It's time for MEDICARE FOR ALL!

An Open Letter to the United States Senate

I learned my first lessons about injustice and health as a little Black girl growing up in segregated Bennettsville, South Carolina. I remember my parents’ and my sadness over the senseless death of little Johnny Harrington, who lived three houses down from our church who died before he reached 10 because his hard working grandmother didn’t know about the need for or have the money for him to get a tetanus shot after he stepped on a rusted nail. I also remember being awakened in the middle of the night after a Black migrant family’s car collided with a White truck driver’s vehicle on the highway in front of our parsonage, and the horror I felt when my Daddy, my siblings and I witnessed the White ambulance driver and attendants arrive on the scene only to leave behind the seriously injured Black migrant worker after they saw that the White truck’s passengers were not hurt. And I remember the loss of a playmate who lived around the corner who died from a broken neck after jumping off the bridge at Crooked Creek nearby where many Black children swam and many Black families fished for food. When I got older, I learned the creek was an outlet for hospital and other sewage.

The sorrow and outrage and sense of injustice I felt as a child at senseless deaths and injuries shaped my life’s work. I cannot stand seeing any child mistreated, placed at risk or excluded from essential services because of the color of their skin or the poverty of their parents or grandparents they did not choose. God did not make two classes of children and my Biblical values and my parents’ efforts to live up to its teachings enjoined me to believe each child is sacred. During the Civil Rights Movement it was always clear that health care was one of the basic rights for which we were fighting because it could mean life or death. As my friend and mentor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman.” I would never have believed that decades later Dr. King’s words would still ring true and that after fifty years of hard-earned progress expanding access to health coverage for 95 percent of all children, it could all be ripped away in a heartless game of politics and greed that disregards human life — even the smallest human life. In the wealthiest nation on earth, the fact that we are still unwilling to treat health care as a right available to all regardless of color, income or creed is a disgrace. That child lives are considered political fodder rather than a sacred responsibility by every adult is unjust and shameful.

You, the ever powerful United States Senate, will soon have a choice to make when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell brings the deeply harmful, flawed, unpopular and misnamed Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) — it should be called the Worse Care Reconciliation Act — to the Senate floor for a vote. This draconian bill will unravel decades of progress fighting for more health equity and justice for all. I hope every voter will stand up for children, the disabled, the elderly, and the most vulnerable among us and make sure those who vote against them are held accountable.

At a time when 95 percent of children in America have health coverage after years of laboriously achieved incremental progress with bipartisan leadership and the percentage of uninsured Americans is at a record low, will you vote for renewed pain and suffering or forward progress? Will you vote to end Medicaid as we know it — a lifeline for more than 37 million children and more than 40 percent of children with special health care needs — to pay for a giant tax cut for wealthy Americans and corporations who don’t need or deserve it? Will you vote to rip away health coverage from 22 million Americans and leave millions more paying a lot more for skimpier coverage?  Will you vote to undermine coverage for essential services for children and other Americans including those with pre-existing conditions? Will you vote to strip important and popular protections, returning us to a day when discrimination based on age, gender, health status and ability to pay is permitted? Will you vote to deprive millions of Americans mental health and substance abuse treatment in the midst of a national opioid crisis?

You may be wooed with “fixes” being negotiated behind the scenes that tinker around the edges of the cruel, unjust Better Care Reconciliation Act, but make no mistake: it is irreparably flawed and no altering of growth rates and caps, taxes, or creating special “funds” or “risk pools” will fix it. It deserves a swift and decisive death in the Senate if we are to keep any semblance of an American sense of fairness and moral decency alive.

I have just returned from two days in the Mississippi Delta which Senators Robert Kennedy, Joseph Clark and George Murphy visited 50 years ago where they saw children with listless eyes and bloated bellies from lack of food and health care. Mississippi is one of 19 states that turned down Medicaid expansion money their people need. Health injustice still disproportionately affects people of color but those who will suffer come from every race in every state.

Would you vote to deprive your own children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews of basic life supports? I suspect not. Denying children essential health care makes no moral or economic sense. Healthy children and adults make America stronger and safer. So at this critical moment in our nation’s history, I hope you will stand up for children, the disabled, and the elderly left behind in multiple ways by the politics of greed and self-interest. Please vote NO on the misnamed Better Care Reconciliation Act — a mean-spirited, draconian, un-American step backward that would leave preventable suffering among millions in its wake.

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Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind^® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org. 

Mrs. Edelman's Child Watch Column also appears each week on The Huffington Post and Mom's Rising.

Children's Defense Fund: Redlined for Failure and the Prison Pipeline

Redlined for Failure and the Prison Pipeline

Ndume Olatushani is an artist, organizer, and a passionate advocate for justice who works with the Children’s Defense Fund’s Nashville organizing team. He helps us fight to keep children and people of color, especially Black boys, out of the Cradle to Prison Pipeline™ and mass incarceration system which will trap 1 in 3 Black boys born in 2001 sometime during their lifetime. He also combats zero tolerance school discipline policies that push Black children, especially Black boys, out of school and criminalize children of color. I met Ndume soon after he was freed as an inmate wrongly convicted of murder who served almost 28 years in prison, 20 on death row, before his release June 1, 2012. He’s a gentle, forgiving man. Long before that, Ndume was a small Black boy trying—and failing—to survive the violence, poverty, and low expectations that surrounded him.

Not long after his release from prison, he wrote his story:  

“My name is Ndume Olatushani. I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. I currently reside in the Nashville, Tennessee area. I spent my early years in the notorious Pruitt- Igoe Projects where the best and worst of human behavior were always on display. Because the Pruitt-Igoe Projects had become so lawless they were the first to be torn down by the federal government in the 1970's.

“At a young age I was exposed to all kind of things that no child should ever be exposed to. At the age of five I witnessed my first murder, which was of a young black man. At the time, I did not realize how this tragic event would help shape me but, like any child exposed to violence over a sustained period of time, I gradually became desensitized to violence. In some ways I became the people who stood around at the site of the playground murder, laughing and joking, as the young man took his last breaths.

“Though I officially dropped out of school in the eleventh grade, I had checked out of school mentally years earlier. In the newly integrated schools I attended, I experienced hostility from my white peers and discouragement from my teachers. My fourth grade teacher who was white asked my class what we wanted to be when we grew up. When I told her I wanted to be a veterinarian, her response was that I should instead aspire to do something with my hands, like construction.

“Years later, when I was sitting in a prison cell assessing my life, I understood the significance of her statement. As a child I did not understand the effect her statement had on me psychologically, and I did not understand the pathology of racism. Of course I do not lay the misguided decisions I made on her doorstep, but she was a part of the thread that weaved the quilt of my life. It was her and so many small but significant events that I was exposed to as a child that contributed to the trajectory of my life's decisions.

“As a young man, I began making some bad decisions that landed me in jail and prison on a range of felony charges. I have seen the inside of jails and prisons in four states. While I was making the decisions that landed me in all those jail and prison cells, I had no idea that the criminal record I was developing would lead to me being falsely accused and wrongly convicted of a robbery murder. I was 26 years old when, in 1985, I was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death for a murder  that took place in Memphis, Tennessee, a state  I  had never even stepped foot in before standing trial there.

“It took 28 years — 20 of which I spent on death row—for me to finally prove that I was innocent. In December of 2011, a court overturned my conviction in the face of overwhelming proof that the prosecutors in my case had buried a mountain of evidence demonstrating my innocence. The bulk of the buried evidence showed that an entirely different group of suspects were the real perpetrators of the crime…

“I was red-lined for failure, although I do not absolve myself from the decisions that I made that helped make it possible. But those decisions were not without some guidance and direction from a system [whose] only use for some people is for them to be sitting in a jail or prison cell. We have to ensure that we are fully aware of this system and we have to continue to work hard at disrupting and dismantling this system to save our children.

“I feel strongly about not forgetting all the men I left behind in prison. I am deeply committed to working for criminal justice reform. The work [I and my coworkers are] doing to challenge polices resulting in the mass incarceration of people of color and especially the zero tolerance policies leading to the criminalization of our children is incredibly important to me and it should be to all of us. I witnessed what the policies of mass incarceration have done to generations and we don’t have to wonder about its effects on our future.”

Ndume taught himself to become a fine artist in prison and has not a bitter or mean bone in his body. He works tirelessly today with poor children, especially boys of color living in Nashville housing projects, encouraging alternatives to the street through art.

Ndume’s art along with his mentees’ creations grace our offices in Washington, D.C. and Tennessee to remind us of the gifts children have if we enable them to come forth and blossom and not discourage them. Every parent and educator ought to be very mindful about the power their words and attitudes convey to the children we raise and teach. They will live up or down to our expectations. Let’s make sure we lift them all up and give them something to strive toward.

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Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org. 

Mrs. Edelman's Child Watch Column also appears each week on The Huffington Post.

Children in the Desert

Children in the Desert

By Marian Wright Edelman

Bishop Minerva Carcaño, the Los Angeles Area Resident Bishop of the United Methodist Church, is acting with urgency. Along with more than 100 other religious leaders and activists, she was arrested for civil disobedience at the White House for protesting the deportation of the unaccompanied children crossing our border after fleeing from the brutal violence and poverty of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. A few days earlier she visited Port Hueneme Naval Base in Oxnard, California for the second time and met some of the hundreds of migrant children temporarily housed there. Joining her this time were Bishop J. Jon Bruno of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, Dr. Robert Ross of the California Endowment, and Fred Ali of the Weingart Foundation.

About her first visit to Port Hueneme she said, “The naval base has been turned into a holding site for these children, and it was to capacity with 575 children and young people between the ages of 13 and 17, and they’ve all been through horrific experiences. Many of the girls have experienced sexual assaults, and some of them have been raped . . . If you ask them what the prayer in their heart is, they’ll tell you immediately, with a sense of faith, that indeed it’s going to happen—and their prayer is that God will give them life.”

Bishop Carcaño spoke to a rapt congregation at the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF)’s Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry at CDF Haley Farm in mid-July about the humanitarian crisis of thousands of desperate children crossing our border. The details are haunting: An unaccompanied toddler being cared for by little girls sitting in a locked cell for 12 days. A grandmother with three little granddaughters who a gang had threatened to take if she didn’t pay over $20,000. These are stories from one point of the border at McAllen, Texas—just a few of the tens of thousands of children who have crossed the desert in this current migration wave, including nearly 60,000 unaccompanied children traveling alone.

These children are in many ways the latest innocent victims of the U.S. war on drugs. Even as the U.S. worked with Mexico and Colombia to close down the drug cartels and gangs there, the massive market for illegal drugs here in our nation has remained. To feed our illegal drug habit, the drug lords and vicious gangs have moved operations and created unprecedented levels of violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Now these essentially lawless countries have become some of the most dangerous places on the planet.

My friend Kent Wong, the director of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Labor Center, recently returned from Honduras and wrote: “I had a series of meetings with courageous union, community, and women leaders who are organizing in the face of tremendous obstacles. We met in San Pedro Sula, the murder capital of the world. Many of the leaders we met with have had family members and friends who have been killed. The northward migration to flee the violence and extreme poverty is an act of desperation. Deportations are not the answer.”

Part of the solution may rest with the faith community here and abroad. I am encouraged to see the coming together of many faiths in McAllen, Texas to respond to the crisis in their city. But this crisis needs a compassionate response from every city and our entire nation. I shudder when I see the angry outbursts about these helpless children coming from some communities.

The best solution, as always for children, is to reunite them with their families whenever and as soon as possible. Of the nearly 60,000 unaccompanied children who have crossed the border since October, it is reported that nearly 50,000 of them have been released to sponsors or family members, sometimes even to a parent already living in the U.S. The continuing horror is for those children being kept in detention like those Bishop Carcaño keeps visiting.

In her July Haley Farm sermon, Bishop Carcaño said: “If our children see us ignoring the plight of the immigrant child, what do we teach them? Do we not teach them that immigrant children are worthless, not worth our attention or our care? And what do we teach the immigrant children if they never see anyone extend a hand, a caring hand to them? Do we not confirm that lesson of worthlessness, and do we not teach them that the world is indeed cruel and unjust? And will either lesson bring them and us any justice, any equity, any peace, any joy?”

Bishop Carcaño’s words are a reminder that those of us who follow Jesus’ teachings and the call in every major faith tradition to care for children must act on our faith. We must see these thousands of children in need of help right now not as a political dilemma but as an urgent humanitarian crisis. As Bishop Carcaño says: “We must be the strongest witness for justice in God’s reign that we can muster, a witness for the children . . . not just for some children, but for all of God’s children.” As such witnesses, we must help ensure sufficient resources are provided by the government and faith and other community organizations so these vulnerable children will be treated humanely, find safe families and warm food to eat, and receive the counsel and due process hearings guaranteed them in law before any are returned to their dangerous homelands and possible deaths. It is deplorable that Members of Congress left town for their own summer vacations with the humanitarian crisis continuing and without providing the resources the government needs to ensure safety and justice for these innocent children.

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Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind^® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.

Mrs. Edelman's Child Watch Column also appears each week on The Huffington Post.

Denying Americans Food

Preventable Hunger in Our Land of Plenty

While many American families gather around the Thanksgiving table this week, some of us combining this year’s traditional dinners with Hanukkah feasts, a too quiet group will be left out of the national celebration. The nearly 49 million Americans—including nearly 16 million children—living in food insecure households will be struggling to afford the food they need. These families won’t be choosing between apple or pumpkin pie this holiday season but will face choices about paying for groceries or rent, heat, electricity, medicine or clothing for their children as they do each month—choices no family should have to make in our nation with the largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the world. Congress will be choosing how many of these desperate families and children in need to cut from life-giving and life-sustaining federal nutrition programs. In the middle of this season of gratitude for plenty, Congress has put the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, often called food stamps) on the chopping block while leaving largely intact subsidies for rich farmers and even some non-farmers.

With the decision deadline just weeks away Congress is working to bridge the gap between two dramatically different Farm Bill proposals which both include unjust funding cuts for SNAP. The Senate Bill cuts $4 billion from SNAP over 10 years while the House bill slashes more than $40 billion—denying food to as many as six million people, including children, seniors, and veterans. The House proposal would also drop 210,000 children from school meals and cost our economy 55,000 jobs in the first year alone.

Any agreed upon Farm Bill cuts to the already meager SNAP food benefits will come on top of the $11 billion cut over the next three years that already began on November 1st and affected every single SNAP recipient. This recent cut was equivalent to a week’s worth of meals for a nine-year-old. SNAP benefits now average a mere $1.40 per person per meal. Imagine preparing your family Thanksgiving meal on that budget.

SNAP lifted 2.2 million children out of poverty in 2012 and provided benefits to over 46 million Americans on average every month, including more than 22 million, or more than one in four, children. SNAP was a life saver for millions of families in need during the recent recession and still sluggish recovery. Nearly three-quarters of SNAP households are families with children. Any additional cuts will take desperately needed food away from many vulnerable children and adults.

At a time when child poverty remains at a record high, and when three-quarters of our nation’s teachers report students who routinely show up to school hungry and half report hunger to be a serious problem in their classrooms, what kind of political leaders could for one minute consider cutting children’s food assistance while protecting subsidies for rich farmers?

Hunger and malnutrition have devastating consequences for children and have been linked to low birth weight and birth defects, obesity, mental and physical health problems, and poorer educational outcomes. SNAP cushions these threats and yields a strong return on investment. Children who benefit from SNAP are less likely to be in poor health, experience fewer hospitalizations, and are less likely to have developmental and growth delays than those with similar incomes denied the program. A recent study found that needy children who received food assistance before age five were in better health as adults. Specifically, the girls studied were more likely to complete more schooling, earn more money, and not rely on safety net programs as adults.

Adults who care and have common and economic sense would strengthen and not cut this critical lifeline for children. During this Thanksgiving week, those of us blessed with enough or too much food can show our gratitude for living in a wealthy country where we can take action and urge our political leaders to put hungry children before rich farmers. And as millions of us sit down to a Thanksgiving dinner let us offer a simple Thanksgiving grace:

God, we thank You for this food

for the hands that planted it

for the hands that tended it

for the hands that harvested it

for the hands that prepared it

for the hands that provided it

and for the hands that served it.

And we pray for those without enough food

in Your world and in our land of plenty.

 

 

Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind^® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.

 

 

Dear God! When Will It Stop?

From Marian Wright Edelman's Child Watch Column for Children's Defense Fund --

Dear God! When Will It Stop?

The horrendous news from Newtown, Connecticut has pierced our hearts. A black-clad man in his 20s armed with two semi-automatic handguns entered the Sandy Hook Elementary School and made an elementary school for kindergartners through fourth graders the scene of the worst mass shooting in a public school in American history. Twenty children were shot and killed. Seven adults were shot and killed. We don’t yet know how many were wounded. We do know dozens of parents are experiencing the worst nightmare any parent could imagine. We do know more than 500 young children in the school are traumatized.   Once again we are faced with unspeakable horror from gun violence and once again we are reminded that there is no safe harbor for our children. How young do the victims have to be and how many children need to die before we stop the proliferation of guns in our nation and the killing of innocents? The most recent statistics reveal 2,694 children and teens were killed by gunfire in 2010; 1,773 of them were victims of homicide and 67 of these were elementary school-age children. If those children and teens were still alive they would fill 108 classrooms of 25 each. Since 1979 when gun death data were first collected by age, a shocking 119,079 children and teens have been killed by gun violence. That is more child and youth deaths in America than American battle deaths in World War I (53,402) or in Vietnam (47,434) or in the Korean War (33,739) or in the Iraq War (3,517). Where is our anti-war movement to protect children from pervasive gun violence here at home?   This slaughter of innocents happens because we protect guns, before children and other human beings. Our hearts and prayers go out to the parents and teachers and children and the entire Newtown community that has been ripped apart by each bullet shot this morning. We know from past school shootings and the relentless killing of children every day that Newtown families and the community will never be the same. The Newtown families who lost children today will never be the same. The families of the teachers who were killed will never be the same. Every child at the Sandy Hook Elementary School this morning will never be the same.   Each and all of us must do more to stop this intolerable and wanton epidemic of gun violence and demand that our political leaders do more. We can’t just talk about it after every mass shooting and then do nothing until the next mass shooting when we profess shock and talk about it again. The latest terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is no fluke. It is a result of the senseless, immoral neglect of all of us as a nation to protect children instead of guns and to speak out against the pervasive culture of violence and proliferation of guns in our nation. It is up to us to stop these preventable tragedies.   We have so much work to do to build safe communities for our children and need leaders at all levels of government who will stand up against the NRA and for every child’s right to live and learn free of gun violence. But that will not happen until mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and neighbors and faith leaders and everybody who believes that children have a right to grow up safely stand up together and make a mighty ruckus as long as necessary to break the gun lobby’s veto on common sense gun policy. Our laws and not the NRA must control who can obtain firearms. It is way past time to demand enactment of federal gun safety measures, including: Ending the gun show loophole that allows private dealers to sell guns without a license and avoid required background checks; Reinstating the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004; And requiring consumer safety standards for all guns. Why in the world do we regulate teddy bears and toy guns and not real guns that have snuffed out tens of thousands of child lives? Why are leaders capitulating to the powerful gun lobby over the rights of children and all people to life and safety?   I hope these shocking Connecticut child sacrifices in this holy season will force enough of us at last to stand up, speak out, and organize with urgency and persistence until the President, Members of Congress, Governors and State Legislators put child safety ahead of political expediency. And we must aspire and act together to become the world leader in protecting children against gun violence rather than leading the world in child victims of guns. Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect all our children.   Albert Camus, Nobel Laureate, speaking at a Dominican monastery in 1948 said: “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.” He described our responsibility as human beings “if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it” and “to refuse to consent to conditions which torture innocents.” It is time for a critical mass of Americans to refuse to consent to the killing of children by gun violence.   http://cdf.childrensdefense.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=30521.0&dlv_id=28981

In the words of Marian Wright Edelman....

Marian Wright Edelman is a blessing!

From: Keith Olbermann Fan Page shared Rude and Rotten Republicans's photo.

Rude is an understatement....