Poverty's Killing Fields

By Bill Shore | 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.