The Witness has always endeavored to keep the level of hope greater than the level of despair. But this month it has been a special challenge to remain sanguine as we've probed the dimensions and strength of the forces which are damaging the health and welfare of American children.

As Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman notes with justifiable, perhaps weary, outrage, "millions of children are growing up unsafe, unstimulated, under-educated, sick, hungry, neglected or abused." More scandalous still is that so much of this suffering has been cultivated and sanctioned by government social policies that stem from a national idolatry of market capitalism which relentlessly drums a mantra of profit, profit, profit into the public ear.

It's not that good people in every community and every state aren't addressing children's needs in countless imaginative and concrete ways. Here in Maine, Jim Hanna of the Maine Coalition for Food Security has been working on making sure that hungry children have non-emergency access to nutritious food. My friend Deborah Cotton has for several years been part of a cadre of Knox County adults mentoring adolescents caught breaking the law for the first time--shoplifting, drug possession, drunk driving--in the knowledge that some truthful talk, combined with respectful work on decision-making skills, can help shift kids away from self-destructive behaviors (the program's success rate is 98 percent).

Our neighbor across the road, Jack Carpenter has pioneered a program that brings at-risk youth and local adults together for camping trips that provide a basis for moving from shared fun to sharing concerns about deeper issues.

Well-child clinic in Colebrook, New Hampshire

In affluent Camden, students in the alternative high school are getting help in establishing a shelter for homeless teens from advisors and community leaders who understand that many of the clients will be students at the school. In Lewiston, Norwich House provides a supervised setting for teen mothers (and their children, who otherwise would be taken from them) in desperate need of personal support and mentoring in life and parenting skills. Outright is a recently established Portland-based non-profit that already has a mushrooming program of support and drop-in services for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth who need safe, positive and affirming environments in which to be themselves. And the faith-based Genesis Community Loan Fund headquartered in nearby Bristol, invests in enterprises that provide low-income families with affordable housing and transitional accommodations for mothers with children suffering from domestic violence (see TW 12/98).

Every reader will have their own list of encouraging near-at-hand examples of concrete commitment to meeting daunting needs. Such witness is crucial in saving lives. But my hope-threatening fear circulates around the suspicion that the bad-news statistics will continue to accrue unless more of us in this country have a radical change of heart that results in elected leaders and a public policy that value children's lives more than money.

I find myself engaged by author Patricia Hersch's observation that each of us can begin to change a national climate that devalues the lives of children by making a point of greeting the kids in our neighborhoods by name. For my friends Deborah and Jack and for all the folks involved in programs we cite as causes for hope, it is the children and families they have come to know who keep them committed to the work. So it seems likely that the more children we each know by name, the more we will know of their lives. And such familiarity should make it less and less possible to remain content with politicians, government leaders and policy makers--perhaps even ourselves--who shrug off kids' reality with simplistic or dismissive generalizations, claiming as justification for budget cutbacks a cupboard-is-bare economy.

So what's in a name? Perhaps the strongest basis for hope.

Julie A. Wortman <julie@thewitness.org> is a co-editor/publisher of The Witness.

Photo: Dan Habib/Impact Visuals

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