, and specifically child poverty.

Neither political party is tremendously interested in equipping and assisting the poor to escape their situation. The Republican party would like to cut the legs out from under the poor without first enabling them to stand on their own. The Democratic party subsidizes poverty by cultivating a culture tolerant of irresponsibility, single-parenthood, unemployment and dependency.

Both parties are more interested in implementing their own version of the same stagnant status quo than in innovating new solutions for the tenacious problems that persist.

When America chooses not to attend the discussion on Sept. 19, we will send a message to the world about where our national commitments really lie. It seems that we would rather kill a handful of teen murderers than talk about how we can feed, house, and educate poor children.

Do we really want to epitomize the odious sanctimoniousness of hypocritical moralizers? Countries like Iran are willing to sit at the table and admit their short-comings while America The Pure would rather ignore its poor.

It is about time that we embrace accountability. We need to stop standing back, simply pointing out the human rights violations against other nations’ children, and be proactive members of the international human rights community. America should be present at the United Nations meeting later this month, while beginning to prioritize her nations’ children.

Benjamin D. Grizzle ’03, a Crimson editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Phorzheimer House.