Much of America’s social and moral decay can be laid at the feet of rampant capitalistic forces, over-the-top defense spending and conservative public policy, according to Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) director and welfare state activist Marion Wright Edelman, speaking in September at United Methodism’s Lake Junaluska Conference Center in North Carolina.
The 2010 Lake Junaluska Peace Conference, attended this year by more than 200 United Methodists, is an interfaith summit largely underwritten by the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society. As its chief speaker, Edelman vociferously denounced American economic and public policies that have led to the deterioration of social values at home and increased violence abroad. The conference was themed “Peace for the World’s Children,” and besides Edelman, played host to a number of critics of U.S. domestic and foreign policy.
Throughout the statistics-heavy discourse, Edelman painted a bleak picture of America’s future, reading off dismal national figures as a school teacher might read a failing report card. “The greatest threat to America’s national security comes from no enemy without,” she began, “but from our failure to protect, invest in and educate all of our children.” She subsequently blamed the misappropriation and unequal distribution of wealth for the poor state of children’s welfare in this country. “God has blessed our nation with very great material wealth, but we’ve not shared it fairly, with our children or with our poor,” she said.
Edelman insinuated that the success of those at the top comes at the expense of those at “the bottom and the middle” of the economic totem pole. In particular she targeted the wealthiest two percent in American society as proof of an unfair system that takes from the poor and gives to the rich. “They really don’t need another tax cut,” Edelman quipped, to fervent applause. “But you gotta say so. You’ve gotta make your voices heard or you may just see an extension of tax cuts… to people who don’t need it. Don’t blame anybody if you don’t stand up and say no. And people of faith should say no.”
American economic policy continued to be a major theme in Edelman’s speech. “I don’t know how it is that we can somehow find money to bail out banks and somehow can’t find money to bail out babies,” she said, again to applause. “It is so unseemly that we’re a nation with a GDP exceeding 14 trillion dollars and we cannot find the will, the common sense and decency to widen the safety net protecting our poor children and those in extreme poverty.”
Edelman bemoaned the discrepancy between defense spending abroad and children’s development in the U.S., even taking a pot-shot at American gun-control laws. “Just one second of defense spending [out of its yearly budget] is more than a Head Start teacher earns in a year, yet our children are three times more likely to die from firearms at home than American soldiers fighting the Afghanistan war,” she said. She then raised the call for an “anti-war movement at home,” asking, “What is the difference between the value to our children’s lives or a child’s life, and those in the military?”
Edelman also blamed failing schools for what she called the “cradle to prison pipeline.” “We are the world’s leading jailer,” she said, “and we are criminalizing our poor and our children at younger and younger ages.” She characterized this “pipeline” as a social machine that runs on “a toxic cocktail of poverty and racial disparity,” producing what she christened “the New American ‘Apartheid.’” This “re-segregation” is being overseen by a broken judicial system that has put “more black citizens under the purview of the criminal justice system today than there were blacks in slavery ten years before the civil war,” she said.
Throughout Edelman’s speech, emphasis was placed on the “choice” Americans have in causing and alleviating suffering in society – “none of these statistics are Acts of God,” she noted – yet in her discussion few references were made to the traditional family’s role in nurturing children and maintaining a just and moral society, nor the role of faith in shaping American values. Almost entirely, the “choice” was placed in the hands of policy makers and the public sector; through whom, ostensibly, the nation’s salvation is either realized or denied.
Edelman herself was active in the Civil Rights movement as counsel for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, and was director of the Legal Defense and Educational Fund for the NAACP. CDF’s “Freedom Schools” initiative has been credited with elevating student performance for inner-city children.
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