Pubdate: Sun, 14 Jul 2002
Source: Centre Daily Times (PA)
Copyright: 2002 Nittany Printing and Publishing Co., Inc.
Contact:  http://www.centredaily.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/74
Author: Henry A. Giroux
Note: Henry A. Giroux is the Waterbury Chair Professor in the College of 
Education at Penn State. This is an excerpt of a longer essay that appears 
on the Opinion section of our Web site, www.centredaily.com.

WAR AGAINST CHILDREN

A great deal has been written critically about new anti-terrorist laws 
passed in the name of "homeland security" that make it easier to undermine 
those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and 
potentially repressive government actions.

There is a thunderous silence, however, on the part of many parents, 
educators and politicians regarding the ongoing insecurity and injustice 
suffered by young people in this country.

There is a sense of moral and political indifference, if not cynicism, 
about the forms of domestic terrorism suffered by children who are poor, 
hungry, homeless, neglected, lack medical care or suffer physical abuse by 
adults. This is especially evident in child services departments, such as 
that in Florida, where children are continually abused by adults and in 
some cases actually disappear.

Increasingly, children seem to have no standing in the public sphere as 
citizens and, as such, are denied any sense of entitlement and agency. 
Children have fewer rights than almost any other group; consequently, their 
voices and needs are almost completely absent from our debates, policies 
and legislative practices.

I believe that the United States is at war with young people. That is 
especially so for those marginalized by class and color, but all youth are 
targets. No longer seen as a crucial social investment for the future of a 
democratic society, youth are now derided by politicians looking for 
quick-fix solutions to crime and demonized by the popular media. In a 
society deeply troubled by their presence, youth prompts in the public 
imagination a rhetoric of fear, control and surveillance -- made all the 
more visible with the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the 
widespread use of random drug testing of public school students.

Moreover, this perception of fear and disdain is increasingly being 
translated into social policies that signal the shrinking of democratic 
public spheres, the hijacking of civic culture and the increasing 
militarization of public space.

Instead of providing a decent education to poor young people, we offer them 
the increasing potential of being incarcerated, buttressed by the fact that 
the United States is the only industrialized country that sentences minors 
to death. Instead of guaranteeing them food, decent health care and 
shelter, we serve them more standardized tests. Instead of providing them 
with vibrant public spheres, we offer them a commercialized culture in 
which consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship.

But the hard currency of human suffering that affects children in this 
country can also been seen in some of the astounding statistics that 
suggest an improbable moral and political contradiction at the heart of the 
United States, one the richest democracies in the world:

Twenty percent of children are poor during the first three years of life.

Nine million children lack health insurance.

Millions lack affordable child care and decent early childhood education;

In many states, more money is being spent on prison construction than on 
education;

The infant mortality rate in the United States is the highest of any other 
industrialized nation.

The United States ranks first in military technology, military exports, 
defense expenditures and the number of millionaires and billionaires, but 
it is ranked 18th in the gap between rich and poor children, 12th in the 
percentage of children in poverty, 17th in the efforts to lift children out 
of poverty, and 23rd in infant mortality. One of the most shameful figures 
on youth reports that 1.4 million children are homeless in America for a 
time in any given year, and these children make up 40 percent of the 
nation's homeless population. In short, economically, politically and 
culturally, the situation of youth in the United States is intolerable and 
unforgivable.

Big government, recalled from exile after Sept. 11, is now popularly 
presented as a guardian of security -- not in terms of providing adequate 
health care or a social safety net, but in its increased role as a policing 
force -- resulting in the ongoing abridgement of basic freedoms and 
dissent, the criminalization of social problems, and the prioritizing of 
penal methods over social investments.

As the Childrens' Defense Fund observes, what is often missed by 
politicians, the media and others is that "the war on terrorism is no 
excuse not to prevent and stop the domestic terrorism of child poverty, 
hunger, homelessness, and abuse and neglect."

The greatest challenge Americans face does not come from crazed terrorists 
but from the ongoing struggle to expand and deepen the principles of 
justice, freedom, and democracy for all citizens -- especially young 
people, who are quickly becoming an abandoned generation. This is not going 
to take place through creating a phony notion of market-based choice, 
eliminating democracy's most cherished rights and freedoms, or substituting 
policies of containment for those that emphasize social investment, 
especially in regards to our children's needs.

Any attempt to enact real patriotism -- if the pledge to "liberty and 
justice for all" is to mean anything at all -- must begin with the current 
state of crisis among youth rather than the jingoistic posturing currently 
fashionable among U.S. lawmakers and the acolytes in the press who have 
spent the last decade peddling market moralities and mentalities at the 
expense of democratic values.
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MAP posted-by: Beth