If You Really Cared, You’d Have Voted

W e love our children.

It’s a lie, and I don’t believe it anymore.

Our children are our most precious possession.

It’s a lie and I’m not listening to you.

Don’t say it again. You’re only fooling yourself because I know better. I know the truth. You don’t really care. I’m just trying to figure out why you keep saying that you do.

I know why the politicians say it. It helps them get elected, and once elected, they sacrifice programs for children at the altar of fiscal responsibility.

But you, I don’t know why you say it.

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I used to believe that you loved your children. I believed it even as I read the statistics that tell the damning story of the declining status of the nation’s youth--the suicide rate for children has tripled, the homicide rate for children has doubled, the number of children in poverty is higher now than 25 years ago, overcrowded classrooms, declining test scores.

Maybe I believed it because I still heard people gasp at the horrifying stories of toddlers and teen-agers gunned down in the street, neglected, abused children crowding the foster care system and abandoned children left to wander homeless on the city’s streets.

I believed you cared, but that maybe you just didn’t understand the magnitude of the problem. So I wrote stories about it, and you read them, and sent letters expressing your dismay, your shock and your concern. And my colleagues wrote stories, and you sent them the same letters.

But still you did nothing.

So, I made excuses for you. I talked about the pressures and stresses of the day that make parenting so difficult, the hardships of single parenthood. I’m a parent too. I know how hard it is. I know how these issues can seem so overwhelming that there appears to be nothing you can actually do. I saw how rarely there seemed to be one simple action that would clearly have an impact on the status of our children.

But then came Proposition 174, and finally I knew that it was all a facade, just a show.

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You remember Proposition 174, the plan to shift billions of state dollars and allow parents to place their children in private schools using taxpayers’ money. It was much debated, much talked about. Millions of dollars were spent in campaign advertising.

The media, broadcast and print, covered the issue incessantly. In the three months from when the issue was first placed on the ballot and Election Day, The Los Angeles Times produced 225 articles mentioning Proposition 174, something like two items every day. The Daily News mentioned it in 210 articles.

No other story, not the Damian Williams/Reginald Denny trial, not the Clinton health care plan, not Bosnia, not Somalia, not police, not crime, was written about more in the pages of local newspapers during that period.

Radio and television covered it in their news programs; it was the focal point of their talk programs and televised debates. There were editorials and commentaries. Why so much coverage? Because it was about children, and the media believed that if there was one thing people really cared about it was their children. So the media assumed they had an obligation to cover the issue thoroughly. The public wanted to know. The public needed to know, because this issue could dramatically affect the one thing that they supposedly held most dear.

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Then came Nov. 2, Election Day.

No matter your position, everybody had a reason to vote. If you were for the plan, it was a blessing, a chance to rid your children of a cumbersome, ineffective school system and give them an opportunity that would help fortify their future.

If you were against it, it was the devil’s doing, a proposal that would damn your children to an inferior education by sucking away money from an already strapped school system.

And what happened? Only 24% of the registered voters in the city of Los Angeles went to the polls. Less than one of every four adults thought children were even worthy of them taking the time to cast a ballot on an issue that will probably have the greatest impact on their lives--education.

That’s when I knew once and for all that you were lying. You didn’t even care enough about your child to vote, one way or the other. You put your children’s future in the hands of someone else with a casual disregard.

I was against Proposition 174, but if it had passed with 70% of the voters going to the polls, I would have been pleased, not at the outcome, but because that many people cared. I may have thought they were wrong, but at least they cared, and that was a start. But they didn’t. You didn’t.

So, don’t say that you love your children. It’s a lie. And after Proposition 174, everybody knows it.