On the Unicef website we learn random disturbing facts that pertain to the plight of children:
“An estimated 540 million, or one in four, children in the world live with the ominous and ever-present hum of violence that might erupt at any time, or are displaced within their countries or made refugees by conflicts that are already raging. Hundreds of thousands are buffeted by floods and droughts in repetitive patterns. Many of those same children are among the more than 600 million children already beset by unyielding and merciless poverty.”
In 1994, in the course of a few weeks of genocide, it is estimated that a quarter of a million children were slaughtered in Rwanda.
Children in the tens of thousands perish outright every year or lose limbs in landmines following wars, for example after the decimation of prior Yugoslavia. Of the hundreds of unexploded bombs that still kill or main civilians each month in Afghanistan that were dropped during the air raids of coalition forces against the Taliban in 2001, half target children of ages 7 to 15, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, August 6th, 2003, pages 650-653.
Girls and women are still raped as a weapon of war (see, for example, an October 7th, 2007 article in the New York Times entitled “Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War”).
In Sierra Leone, amputations of arms and legs were a common horrendous alternative to outright massacre. Children have been coerced or lured into armed conflicts in more than 30 countries in recent years, according to the UNICEF website (see, additionally, a Washington Post article from June 22, 2004, entitled “The Other War” which stated that children counted among the “more than 10,000 people who had been murdered, raped, abducted or maimed by rebels in a campaign of calculated terror”).
Some 150 million children in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union suffered during the region’s precipitous decline in the early 1990s. Child mortality rates soared and diseases once conquered – diphtheria, polio, cholera, tuberculosis – returned.
Hurricane Mitch in 1998 killed thousands of children in floods and mudslides. It wiped out roads, farmlands, water and sanitary infrastructures, health and educational institutions and left families destitute and homeless in Central America. But the ruins it left were the result of generations of chronic poverty, civil strife and social exclusion in the region, as much as they were the effects of that particular storm, according to UNICEF. In Nicaragua, where three quarters of the people were already living in poverty and the nation was still healing from its earlier civil war, the rural poor were most affected. When the storm finally subsided, more than 100 health centers, as well as 512 schools and 17 per cent of all homes, had been partially or completely destroyed. Of the hardest hit, 45 per cent were children under the age of 14. An estimated 10 per cent of children in the most affected communities suffered serious emotional trauma.
Many of these youngsters saw family members being carried away and drowned by floodwaters or buried alive in landslides, while others were separated from their parents or made homeless.
Addressing their mental health needs became a priority for relief workers, who saw children traumatized by loss and languishing in refugee camps with no schooling and nothing to do. Like children affected by war, they experienced insomnia, nightmares, headaches, fear and dependent behavior. With food shortages and the stress of family separation, violence among families increased in the camps.
And so the story goes with more and more examples of the abject failure of capitalist society to meet the needs of millions of children around the globe.
While it is true that children in the northern hemisphere, such as in Europe, Canada or the United States fare much better than their counterparts on the planet’s southern hemisphere, that does not mean that the North American child is free from the effects of economic problems either.
According to a 1991 Illinois State Dept. of Children and Family Services “Opinion Paper” trend report, the status of American children was worse at that time than it had been at any time in the past 50 years.
The report stated that one in every five children in the United States lived in poverty. The incidence of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse had increased dramatically. Many children were physiologically and emotionally damaged or dying from the primary or secondary effects of alcohol and drugs. Nearly 10 million children were emotionally disturbed or mentally ill, with most lacking adequate treatment. One million teenagers had children. Life for minority children was getting worse. School-age children in general were not learning. Children were suffering from an informal policy of national neglect that will have devastating consequences in the years ahead. By the year 2050, the paper projected that a total of 146 million Americans will be in their prime years of productivity. If that number is reduced by millions of adults who are victims of today’s neglect, the number of nonproductive, functionally dependent Americans of all ages will exceed the number upon whom they will realistically be able to depend.
To remedy this situation, the report recommended that the United States adhere to a formal social and economic policy that every child be entitled to an opportunity to reach his or her full potential (that is exactly what socialists advocate too, but they have good data to back their hypothesis that this can not happen within the limitations imposed by a for-profit social system). If children are to be guaranteed opportunities for self-actualization then, the report cautioned, their physiological, social, security, and self-worth needs must be met.
It is easy to cut and paste statistics about the desperate and horrifying plight of children in both the developed and developing worlds. What is harder is for citizens of countries in the northern hemisphere, such as fellow Americans who think of themselves as liberal, progressive and tolerant, to think outside of the box. It is easy to assume that capitalism, which so bristles in each new commodity with modernity, is itself the harbinger of effective economic solutions to its problems. But that assumption is clearly incorrect.
It is also easy to equate the technological developments of capitalism, brought to you in the form of better, faster and shinier commodities, with economic reform that has paled in comparison with the development of computers, cell phones, surgical procedures, and the potential medical advances on the horizon owing to stem cell research.
That is what socialists are urging you to do, to bring social organization to a level of modernity consistent with this development – a world in which our astounding technological and organizational abilities may serve in the meeting of our needs. Socialists feel that capitalism, which reached its zenith as a promising young adolescent in the Victorian era and has been teetering clumsily about as an angry alcoholic adult ever since, is a form of social organization that has long outlived its usefulness which was to bring humans a revolution in science and a model of representative democracy in which leaders were to be elected to operate the market system as best as they could, even though it was a system intrinsically designed to make a minority of owners rich by fleecing the majority of non-owners of vast quantities of unpaid values produced by their labor. Socialists feel that the time has come for a new form of social organization that can improve vastly upon capitalism by gearing our technological systems to meeting human needs directly and freely, and by upgrading the organizational requirements of modern society from one presently based on leadership and bureaucracy (politicians, bosses, CEOs, generals, presidents, prime ministers, party secretaries and popes) to one based on more inclusive forms of democracy (a “real” democracy, if you will). It is a criminal contradiction that the world that brings millions of you your emails each morning still condemns millions of children that same morning to starvation, poverty and war instead of emails.
“Iran says Israeli threats are a ‘childish game’”
(1/22/2006, Washington Post)
The obvious solution is to place the production of social wealth into the democratic hands of the community. When that is done by the will of the majority, the production of wealth will have but one goal – not as today, to be sold for a profit – the realization of needs. All needs. The need to eat. The need to have a warm, safe, place to come home to each evening. The need for medical care provided by the best trained minds of our generation, and the need for other brilliant minds to spend their lives in crucial medical research, investing material resources to such a task at a level that would greatly dwarf present investment. The need to rest. The need to play. The need to work closer to home or in a different location on our planet each year, as desired. The need for improved mass transportation systems that would render private cars an almost redundant gadget, except in cases in which their use would still be necessary. The need to produce wealth in a manner that will not condemn future generations to a world of gasmasks and eroded nature. The need to safety from industrial accidents, wars, and psychopaths in charge of armies and governments who wield power over their subjects. In short, the need for decentralized power systems, for democracy, for organizational means that provide everyone with an ongoing, daily, voice, not just a vote every few years.
“The crown prosecutor in a
controversial gang-rape case
described the crime as
“childish experimentation”"
(12/11/2007, Daily Telegraph)
That is what it would mean to abolish the market system and replace it with an economic democracy of production to meet needs and free access to wealth. It would mean a world that values its children.
But children do not really matter enough deep down to most humans today. While they may superficially or even deeply care for their own offspring, they are not yet acting politically in a way that truly makes a difference for either their children or unknown faceless children in other places around the world who have it much worse. If they did, why would they subject their children to the same world that they must deal with each day – a world in which it is perfectly acceptable to be laid off, worked crazy hours, sold inferior adulterated foods, made to feel powerless as wars rage around the world, made to feel that decision-making should be left to wealthy politicians, spending half your life in a traffic jam, living in a natural world that daily gets denuded, watching documentaries on television about animals that will likely be extinct in five years, made to count the pennies, indeed made to feel it is their place to count the pennies in their pockets and the place of others to count the Porsches in their garage? It is the great 50,000,000 dollar question isn’t it? Why do so many people subject their children to that kind of a world?
“My son is no Nazi – he is a childish
sort” (9/18/2007, Haaretz.com)
It is hauntingly painful to watch children grow up nestled in a matrix of love, structure, care, play and intellectual stimulation, only to slowly realize as their minds mature to increasing sophistication that the world outside does not coincidence with what they anticipated as normality given their upbringing thus far. The thought invariably hits at some point from early adolescence to adulthood that they are alone in some terrible sense that can not be well articulated because its reality is so overwhelming, so unalterable, so cold.
How do children process the realization that other children actually starve somewhere else – did mother not just tell me to finish what was on my plate given the fact that others elsewhere would give their limbs for this food? How do children begin to realize the reality of war – while they play cowboys and Indians or pretend to be brave warriors fighting the “bad guys” – a theme that plays again and again in virtually all cartoons, movies and video games? Children personally unaffected by starvation, war or abuse are typically raised in homes bent upon principles in which sharing, playing and volunteering are central cultural values, despite the firm limits parents must place upon them in the interest of teaching them that choices have consequences.
Developmental psychology teaches us that cognitive complexity develops over time, so this awakening to the brutish reality of life in capitalism must be less a rude one as much as a slow mental adaptation, during which time earlier gentle assumptions modeled by family are murdered while newer more violent ones slowly march in and stand to attention.
“A man who stabbed a neighbor through the
heart with a steak knife after a “childish”
row in Aberdeen has been jailed for eight
years.” (11/15/2007, BBC News)
It is a theme that plays over in our popular culture that we must stop being children at some point in our individual development and seize our places in adulthood. While there is no questioning the higher-order sense of responsibility that comes with mature minds as our adaptive capacity becomes more complex, there is an undeniable message between the lines that harden into steadfast rules about our new lives. One of these is that we will not be loved in the way we were by parents.
Another is that the sense of safety we enjoyed as youngsters is gone forever, and that now we must keep a vigilant eye upon dangers from wherever they may spring – the streets, the unscrupulous employer, the stranger, the politician, the business out to scam you. These unspoken rules perhaps play some part in the desire to either block out the coldness of the present or return us momentarily to the warmth of the past in alcohol, drugs, extramarital affairs, addiction to consumption, overeating, which in turn may feed marital tensions, depression, anxiety, or readiness to sacrifice ourselves for love of country.
Whatever this subtle yet violent psychological process may be that we subject our children to, a hypothesis is entertained by this author that perhaps it underlies the bitterness of others, the skepticism about building a better world, the disbelief that they could live in a democratic leaderless society as active decision-making participants, the very myth of “human nature”? For to accept the possibility that they possess the power to literally create a warmer new world is also to allow in themselves the pain associated with the loss of their own, earlier, nature, the one for whom joy and care flowed like blood through their veins. It would mean to allow themselves a sense of freedom and joy again, the very possibility of which they have had to bury for years beneath a hardened external shell in order to cope with the harder realities of adulthood in the modern world of capitalism.
To build a world in which children come first is also to build a world in which humans may allow themselves their own “inner child,” to use a much abused term. It would mean for us to recognize our own vulnerability and to put our energy into working for ourselves to meet our needs given our democratic organizational as well as technological skills. It would mean lowering our narcissistic defense that insists that we are inviolable, and using our repressed vulnerability to notice that the prospects of further life on this planet are increasingly dwindling, that the mad quest for profits is making us all increasingly mad, and that our failure to look after our children, not only ours but children everywhere, may be a loss to our basic humanity too dreadful to contemplate as we look into a horizon of vacuous conspicuous consumption, automaton-like work and lifestyles, and profound feelings of failure both as individuals and as a species.
One of the most damning articles on how the market system itself has eroded the attachment and emotional needs of children was of all places found in the English newspaper The Guardian, by Martin Jacques (9/18/2004), called “The Death of Intimacy.” While not referring to specific psychological or sociological research, its discussion of specific themes certainly rang true in terms of our daily experience. For example, it accused the rampant individualism that is a central ideological tenet of capitalism to have reduced the importance humans have always placed on family, thus disintegrating our most basic human needs for intimacy upon which our well-being depends. The article damned the very notion of self – intricately bound up as it is with the market place (the self as a purchasing unit) – that has been used to justify selfishness in our daily lives and indeed to undermine the collective aspect of both being and indeed feeling human.
By the standards of consumer society, sex as an item of consumption has certainly attempted with increasing success but not altogether to replace the more elusive quality of love in our relationships. However, Jacques is rightly even more critical of the way the market system has weakened not only the intimate bond between parents, but also that between parents and children. To quote the most powerful and relevant paragraph as it applies to capitalism’s negative effects upon the emotional and attachment needs of children:
“Parents are now spending less time with their babies and toddlers. The effects are already evident in schools. In a study published by the government’s Basic Skills Agency last year, teachers claim that half of all children now start school unable to speak audibly and be understood by others, to respond to simple instructions, recognize their own names or even count to five. In order to attend to our own needs, our children are neglected, our time substituted by paying for that of others, videos and computer games deployed as a means of distraction. And the problem applies across the class spectrum. So-called “money-rich, time-scarce” professionals are one of the most culpable groups. Time is the most important gift a parent can give a child, and time is what we are less and less prepared to forgo.”
What kind of lessons do children learn growing up in a society based on production for profit? Certainly not the kinds we would like learn them to learn about what it means to be human, yet is it not a world that in its actions and not its words values greed, exploitation, overwork, authority, individualism, violence, consumption, and commodities, over intellectual as well as emotional intelligence, peace, nature, collectivity, creativity, sharing, safety and intimacy or attachment?
It is time for a revolution in priorities that will be carried out in part by parents demanding more for their children. Count me in.
I am beaten
I am worn
I am tired
I am torn
I am a child like everyone else
I am not different
I am just a kid
that is sick of the world
I don’t care what they say anymore
I am a child
And so were you
don’t deny it
Just say it too
How did they treat you?
Like a rag
Like a bag
Or like a prince with a crown?
Aliza, 13
dr. who (2008)
Related posts:
