[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 7 (Monday, January 22, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S281-S282]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        SPARE US THE CHEAP GRACE

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, one of the people who has been most 
effective in prodding our conscience is Jonathan Kozol, author of 
several books, including an important one on literacy, another on the 
sad plight of our schools, and more recently, ``Amazing Grace: The 
Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.''
  Unfortunately, as we balance the budget--which we should have done 
long ago--we are horribly distorting the priorities this Nation should 
have. The use of the word ``horribly'' may seem out of place, but for 
many of the poor, our budget will result in horrors.
  To say we want to balance the budget, then start with a $245 billion 
tax cut is like adopting a New Year's resolution to diet, then having a 
huge dessert.
  Compounding that is the fact that the tax cut is largely for those of 
us who are more fortunate, while those who will suffer will be the 
neediest in our society.
  Time magazine recently had an essay by Jonathan Kozol titled ``Spare 
Us the Cheap Grace,'' which I ask to be printed in the Record after my 
remarks.
  Among other things, Jonathan Kozol says, ``What does it mean when 
those whom we elect to public office cut back elemental services of 
life protection for poor children and then show up at the victim's 
funeral to pay condolence to the relatives and friends? At what point 
do those of us who have the power to prevent these deaths forfeit the 
entitlement of mourners?'' The piece follows:

                  [From Time magazine, Dec. 11, 1995]

                        Spare Us the Cheap Grace

                          (By Jonathan Kozol)

       It is hard to say what was more shocking about the death of 
     Elisa Izquierdo--the endless savagery inflicted on her body 
     and mind, or the stubborn inaction of the New York City 
     agencies that were repeatedly informed of her peril. But 
     while the murder of Elisa by her mother is appalling, it is 
     hardly unexpected. In the death zones of America's postmodern 
     ghetto, stripped of jobs and human services and sanitation, 
     plagued by AIDS, tuberculosis, pediatric asthma and endemic 
     clinical depression, largely abandoned by American physicians 
     and devoid of the psychiatric services familiar in most 
     middle-class communities, deaths like these are part of a 
     predictable scenario.
       After the headlines of recrimination and pretended shock 
     wear off, we go back to our ordinary lives. Before long, we 
     forget the victims' names. They weren't our children or the 
     children of our neighbors. We do not need to mourn them for 
     too long. But do we have the right to mourn at all? What does 
     it mean when those whom we elect to public office cut back 
     elemental services of life protection for poor children and 
     then show up at the victim's funeral to pay condolence to the 
     relatives and friends? At what point do those of us who have 
     the power to prevent these deaths forfeit the entitlement of 
     mourners?
       It is not as if we do not know what might have saved some 
     of these children's lives. We know that intervention programs 
     work when well-trained social workers have a lot of time to 
     dedicate to each and every child. We know that crisis hot 
     lines work best when half of their employees do not burn out 
     and quit each year, and that social workers do a better job 
     when records are computerized instead of being piled up, lost 
     and forgotten on the floor of a back room. We know that when 
     a drug-addicted mother asks for help, as many mothers do, it 
     is essential to provide the help she needs without delay, not 
     after a waiting period of six months to a year, as is common 
     in poor urban neighborhoods.
       All these remedies are expensive, and we would demand them 
     if our own children's lives were at stake. And yet we don't 
     demand them for poor children. We wring our hands about the 
     tabloid stories. We castigate the mother. We condemn the 
     social worker. We churn out the familiar criticisms of 
     ``bureaucracy'' but do not volunteer to use our cleverness to 
     change it. Then the next time an election comes, we vote 
     against the taxes that might make prevention programs 
     possible, while favoring increased expenditures for prisons 
     to incarcerate the children who survive the worst that we 
     have done to them and grow up to be dangerous adults.
       What makes this moral contradiction possible?
       Can it be, despite our frequent protestations to the 
     contrary, that our society does not particularly value the 
     essential human worth of certain groups of children? 
     Virtually all the victims we are speaking of are very poor 
     black and Hispanic children. We have been told that our 
     economy no longer has much need for people of their caste and 
     color. Best-selling authors have, in recent years, assured us 
     of their limited intelligence and low degree of 
     ``civilizational development.'' As a woman in Arizona said in 
     regard to immigrant kids from Mexico, ``I didn't breed them. 
     I don't want to feed them''--a sentiment also heard in 
     reference to black children on talk-radio stations in New 
     York and other cities. ``Put them over there,'' a black 
     teenager told me once, speaking of the way he felt that he 
     and other blacks were viewed by our society. ``Pack them 
     tight. Don't think about them. Keep your hands clean. Maybe 
     they'll kill each other off.''
       I do not know how many people in our nation would confess 
     such contemplations, which offend the elemental mandates of 
     our cultural beliefs and our religions. No matter how 
     severely some among us may condemn the parents of the poor, 
     it has been an axiom of faith in the U.S. that once a child 
     is born, all condemnations are to be set aside. If we now 
     have chosen to betray this faith, what consequences will this 
     have for our collective spirit, for our soul as a society?
       There is an agreeable illusion, evidenced in much of the 
     commentary about Elisa, that those of us who witness the 
     abuse of innocence--so long as we are standing at a certain 
     distance--need not feel complicit in these tragedies. But 
     this is the kind of ethical exemption that Dietrich 
     Bonhoeffer called ``cheap grace.'' Knowledge carries with it 
     certain theological imperatives. The more we know, the harder 
     it becomes to grant ourselves exemption. ``Evil exists,'' a 
     student in the South Bronx told me in the course of a long 
     conversation about ethics and religion in the fall of 1993. 
     ``Somebody has power. Pretending that they don't so they 
     don't need to use it to help people--that is my idea of 
     evil.''
     
[[Page S282]]

       Like most Americans, I do not tend to think of a society 
     that has been good to me and to my parents as ``evil.'' But 
     when he said that ``somebody has power,'' it was difficult to 
     disagree. It is possible that icy equanimity and self-
     pacifying form of moral abdication by the powerful will take 
     more lives in the long run than any single drug-addicted and 
     disordered parent. Elisa Izquierdo's mother killed only one 
     child. The seemingly anesthetized behavior of the U.S. 
     Congress may kill thousands. Now we are told we must ``get 
     tougher'' with the poor. How much tougher can we get with 
     children who already have so little? How cold is America 
     prepared to be?

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