Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given at the First Unitarian Church, Portland, OR

October 10, 1999

About three weeks ago, a high school student, late for class and impatient, passed a stopped car on the right and hit a child who was crossing the street, using the school crosswalk. The child was flipped onto the hood and into the windshield before falling to the ground. Luckily, he received only bruises and abrasions.

But that’s not all of the story. Red lights were flashing on the ambulance, while emergency workers cared for the child; red lights were flashing on a fire truck; red lights were flashing on the bus—but all these warnings didn’t stop the driver of another car from continuing on her way, trying to squeeze between the fire truck and the bus. Failing there, she backed up and almost hit someone else in the crosswalk.

And still the story goes on. The very next day at the same time and the same place, the very same school bus was loading children once again. A couple of motorists stopped behind the bus became impatient. A man got out of his BMW and made angry motions for everyone to hurry. He finally got back into his car. As the school bus was pulling away, he pulled into the lane of oncoming traffic to pass the bus on the left. A number of parents moved into his path, to make sure he waited. Then a woman got out of her SUV and began to yell. The parents made it clear that drivers needed to wait, that children’s safety was at stake here.

The bus pulled on out, and traffic began to flow again, the parents getting dirty looks from some of the drivers. As the woman in the SUV passed, she yelled at the parents. Several of the parents approached her vehicle, and one told her that drivers needed to be patient, that a child was hit here the day before.

"I know, I saw it happen," she screamed. "Keep your kids out of the road!" And then she sped away.

This is a startling story—but all too believable. It is almost a metaphor for our time: keep your kids out of the road, keep your kids out of our lives. We have places to go, things to do—get the kids out of our way.

The way I see it, children are being dismissed by all of our major institutions—the institutions which in a healthier society would be expected to treasure our children, to nurture them, to prepare them to take leadership roles in the future. These institutions are the government, business, education, and the family.

Let’s begin by taking a look at government policy. We say we can’t find the money for pre-school programs, for nutrition, for health care. But the truth is that we are an immensely rich country, and we can find the money for things we value. We can find money for a hugely inflated defense budget, even though we have no real enemy. A Stealth bomber is a pricey item, at $530 million per plane, and the fact is, we’re finding they’re not even very stealthy. We will pay for capital punishment, which costs us $1.7 million per case, and we can pay $166 billion dollars to bail out failed savings and loan companies. It’s not that we don’t have the money—it’s where we choose to spend the money.

Children from all classes and races are suffering these days. It’s not just a question of what is happening to poor children. And yet, these poor children—about 19 % of all children—are taking the brunt of the pain. And the poorest of the poor are increasing rapidly: the number of American children living in families with incomes below one-half of the poverty line rose to 2.7 million in 1997, up by 426,000 from the previous year. One in five children have no health insurance. A black baby born in the shadow of the White House is more likely to die in the first year of life than a baby born in Jamaica or Trinidad.

Well, what about the highly vaunted welfare reform? Aren’t families better off now? The economy is strong. Jobs are plentiful. We see in the newspaper the single mom now busily working at a satisfying job. But how are these families really doing? Truthfully, we don’t know, because enough studies haven’t been done yet. But we do know that more people are lining up at our food banks. A federal program known as WIC that provides food vouchers as well as nutrition counseling to almost 90,000 low-income women and children in Oregon recently ran out of money two weeks before its fiscal year was up. Program staff said the caseload was too high. The program takes on 3,000 new women and children each month.

And we do know that most jobs available to welfare recipients will not pay them enough to lift them out of poverty. Think about it. How much does it cost to live these days? Assume that a woman living here in Portland with a single child can get a job paying $7.00 an hour. Now keep in mind that minimum wage for the U.S. is $5.15, and the Oregon minimum wage is $6.50—so $7.00 is good money. If she can find a cheap apartment and if she can keep an old junker of a car running, her basic expenses--and I mean basic (that is, no movies, no eating out, no gifts, no frills of any kind) would be, by my reckoning, $1,570 per month. Her take-home pay is about $950 a month. She needs, then, $620 more dollars just to scrape by. The solution? Clearly, take a second job. And then what happens to the child? The mother is either absent or, when she is home, exhausted.

The greatest disgrace in this nation is what we do to our working poor. They work at sometimes two or even three jobs, often doing the work that nobody else wants to do: cleaning the toilets in the hotels, lifting the heavy boxes at the warehouses, washing the dishes at the restaurants where we eat. Our tax system favors those who have money, and the rich are becoming ever richer, on the backs of the poor. Economic inequity is at the root of so much of our national suffering. We need to pay a living wage. We need a just tax structure.

What is the face of poverty for children? Poverty is going to school hungry in the morning and not being able to concentrate on your lessons. Poverty is your family having to move again and again because Daddy can’t pay the rent. Poverty is wearing clothes that don’t fit and having hair that goes uncut. Poverty is feeling ashamed, because somehow you think you are at fault for being poor.

When some suffer, we all suffer. We do know that it is inevitable that the problems of child poverty will become the problems of the juvenile court system. Poor children are more likely to suffer from emotional and behavioral problems. They struggle in school and are twice as likely as other kids to drop out of school, to repeat a grade, or to be expelled. We are busy transferring public money from poverty programs to the prison system. The cost of building a new prison is well over $60,000 per inmate, and it costs more than $15,000 a year to keep each prisoner in jail. We can always cut the education budget, of course. But every business leader and politician should know that every dollar spent on pre-school education saves $4.75 on remedial education, welfare, and crime control.

Government policies regarding women and children are much more enlightened in Europe than those in the United States. In most European countries the government helps pay for child care, requires private employers to provide generous leaves for childbirth, and encourages flexible work schedules. French families receive a monthly allowance to help them rear each child, and children go to school for free starting at age two and a half. In Sweden, both men and women are allowed one year of leave at 90 per cent of their earnings after they have a child.

Only a small number of American companies have family friendly policies, but companies are beginning to see that if they want to stop the high turnover rate of their women employees, they need to become more sensitive to the needs of families. Corning is an outstanding example of a company that early on recognized these needs. They ran a survey and discovered that family stress was the main reason that so many women quit their jobs. By the end of 1988, Corning had in place a policy package that included parenting leave, on-site child care, part-time work options, and job sharing. Hopefully, more and more companies will follow suit.

I want to shift now to education. How are we doing there? SAT scores have shown modest improvement recently, but from 1965 to 1990, they fell 70 points. In a study of 5,000 students in Dallas, Texas, 25% of them could not name the country which borders the U.S. on the south. In Boston 38% could not name 6 New England states. Only about 70% of our high school students earn a diploma, when our economic competitors have near-universal secondary education. In Japan, for example, 90-95 % of 17-year-olds graduate from high school. And their schools are much more rigorous. Our graduates are required to have more knowledge and skills than ever before, but their capabilities are actually decreasing.

What about the family? As fundamentalist Christians have pointed out-- and they are right--there has been a massive breakdown in the family. The demise of the extended family. The divorce statistics. You know the scene as well as I do. But the answer to the fragmentation of the family is not keeping women at home. With almost 50% of the workforce being women, the one paycheck family is rare these days. But if both parents are in the workplace, and the hours in the workplace keep getting longer, who cares for the children? The data show that the amount of time that parents spend with children has dropped 40% in the last 25 years. It really does take a village to raise a child. How can we create these villages of support?

Some adults seem almost afraid of their children at times, afraid to exert any control over a child’s behavior. You may have seen the article about teen boxing in the Oregonian this past Friday. Apparently teens have been coming to a secluded park in Oregon City to hold unsupervised boxing matches. A hundred and seventy-five people gathered last Thursday to watch. Police and school officials say there is little they can do to stop the fighting, because "boxing is legal," according to city lawyers. However, these teens are not boxing, they are brawling. Thursday’s fights included two girls slamming their fists rapid-fire into the faces of their opponents. Excited spectators formed a ring four or five people deep to cheer and taunt. In another fight a sophomore at Oregon City High was struck twice in the head. The young man said that he had never fought before and that he could not remember the final blows in the fight. Some older boxers who came to offer help suggested that the child could have suffered a minor concussion. It was only then that the police stopped the fight.

Now, who is responsible for this situation? None of the adults who could be expected to protect children actually did so. Not the schools, not the police, not the onlookers. And where were these kids’ parents? These boxing matches have been going on since February, and the parents of these kids have not tried to stop this violence? I wonder if the parents even know where their kids are.

I remember two years ago when a teen opened fire at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky, killing several students. At that time, my son Madison was teaching high school physics in a town not too far away. He and his students were shaken and disturbed. I asked him, "You know high school kids--how could this happen?" His answer was, "Mom, parents don’t know where their kids are and what they’re doing. Parents all think that their kids are little angels—the other kids might drink or do drugs, but not my child. They just don’t have a clue."

We are leaving the children of this country to the rule of popular culture, and many children take their values from video games, TV, and movies, all of which have become increasingly violent. We can understand why some teens think smashing each other in the face is entertainment. The TV has become the baby-sitter most often used for children. Three to five-year-olds watch 3 ½ hours daily. By age 12 kids have seen 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence. When my boys were growing up, I let them watch Bert and Ernie and Mr. Greenjeans. Then they started watching cartoons, which were often violent. That was the end of the TV—I simply got rid of it.

What do kids need in their lives? According to Richard Weissbourd in his book The Vulnerable Child, children need four things: to feel safe, to accomplish work they are proud of, to feel that the world is just, and to have hope. They get these things from positive contact with adults. When I read this, I started thinking about my own upbringing. My parents were divorced, my mother gone, my father given to drink. But I had everything that Weissbourd mentions. I had a large extended family of aunts and uncles that I saw frequently and who acted as positive role models for me. In my small town where everybody knew everybody else, if I made a misstep, my grandparents would know about it before I arrived home. Everybody watched everybody else’s children. It was truly a community—everybody was tied to all the others and somehow responsible to them. Let me illustrate.

I remember the day our coach left town for good. Our whole senior class remembers that day. He came into our English class to tell the teacher good-bye. His right eye was swollen and purple. It appeared that the coach was having an affair with the tall, statuesque wife of Doodlie Peterson, son of bootlegger Pee Wee Peterson, from whom my father got his bootleg liquor, at the filling station catty-corner from the Baptist Church where I went to services twice on Sunday and then again on Wednesday night. See what I mean? The fabric was woven tight. Anyway, Doodlie had beaten up our coach and told him to get out of town that day, or he would kill him. And knowing Doodlie, I expect he would have. All of us in that class looked at one another. We all knew. We sighed. Now, for the rest of the school year, we would have to make do with the assistant coach, who was not the brightest bulb on the marquee of life.

I’m not saying that I want to go back to that little town in North Louisiana—but I am saying that our children need a sense of belonging, a deep knowing that they are children and adults are adults. I don’t think American parents are bad people, selfish and narcissistic. I don’t think people get divorces on a whim. I think we live in a social and economic system that drains the life out of us and promotes values that are deadening to the spirit: greed, competitiveness, overwork, alienation from others. We are lonely and soul sick. I think we have trouble parenting because we have no context of community in which to do so.

I hope that this church is a life-giving place for those who are involved here. In our religious education program, we treat our children with care and respect. In our social justice program, we are focusing on children this year. We have opportunities for hands-on help, like volunteering at the Goose Hollow Family Shelter, but we emphasize systemic change. Yes, we need to feed hungry children, but even more we need to ask the question, why are so many children hungry. The Economic Justice Action Group will have information on efforts to get the World Trade Organization to address child labor. The Campaign Finance Reform group will have information about lobbying efforts that, if successful, could result in reduced health benefits for children. So if you’ve been wanting to better the lives of children and wondering where to begin, let us help you. You are invited into the Parish Hall in the basement of this building after church today, where the various action groups will have concrete suggestions for you.

Let me share with you something from the Masai tradition. The Masai are among the most accomplished tribes of Africa, their people deeply intelligent, their warriors fearsome. It is telling that the traditional greeting passed between Masai warriors is "kasserian ingera," which means "and how are the children?" This greeting acknowledges the high value that the Masai always place on their children’s well-being. Even warriors with no children of their own always give the traditional answer: "All the children are well," meaning of course that peace and safety prevail. The young and powerless are being protected. Masai society has not forgotten its reason for being.

I wonder how it might affect our consciousness if in our culture we took to greeting each other with this same question: "And how are the children?" I wonder if we heard that question and passed it along a dozen times a day, if perhaps we would begin to change in how we care for our children. What would it be like if the President began every press conference by answering the question, "And how are the children, Mr. President?" What if every governor, every legislator of every state, had to answer the same question with every public appearance? "How are the children?" What would happen if every adult, parent and non-parent alike, felt responsible for our children. I wonder if then we could truly say, without any hesitation, "The children are well, yes, all the children are well."

How to begin? We have to think big, to question, to meet with others and talk openly about the pain of our living, to imagine, to risk change. No political ideology can give us the answer, there is no book of rules anywhere. We have to create it ourselves. We have to acknowledge that the way we live now leads to death of the spirit—for all of us. What would be a way that gives life, both for ourselves and for our precious children? No more silent marching in the ruts, no more turning away from what our heart is saying to us. No more despair. We can’t afford that luxury. Let us dare to imagine a new way. Let us have the courage to hope and to dream of what could be. Perhaps one day we will be able to say, "The children are well, all the children are well."

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Beloved, we confess that we haven’t done right by the children. Money that should be for them is going into weapons, by which they are killed. Wealth is going into private hands, while public schools struggle. Too many of our young are cold and hungry. We want to right these wrongs, but we feel so helpless in the face of the powers that be. Help us to own our power, to speak our truth, and to join together to create a new way.

So be it. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Let us go now and resolve to care for the children, for all of them belong to all of us. Go in love, and go in peace. Amen.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Welcome to this house of worship. We are here to be reminded of the best impulses of the human spirit, to be brought back to our best selves. Come, let us worship together.

The original source for this story of the Masai is not known. My remarks are excerpted from a speech by the Rev. Patrick O’Neil

Copyright 1999 by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.