Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now is over $800 billion dollars a year... if we judge the United States of America by that... Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. --Senator Robert F. Kennedy
What do we stand for as a
nation and who do we wish to be?
In a 1968 speech at the
University of Kansas, Senator
Robert Kennedy correctly worried
too many used our nation’s
wealth as the standard of
greatness rather than the human
values that should matter most.
Our Gross Domestic Product — now
$17.7 trillion — includes many
things for us not to be
proud of. So we should ask
ourselves how well America is
doing on the things that should
matter most—the well-being of
our children and families and
the quality of justice and life
in our communities and nation?
Among high-income
countries the United States
ranks first in Gross Domestic
Product and first in the number
of billionaires, and second
worst in child poverty rates –
ahead only of Romania whose
economy is 99 percent smaller
than ours. It is a national
disgrace that children are the
poorest group of Americans with
14.7 million living in poverty.
We are first in
military spending — $11.1
billion a week — and first in
military weapons exports.
We are first in
the number of people
incarcerated and worst in
protecting our children against
gun violence. A Black boy born
in 2001 has a one in three
chance of going to prison in his
lifetime and a Latino boy a one
in six chance of the same fate.
Children and teens in America
were 17 times more likely to be
killed by gun violence than
those in 25 other high-income
countries combined.
We are 30th
in preschool enrollment rates
and 17th in reading,
23rd in science, and
31st in math scores
for our 15-year-olds. Nearly 60
percent of all fourth and eighth
grade public school students in
the U.S. and more than 80
percent of Black and almost 75
percent of Latino children in
those same grades could not read
or compute at grade level in
2013.
We rank first in
health expenditures but 25th
in low birth weight rates, 26th
in child immunization rates, 31st
in infant mortality rates, and
second worst in teenage births –
just ahead of Bulgaria.
If we compare
Black child well-being in
America to child well-being in
other nations, the U.S. Black
infant mortality rate exceeds
that in 65 nations including
Cuba, Malaysia, and Ukraine. Our
incidence of low-birth weight
Black infants is higher than in
127 other nations including
Cambodia, the Congo, and
Guatemala.
The United
Nations Convention on the Rights
of the Child
spells out the basic rights
children should have everywhere
and is the most widely and
rapidly ratified international
human rights treaty in history.
For years the United States and
Somalia, which had no recognized
government, were the only United
Nations members that had failed
to ratify the convention. In
January 2015 Somalia became the
195th nation to do
so. The United States now stands
only with new U.N. member state
South Sudan as the two countries
that have not ratified it — and
South Sudan has started working
towards ratification.
The United States
stands alone, despite recent
progress, in still permitting
life-without-parole sentences
for juvenile offenders who were
under 18 at the time of the
offense. The U.S. Supreme Court
has banned capital punishment
for crimes committed by
juveniles but America remains
one of 58 nations that continues
to use capital punishment for
adults. In 2013 the U.S. had the
sixth highest number of
executions — after China, Iran,
Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and North
Korea.
If America wants
to be a truly great nation on
the world stage, it’s time to
redefine the measures of our
success. The litmus test I
propose is that of the great
German Protestant theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
executed for opposing Hitler’s
holocaust, who said “the test of
the morality of a society is
what it does for its children.”
The great South African
president
Nelson Mandela agreed with
him and believed “there can be
no keener revelation of a
society’s soul than the way in
which it treats its children.”
On the Bonhoeffer-Mandela
measure of success,
we must do much,
much better.
Marian Wright Edelman is the president of the Children's Defense Fund.
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OneLove
:::MME::
