TV Reviews : Simple Stories of Poor Children’s Urgent Plight

Avert your eyes from the grimy figure sleeping in a doorway. Feel the frisson of fear induced by the sight of abject poverty. Could you ever end up like that? What would happen to your family?

“America’s Children: The Poorest in a Land of Plenty,” airing Sunday at 10 a.m. on Channel 4, asks you to go beyond fear--or pity or contempt--and see the faces behind the poverty statistics. Particularly the youngest faces.

Remarkable for its eloquent black-and-white still photographs by Pulitzer Prize-winner Eli Reed, the hourlong film, produced by the National Council of Churches as part of “The Promise of America II” series, profiles the lives of seven parents and their children in a struggle for survival with dignity.

In clear, measured tones, narrator Maya Angelou (“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”) offers an inexorable list of statistics, presented as poetry and pulpit exhortation.

“Cry out in shame” is the program’s repeated demand.

We must feel shame that we allow 13 million children to live in poverty, Angelou tells us, and that the United States and South Africa are the only two industrialized nations out of 20 that don’t provide comprehensive prenatal and child care.

In contrast, those profiled--chosen from the West and East coasts, the Midwest and the South--tell their stories simply. Teen-agers fear shabby clothes will earn them ridicule, a little girl wishes for a baby doll, a farmer grieves for his lost land, a woman can’t have a necessary operation.

One mother wants to reassure us that poor people are “OK” people, not threats of some kind.

And these are the fortunate ones. They are being given a lifeline by a few church and community groups to help them climb out of the deepening pit of “dependency, crime and joblessness.”

Urgency, not subtlety, is the tone here: We can fix the problem, we are told, but if we ignore the plight of others it could be “the bankruptcy of all our dreams.”