Charles Dickens, as most of us have read, went to work in a boot-black factory at the age of twelve to help with his family’s expenses after his father, John Dickens, had been sentenced to debtor’s prison. The factory, not surprisingly, was in a sagging, tumbledown old house infested with rats. He was there for about a year, and hated it. The experience and its setting remained in his memory for the rest of his life. He was known no more for his novels than for his championship of programs to help the poor, the homeless, and the hungry.
In his celebrated story “A Christmas Carol,” Ebenezer Scrooge is visited in succession by three spirits, each of whom shows him a different facet of English life. Traveling with the warm-robed Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge notices what appear to be claws protruding from the folds of the Ghost’s robe. Naturally, he remarks and asks about them. The ghost reveals two starving, hollow-eyed children.
“Spirit! Are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it! … Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And hide the end!”
Many of us so-called grown-ups fail to appreciate that the children we see about us every day will in a few short years be grown-ups, as well driving, marrying, bearing and rearing children, voting. Further, that what they will become depends to a large extent upon how we treat them as children. Not for nothing did Dickens identify ignorance and want as factors in the doom of society.
At the moment the United States is in the middle of a crisis caused not by external agents, but by its own ignorance. Its president is on a tear, not just pushing the envelope of illegality, but tearing it wide open. The odd and infuriating catatonia of Congress is completely responsible. Amid the billion-dollar-a-day “war” in Iran, the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela, the promise to “take care” of Cuba next, and the continuing efforts to make inroads on Greenland’s sovereignty, we have a huge gold statue of the president (shades of Saddam Hussein) waving a welcome to one of his golf courses, a wing of the White House precipitately destroyed preparatory to building a ballroom with a bunker, the Reflecting Pool drained and painted blue at an expense many times the estimate, and a gigantic triumphal arch planned for near the Lincoln Memorial (you have only to stand before the statue of the seated Lincoln and read his words inscribed on the marble walls to get some appreciation of how far we’ve fallen). The old expression, “pissant,” comes to mind.
Meanwhile, foreign aid programs that for decades projected not only American soft power, but saved hundreds of thousands of lives, have been curtailed or discontinued. USAID, for example, one of our most powerful programs of foreign aid, is gone (the Chinese are cheerfully taking up the slack). The national parks, which return about ten times every dollar budgeted, have had their staffs chopped down; hoodlumism and vandalism are making them less beautiful and less safe. Cuts to subsidies for food, as well as school lunches, have been axed by men and women who dine regularly. The list of budget cuts goes on and on; but the reason given for all of them is different principles or (almost always) shortage of money.
That dissonance is so jarring – a Department of Defense budget request actually reaching one trillion dollars – it’s amazing that a grown-up clad in a dark suit and proper tie can say any of this with a straight face. Yet they do. And the silence from Congress is deafening.
Woody Guthrie, in the midst of the Great Depression, looked at it and sang it for us:
As through this world you travel, you’ll meet many kinds of men. Some’ll rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen. Nowadays it’s most likely a Sharpie. But the result is the same: those emaciated children, deprived of the sustenance and education that is their right, will grow up. They’ll soon become whatever we’ve made of them. I hope the one pushing our wheelchairs and changing our diapers won’t hold our niggardliness against us.
