America’s Heart Isn’t With Its Children

Recently I played bridge with Sol Londe, a 92-year-old pediatrician who, refusing to let age slow him down, cleverly took the rubber. Londe still practices medicine in L.A. County’s juvenile hall two days a week. As further evidence of a clarity of purpose superior to my own, Londe told me that he and his 75-year-old wife Jeanne planned to attend the “Stand for Children” rally in Washington. At the time, two weeks ago, I had not even heard of the event.

Fortunately, 200,000 people had, and like Londe, they made the trek to the nation’s capital Saturday to bear witness to a terrible wrong: The welfare of children is being sacrificed for political gains. By both parties.

Despite the fact that 15.3 million American children live in poverty, 5.6 million of them children of the working poor, Congress has spent the past two years chopping away at poor kids’ life support. House Speaker Newt Gingrich is once again attempting to cut the food stamp program and eliminate Aid to Families With Dependent Children. And now President Clinton seems poised to cave in and sign away the federal government’s 61-year-old commitment to AFDC.

At this point, my conservative friends will stop reading. Just another rant from a liberal who doesn’t understand that it is the government programs that create the poverty. Such a comfortable thought: End the programs and you end the poverty. Why can’t the Londes and the folks at Catholic Charities U.S.A., the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the Girl Scouts, the American Academy of Pediatrics, Nickelodeon and the 3,700 other organizations that endorsed the rally understand that?

Because it is a lie. The conservatives have been playing with the evidence. They blame welfare for everything from crime to out-of-wedlock births. But as Mike A. Males documents in his brilliant new book, “The Scapegoat Generation,” a state like Mississippi, which is stingiest with welfare benefits ($120 a month for a mother with two children), has far higher rates of unwed motherhood and crime than does a generous state like Minnesota ($532 for the same family). Internationally, every industrialized country, from Australia to Israel, spends proportionately more money meeting the needs of poor children than we do. As a result, every one of them has a lower rate of child poverty. The U.S. leads the developed world in impoverishing its young because it spends too little, not too much, on lifting the poor out of poverty.

People who work with poor children day in and day out know that government programs are imperfect and inadequate. But they also know that the meat ax approach to “reform” employed by the Gingrich revolutionaries is a massive disaster in the making. Yes, we need better, more innovative, less bureaucratic approaches to the complex problem of poverty. No doubt more resources should be funneled to private organizations with a grass-roots base like Catholic Charities. But that’s not what the Gingrich cuts are about. In the name of “reform,” the Gingrichites slash and burn.

This is the truth and it hurts. So instead of heeding the pleas of the good folks who gathered in Washington, the conservatives marshaled their rhetoric to smash the messengers. That’s why the Heritage Foundation dismissed the “Stand for Children” rally as “the last stand for big government.” What cynicism. We will have big government as long as we spend $300 billion a year on a defense and intelligence budget designed to fight a Cold War that no longer exists. Compared to this, the $12 billion the federal government spends on AFDC is a piddling amount.

Yet having voted for increases in the defense budget that the Pentagon didn’t even want, the Republicans in Congress dare claim that the budget must be balanced on the backs of poor children in order not to burden future generations. As if the nurturing of children has nothing to do with the well-being of future adults. That shortsighted meanness has driven Gingrich way down in the polls. But instead of cleaning up his act as his handlers had hoped, Gingrich has reverted to form, inexplicably lashing out at children’s advocates who gathered in Washington as “trial lawyers,” “academics” and “bureaucrats.”

Is Londe one of those “bureaucrats” because after six decades of doctoring children he still finds the strength of conviction to tend the sick at a county juvenile hall? Why did he go to Washington, I asked Londe, and he replied with a simple eloquence. “My heart is with the children, that is my basic love.”

In this season of tough love, that sounds naive. But in his 92 years, Sol Londe has seen a lot of Newt Gingriches come and go.