"America loves a child in the spotlight of tragedy and pain, but America doesn't really care for children as a whole." --Burt Harvey

ocieties may be judged by how they treat their children. As I see it, in a profound sense, the ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of a life it gives to its youngest members. After spending almost ten years in the United States of America, I have a pretty good idea by now of how children are treated here, in this society.

Many Americans, I know, still think of America as a child-centered nation. They like to boast that all children here are equally cherished, protected, nurtured, and offered a field of opportunity unmatched in the world... But the truth is that millions of poor kids are not doing well in this country today. There is no doubt that a child in America is now at much greater risk than a child elsewhere in the advanced industrial world. Compared with other industrialized countries, children in the United States are much more likely to die before their first birthday, to live in abject poverty, to be homeless and hungry, to be abandoned by their parents, and even to be killed at a very young age.

As the prominent American thinker Noam Chomsky points out, the purposeful, conscious social policy of this ultra-capitalist system has been to attack and destroy basic social values. However those who promote these policies may seek to disguise this reality from the American people, the truth is that, basically, the United States of America is waging a perpetually escalating war against its children and their families. As a result, there are extremely high rates of child poverty, child homelessness and child hunger in America today.

In the United States, poor kids now face risk and neglect on a scale unimagined in previous generations. Neglect of children has become so endemic to American society that childhood is now miserable for millions of children in this country. In the words of a National Commission on the Role of the School and the Community in Improving Adolescents Health, "Never before has one generation of American children been less healthy, less cared for, or less prepared for life than their parents at the same age."

And the most amazing thing about this society, as Chomsky notes, is that the evil forces who are carrying out this barbaric war against families and children in this country are able to say that they are -- "defending family values" -- and nobody here cracks up in ridicule. This is a really unique element of American culture. That takes a real totalitarian intellectual climate, as Chomsky says.

A couple of years ago, when a three-year-old boy fell into the gorilla enclosure at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, a female gorilla gently picked up the injured child and carried him to safety. Isn't it ironic that this animal instinctively recognized her responsibility to children, unlike those who rule and make social policies in American society, with all their so-called "conservative family values?" I am reminded of a joke that a true American conservative is someone who believes life begins at conception and ends at birth. "Being poor doesn't hurt a child," said one of them, Robert Rector, a senior social policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing conservative think-tank in Washington, DC.

While I have attempted to base my criticism of America on objective factors, the well being of children remains a very special subject to me. Since our daughter was born here in America, we have directly faced the war against children. We encountered it almost immediately. When we took our baby girl to St.Vincent Hospital in Manhattan for her first medical checkup two weeks after she was born, the doctor there refused to see her with the excuse that her mother's health insurance didn't cover a newborn baby. A two-week-old child was simply denied basic medical help for financial reasons! It was really something that we, having lived in the former Soviet Union, couldn't even imagine. Indeed, it was our first serious encounter with the capitalist interpretation of family values, and with the resultant attitude towards children. That incident was probably the turning point which opened my eyes to the vileness of this barbaric system.

Allow me to throw out some introductory statistics, the kind you don't always find on the business pages of your average mainstream American newspaper. Read these figures, and you will start to realize what is going on in this country. Think about these telling numbers which reveal the truth of how America is treating its children. According to the Children's Defense Fund, every day in America six children commit suicide, thirteen children are homicide victims, fourteen children are killed by firearms, eighty-one babies die, 280 children are arrested for violent crimes, 443 babies are born to mothers who had late or no prenatal care, 781 babies are born at low birthweight, 1,403 babies are born to teen mothers, 1,827 babies are born without health insurance, 2,430 babies are born into poverty, 2,756 children drop out of high school every school day, 3,436 babies are born to unmarried mothers, 5,753 children are arrested, 8,470 children are reported abused or neglected, 11.3 million children are without health insurance and 14.5 million children live in poverty. ...

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