BOOK REVIEW HOLIDAY SPECIAL SECTION : Suffer the Child

This holiday season boasts the usual feast of gorgeous books on travel, art, style, design and fetishes. But we are also seeing more books on issues close to our hearts, issues we read about in the newspapers and worry about in our communities. Issues like caring for the nation’s children. These are not dense treatises doomed to obscure shelves. These are coffee-table books, with photographs of children at work, children in war. They sit on coffee tables next to those festive books on yachts and collectibles and trekking in the Himalayas.

Children are growing up today in a post-Cold-War era of unbearable dissonance between promise and performance, between good politics and good policy, between America’s racial creed and America’s racial deed, between professed and practiced family values, between calls for community and rampant individualism and greed, between our capacity to prevent child deprivation and disease and our political and spiritual will to do so in the richest nation on Earth.

One in five of its children live in poverty. Something is out of balance in an America where all the gains in wealth and three-fourths of the gains in family income between 1973 and 1993 went to the richest 20% of families while the bottom 60% saw declines.

Our shame as a nation is the inspiration for “In the Alleys: Kids in the Shadow of the Capitol,” a photographic document of how children are suffered to live in our most public city. The overture of our nationhood, the Declaration of Independence, is awaiting its next movement--a mighty, positive, transforming and inclusive movement that returns us to our founding truths that “All men are created equal.” Our ensuing centuries of struggle to extend these truths to women, racial and other minority groups, and to children must continue--even, indeed especially--in this time of national moral confusion and danger,family and community breakdown, economic fear and political volatility.

Our leaders rarely seem to acknowlege the real lives represented by their statistics; the story of “Kerry: A Teenage Mother” may be meant for children, but it is told simply enough for politicians to understand, too. In this season of peace, hope, and good will it is especially appropriate that we remember God’s message through the prophet Zechariah: “To see that justice is done, to show kindness and mercy to one another, not to oppress widows, orphans, foreigners who live among you or anyone else in need.” This message has not changed over the centuries with political and ideological fashion. The Gospel’s injunction, foretold by the prophet Isaiah to be brought into the world by a poor, homeless child Christians call savior , to bring good rather than bad news for the poor, cannot be overruled by political slogans or media pundits, any more than America’s enduring values of fairness and opportunity can. God’s call to heal and to care is clear and unchanging.

Why aren’t we ashamed to publish a book called “Smart Moves: A Kid’s Guide to Self-Defense”? Let’s take our heads out of the sand and stop the undeclared civil war that has been escalating in our nation for decades with our too-silent acquiescence. An American child is abused or neglected every 26 seconds, and is arrested for a violent crime every five minutes. Since 1979, more than 50,000 children have been killed by guns--the equivalent of American battle casualties in Vietnam. The morally unthinkable killing of children has become routine in Boston and in Bosnia, in Detroit and in Rwanda. Look at the photographs of children’s bodies--shot, bombed, mutilated?--in “Caught in the Crossfire: Growing up in a War Zone.” Do we think this only happens somewhere else? Are these not our children?

The first thing all parents and adults can do is be accountable--to conduct a personal audit to determine whether we are contributing to the crisis our children face or to the solutions they urgently need. Our children don’t need or expect us to be perfect. They do need and expect us to be honest, to admit and correct our mistakes, and to share our struggles about the meanings and responsibilities of parenthood, citizenship, faith, and life. Before we can pull up the weeds of violence, racism, materialism and greed in our society that are strangling our children, we must pull up the moral weeds in our own back yards.

The second thing we can do is to hold our political leaders accountable and not permit dismantlement of the guaranteed safety net woven over 60 years to protect disabled, hungry, neglected and abused children and working Americans without regard to the human consequences, without putting anything better in place and without requiring fair sacrifice from all. Whatever your political views, every citizen must be aware of the momentous social revolution underway: Ask hard questions about its direction, its human and economic consequences, and make sure our Congress and our President do not permanently change America’s values by passing policies of national child neglect.

Finally, we can practice humility. Our children are not merely victims to be protected. Read about the Harlem Boys’ Choir in “Lift Every Voice” and remember the strength of innocence. Let’s pray that during this holy season, God’s spirit will be born anew within all of us and that God will guide our feet to stop the killing and neglect of children, to reclaim our nation’s soul, and to give our children back their hope, sense of security, belief in America’s fairness, and their ability to dream about and work toward a future that is attainable and real.

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KERRY: A Teenage Mother, By Maggi Aitkens, photography by Rob Levine (Lerner Publications/Minneapolis: $13.95; 48 pp.)

LIFT EVERY VOICE: Expecting the Most and Getting the Best From All God’s Children, By Dr. Walter Turnbull (Hyperion: $19.95; 234 pp.)

IN THE ALLEYS: Kids in the Shadow of the Capitol, By Laura Goldstein, foreword by Gordon Parks, photographs by Godfrey Frankel (Smithsonian: $55 hardback; $24.95 paperback; 104 pp.)

CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE: Growing Up in a War Zone, By Maria Ousseimi (Walker: $19.95; 120 pp.)

SMART MOVES: A Kid’s Guide to Self-Defense, By Christopher J. Goedecke and Rosemarie Hausherr (Simon & Schuster: $16; 96 pp.)