Summer 1999
The World's Greatest Power
A recent study, "There's No Place Like Home: How America's Housing Crisis Threatens Our Children," finds that hundreds of thousands of children living in the world's most powerful country have suffered from disease, malnutrition, serious injury, and educational failure due to substandard housing. If we could get TV cameras to document the conditions of the 20% of American children who live in poverty, we would undoubtedly find a tragedy as heartbreaking as the nightly news broadcasts of Kosovar refugees.
The connection between housing and health should come as no surprise, but what's incomprehensible is our society's acceptance of this condition for our own children. It's easier to approve billions for bombs to save homes for Kosovars, than to spend far less to house the one million American families now on waiting lists for public housing. While Congressmen give the Pentagon more funds than requested, they turn empty pockets toward children without Head Start, day care, health insurance, proper nutrition, adequate education, and a safe, non-toxic environment - all programs proven to save lives. While we have no qualms about doing "whatever it takes" to defeat Milosevic, we have never forged the resolve to spend what it takes to defend helpless American children from the evils of poverty which have maimed & destroyed countless innocent lives.
Our political system is so polarized that we forget it was a Republican President and military leader, Dwight Eisenhower, who said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists and the hopes of its children."
It’s no coincidence that the world's greatest military power is also the most violent society, nor that when our leaders resolve conflicts by military force, our children use violence in the streets and classrooms. If our country would change our priorities to spend more on healing than on killing, we would begin to teach the world's children what they need to know to create a future of peace - that love is the greatest power and the only force capable of defeating hate.
