The Map in My Pocket

By Bill Shore | May 23, 2007

Last week I cut a map out of the New York Times and asked my assistant Alice to laminate it for me so I could carry it in my pocket as a constant reminder. It was headlined "Ominous Trends in Infant Mortality in the South."

It used color coding to show the contrast between the New England and west coast states that had less than 3.5 deaths in infants first year per 1000 live births, and those southern states shaded in dark brown that had 8 or more infant deaths per thousand, more than twice as much. They include Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

An accompanying graph showed the large racial disparity involved. In Mississippi, white infant mortality is at 6.6 and nonwhite at 17, for an average of 11.4, way above the national average.

As much as I wanted to go talk with the families and doctors interviewed in the article, a packed schedule prevents me from doing that anytime soon. But bearing witness takes many forms. It doesn't always require jumping on a plane or walking through a devastated neighborhood. Sometimes bearing witness can be pulling out an index card-sized laminated map that makes you stop and think each time you reach for your wallet.

Of all the things to keep in my pocket, I chose this map because infant mortality is a gateway to the most vital issues embedded throughout our work at Share Our Strength. Over previous decades, many states in the Deep South had seen steady progress in reducing infant mortality. But as is the case with other measures of poverty and especially extreme poverty, we are now seeing an alarming slide backward.

Doctors attribute this to cuts in welfare and to the steady rise in obesity, diabetes and hypertension. These are the medical conditions that cause many poor mothers to deliver children of low birth weight most susceptible to death before their first birthday. They are conditions intimately related to food, nutrition and education. They are conditions over which Share Our Strength has some influence and needs to have more.

Maps are comprised of shapes and symbols but there is no symbol that can adequately reflect the heartache of a parent burying a child. Infant mortality dramatizes the high stakes behind our childhood hunger strategy and especially our advocacy of nutrition education, access to healthy food, and quality medical care.

The New York Times map shows one country but two very separate societies. It illustrates the stark divisions that exist along the lines of race, income, education when it comes to how we care for our most precious national resource: the next generation. While you expect to see the outlines of 50 states, you instead find outlined the geography of despair.

The original idea of America was that geography should not be your destiny. With economic freedom people move when they can to take advantage of good jobs, good schools, and better opportunities for their families. You and I know this to be true. Newborn infants don't know this. They remain vulnerable not only to geography but neglect. A child should not be more likely to survive on one part of our nation's map than another. Their needs require more than economic freedom. Their needs require a society that shares its strength.

Some maps help us find our way and some show when we've lost it. The 4 x 6 inch map Alice laminated for me sits lighter in my pocket than my spare change. Yet it weighs me down as I believe it weighs down our nation.

Each of us has the privilege of working to redraw the map, to reconfigure those internal borders and boundaries that divide us, that stubbornly keep two societies from truly becoming one. I hope you will think of yourself as a cartographer as well.