Poverty's Killing Fields
By Bill Shore Share Our Strength | July 16, 2007
I read an article on Saturday that is, without question, one of the most disturbing I've read in many years. New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert wrote that the number of Chicago public school children killed since the start of the most recent school year as a result of gang or random violence has reached 34.
I had to read Herbert's column several times to be sure I wasn't misinterpreting something or overreacting. But it is not possible to overreact to facts such as these.
We tend to think extreme poverty only has life and death consequences in disease-ridden and war-torn developing countries. In the United States we've grown almost accustomed to our own poverty as a hardship that is somehow manageable for those affected. It is not something that intersects with the rest of our lives in a very direct way. But the kind of carnage taking place in the streets of our biggest and best cities means poverty is quite surely a matter of life and death to many American children guilty of nothing more than bad luck in when and where they were born.
Those of us who lived in Washington's suburbs in 2002 during the Washington area snipers twenty-two day killing spree that left ten people dead remember the palpable, paralyzing fear that gripped our communities during that time. It was of course a national and international story. Somehow the gun violence that routinely rips through the playgrounds, schools and streets of our poorest children, mostly black and Latino, is instead a matter of national silence and neglect. Imagine how different it might be if the deaths of 34 school children had occurred in Chevy Chase, Greenwich, or Scottsdale.
Each day's papers bring news of violence and brutality in places like Ramadi, Ramallah, or Rwanda, that leave us speculating about whether their societies have descended into some form of civil war. The distance and complexity of such foreign tragedies leave most of us no choice but to sigh and turn the page. But turning the page is not an option when we are talking about our own most vulnerable children, in our own heartland, citizens of one nation but caught in the crossfire that is the inevitable result of two societies divided by race, income, education, housing and healthcare.
At the same time I was reading Herbert's column, the White House was announcing on Saturday that the president would veto a bipartisan plan to expand the children's health insurance program. The plan, carefully drafted by senior Democratic and Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee, to be financed by an increased tax on cigarettes, would have reduced the number of uninsured children in America by 4.1 million.
Lives are at stake in the choices we make. That is he only thing of which I can be certain in seeking meaning from the juxtaposition of these two items flowing by in one weekend's river of news. It matters that those of us engaged in efforts to heal divisions succeed. It matters that we are strategic enough, well resourced enough, and committed enough to overcome the indifference that perpetrates pain as surely as do lethal weapons. It matters who is President. It matters what we read and where we go, and to what we are willing to bear witness.
July 16, 2007 |Tags: youth violence | TrackBack
Posted by: Cate Puzo on July 17, 2007 at 1:59 PM
Cate's post is such a powerful testament to how violence and the shadow it casts affects each of us in our own way. We surely need to hear more voices like that of the African American grandmother who replaced Cate's pastor. I'm haunted not just by this story of the school children killed in Chicago this past year but by the likelihood that something similar is occuring in many other urban communities and we don't know or see it.
Posted by: Billy Shore on July 18, 2007 at 8:41 AM
Post a comment
© Copyright 2006 Sharing Witness. All rights reserved.
I haven't been able to get this out of my mind. It takes me back to the early '90s when I lived in a snow-white northwestern suburb of Chicago. Gun violence among children was just becoming front-page news, and two young reporters at the Chicago Tribune had taken it upon themselves to dig deep, and then keep digging; I believe they won a Pulitzer for their series on it. So horrified was I by the reality that Chicago's children were killing each other--and not just in the South Side neighborhoods but increasingly in the suburbs...that I convinced my church to sponsor a series of educational sessions on the topic; we invited the young reporters to speak on the topic, and 30 parishioners showed up--a record for such a thing in our affluent suburb. They gave real-life stories of real families and children whose lives had been shattered as a result. They quoted facts and statistics. Then they told us that the problem was spreading beyond the boundaries of those South Side neighborhoods...the problem was moving north from Chicago and south from Milwaukee, and our protected community could be in the line of fire. Literally.
We didn't know what more to do. I felt like I'd done something but not enough, and the stories still haunted my sleep. I became a stronger advocate for strong gun laws. I became more interested and a stronger proponent of diverse communities. When a few years later our pastor retired, I applauded our church leaders for bringing in a vibrant African-American grandmother who was completing her doctorate at seminary, raising her grandson, caring for an ailing husband and eager to wake up our sleepy, sedate, conservative United Methodist congregation. She was, in my mind, the best thing to happen to us. She held nothing back--not her life's story, her exuberance for life and faith, her family's trevails and triumphs, and her criticism of us, as was her role. She brought call and response, dance performances, and real storytelling to our services. She was truly celebrating her faith and was, little by little, getting some of us uptight conservative suburbanites to join her. She was connecting us to the South Side communities that were so troubling to me.
Then she was let go. The elders in the church decided she was shaking too much up. She was disturbing the status quo (read, the moneyed) of the congregation. She was trying to change too much. She was dividing the church. She wasn't what we needed. She went back to the South Side. And I left the church and haven't been back since. But the values she instilled in me, planted on the ground made fertile by these ongoing stories of child gun violence, have stayed.
This story reminded me of all that, of all that still needs to be accomplished, of the small young lives that end needlessly and violently. The story called me to do more and, at the very least, to remember why I advocate for the things I do. It called me to bear witness and never forget.