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	a quiet place by peggy o'mara

Eyes Wide Open
Issue 105

At the same time that I've lost faith in politics, I've also become increasingly interested in the political process. I am dismayed that less than 50 percent of the eligible voters participated in the recent election for president and even more dismayed that only a minority of citizens voted for the man now in office. It gives one pause, as a citizen, to reflect on the nature of representative government and to wonder who's being represented--and how.

I'm afraid that no one in our government is really representing children and that the universal needs of families get lost in the partisan wrangling. The needs of families and children are nonpartisan by nature. They are basic human rights. If we really have "government of the people," then we need to elect representatives who will advocate for family issues, not capitulate those issues to powerful special interests. And we should expect our representatives who already support a child-friendly agenda to protect children and families.

I'm disappointed that in society in general and in government in particular we are not having a serious, nonpartisan conversation about the important social issues faced by families. We seldom talk of the ethics of our social climate or the values of our society. This language, in fact, has become so associated with the political right that we are afraid to use value-based language for fear of seeming politically incorrect. Concern for the social environment, however, is not the platform of any one party. It is everyone's platform. It is the true platform of unity. What are the common values and ideals that we share as citizens?

I think it's time for mothers to talk about these things, to demand they be given attention. We need a Mothers' Manifesto. Mothers are the ones who protect against the influences of society, as well as the ones who help children learn to be part of society. It is sadly ironic that at the same time we are helping our children to be members of society we also feel that we must protect them from it.

We don't have the PR budgets to challenge all of those who compete with us for our children's psyches. As mothers we must demand that society acknowledge the decline in the social environment for children and that our social and political leaders commit to straightforward, no-strings-attached, bipartisan solutions for the following issues:

Quality equal education for all children.
This isn't a new goal but one to which we need to rededicate ourselves. We know what guarantees quality education: ratio. The fewer students per teacher, the better the outcome of education. Homeschooling has confirmed this. We need more teachers and less bureaucrats.

When I was a new teacher in the early 1970s, teachers were paid well and admired. Now neither is true. We must repair the social status of teachers. And we must pay teachers well. Like the individual who talks about the value of exercising but never gets around to it, we as a society have to stop talking about how important education is and fund what works.

People talk about the folly of throwing more money at education, but it seems to me that money is precisely what education needs. Money for schools, not superintendents. We spend ten times more on our military than we do on children's education. Are these the priorities that really reflect our values as citizens?

Quality affordable health care for all children.
Even more than education, children deserve good health care that they can afford. They deserve freedom from worry about health care. And yet nearly 40 percent of our children are without health insurance. It shocks me that we continue to debate how to accomplish this. What we're debating is not how to do it but how to make money at it. Children should just be covered by everyone, that's all there is to it. The health care of children should not be a business.

Likewise, birth should not be a profit center. We should provide prenatal care to all women free of charge. This protects society. Health care of the childbearing years should be a service. All health care, as a matter of fact, is a service.

Freedom from poverty for all children.
I know I've mentioned these statistics before, but I continue to be shocked by them and shocked that I don't see them in every newspaper and that we're not all talking about them. Over 25 percent of all children in the US live in poverty. Over 37 percent of African-American children; over 50 percent of native children.

Poverty itself can be tragedy enough, but it also can limit potential in many areas, particularly in societies where self-worth is measured by income and property. And yet poverty serves the needs of this materialistic economy, which increasingly is fueled by insatiable needs. The culture of insatiable needs, in fact, requires poverty--poverty of the spirit and poverty of the pocket. We have the resources to eradicate poverty. Do we have the will?

Poverty exploits children and can lead to many other exploitations. Our willingness to tolerate so many of our children living invisibly in poverty and not to talk about it allows us to objectify children. It is then a small step to justify selling goods and services to them. As long as we continue to ignore the effects of poverty on our children, we can ignore our responsibility for its continuation. The fact that we don't individually know what to do about it is not the point. We have to first admit and grieve the problem before we can find a solution.

Freedom from exploitation for all children.
For the first time in history, the techniques of child psychology have been used to sell directly to children. The brightest minds of our society are at work manipulating children's desires. We have turned the collective knowledge of society against the child for the profit of the few.

In addition, our children are used as walking advertisements for clothing companies, football teams, beer, etc. People used to make a living wearing sandwich boards that advertised businesses in the area. Today, we wear sweatshirts, shoes, and accessories that advertise companies without giving it a second thought. We not only do it for free, we pay to wear the advertisement. The extent to which corporate identities accompany us throughout our day colors our children's earliest associations. As parents we can hardly compete with the extensive, sometimes subtle persuasion that encourages our children to form corporate bonds during their earliest years.

When I grew up, one expected there to be protection for children, for childhood, and I still expect it today, even though it is eroded. The movie-rating system is one example. A voluntary rating system monitored by the motion picture industry, movie ratings are inconsistent and unenforced. Our children are increasingly exposed to inappropriate material on television and in movies, while ratings and time slots are bought and sold by companies that are not held to any standards by society.

Voluntary monitoring systems of industry seldom benefit the consumer. For example, the toy industry continues to produce violent toys, even though all studies show that violent play is linked to violent actions. These studies do not change the face of US toy manufacture. There is no voluntary adherence by the juvenile product industry to a code of ethics in production of products for and advertising to children. Nor do investors in these companies insist that their companies act ethically.

We know that many of the world's poor are children, and we must open our eyes to the poverty of both matter and spirit that exists within US culture. We are a culture of dominance, of bullying. As consumers we are bullied into buying; we are continually bombarded by the stimuli of desire. As parents we may be able to protect our children from this during their early years, but it is difficult. Commercial influences are pervasive, and surprisingly parents who insist on protecting their children from these influences are often criticized by their peers, themselves the victims of materialism.

Eliminating or reducing unwanted media input makes a difference, but one need only count the number of commercial messages one sees while driving around town to know how inundated we all are with the temptation to be more than what we are. It's a shame to feel as parents that we must protect our children from their own society. In a civilized society, children are automatically shielded from adult experiences. The period of childhood is sacrosanct.

In a society that is not child friendly, children and families are exploited as commodities rather than protected as assets. It's shortsighted to exploit rather than protect our most valuable resources. We must reexamine a society that marginalizes families at the same time that it enforces conformity.

In situations like the extended breastfeeding case in Illinois (see "Bulletins" in the new March/April issue of Mothering, page 31), the man imprisoned for his son's fatal vaccine reaction (see "Your Letters," page 28), and the HIV case in Oregon (see "In the Eye of the Storm," Mothering, May-June 1999, page 68), the court saw fit to override closely held personal beliefs in two cases and refused to consider controversial evidence in the third. I don't think this happens very often, but it does happen more often at times when society's beliefs about health care and personal liberty are changing. There were many court cases involving midwives in the late 1970s and early 1980s when midwives were reestablishing themselves as educated practitioners. Similarly, there were more vaccine and breastfeeding cases in the early 1990s and recently more HIV cases.

These kinds of stories frighten parents, and yet one can't live in anticipation of danger. Even when one is discreet, it is clear that each of these situations above was totally unexpected, unprovoked, and arbitrary. The best we can do is to educate others about the diverse choices families of today are making. Interestingly, those families who make the most individual choices are often highly educated about health care and parenthood and thus make responsible parents.

All parents want the issues of families and children to be the core issues of our political agenda. We could solve these issues with the input of all of the parties. Since diversity was reflected in the many parties represented in recent elections, it would be good to hear views from all sides. The issues that concern families and children are a common ground for our political agenda--an agenda that can bring people together for the common good.

A concern for the common good requires that we abandon general rhetoric for specific solutions to the problems that hurt families. We have to be willing to participate in finding solutions and to consider all solutions that show promise.

We just have to start with a few huge issues, issues that if we publicly dedicated ourselves to, would find torrents of solutions. Here are some to start with:
Quality equal education for all children.
Quality affordable health care for all children.
Freedom from poverty for all children.
Freedom from exploitation for all children.
Aside from the fact that these issues restate our basic values of "liberty and justice for all," they're also a way to find commonality. As our society becomes more diverse, appearances become irrelevant, and we have to find common ground based on shared values.

These are values that we can all agree on. We will have different ideas for implementation, but differences can be assimilated when values are clarified. I want to find common ground. I see people around me worrying either about health care, housing, or money in general. We're the lucky ones; we have change in our pockets. What can we do now to end child poverty?