The Evil of Two Lessers, Part II
By Michael Ventura, Fri., Oct. 25, 1996
According to Dole, the biggest threat to "the fragile world of children" comes from "the fashion and the music and the film industries." (The fashion industry?) Our president, one William Jefferson Clinton, seeking re-election, has made similar, though quieter, noises recently. Clinton, too, would like Hollywood to make less exploitative films, and in addition, he thinks children should observe curfews and wear uniforms. Robert Dole applauded the "welfare reform" bill of the Gingrich congress, signed into law by William Jefferson Clinton -- a bill which will deprive a minimum of a million poor children (Clinton's own figures) from the guarantee of food. All in all, it's an interesting bipartisan prescription for child-rearing: Kids, especially the poorer variety, should be uniformed, absent from streets after dark, listen to blander music, and eat less food.
With both Dole and Clinton emphasizing what children wear rather than what they eat, we are left with a stunning formulation: The fashion industry is more of a threat to children than hunger.
This, when more than one out of five children in America lives in poverty, a higher number than any Western country. (And poverty is hunger, even here. See Part I: The Austin Chronicle; Vol. 16, #6.)
The bipartisan consensus seems to be this: The misfortune and/or sins (depending on whether you're a Democrat or Republican) of the parents, should be visited upon the children, not as punishment, but as an incentive to the unlucky and/or sinful to find and retain shit-work. In my reading of American history, it is the first time that the suffering of children has been utilized as a bureaucratic tool to implement a change in policy.
Polls across the country show that the American people approve of this consensus. According to The New York Times, only six percent of us felt that Clinton was doing wrong. In addition, funds for improving schools are being routinely defeated across the country whenever it involves even a minor increase in taxes. This is especially true wherever there is a big enough concentration of the aged to constitute a voting block. Which is something to remember whenever you see a bumper sticker that says, "Ask Me About My Grandchildren!" Under the circumstances, it has a rather sinister ring. (Perhaps they're offering them for sale?)
There will come a day when these facts will be given as proof that America, in our time, sank into a collective depravity.
The proof won't be our drugs, our music, our films, or even our violence. We've always been violent and we've always gotten high on something. It can even be said that we've always been depraved. Genocide is surely depravity, and we practiced it upon the tribal population of America. Racism is depravity, and it's welded into virtually every institution in America. (For instance, in 22 years I've never worked on a paper where there was more than a token African-American presence among the writers, if that.) But genocide and racism are not peculiar to America -- indeed it is difficult to find a country anywhere that has not practiced the same abominations to one degree or another at some time in its history. But we are the first society in memory not to put the care of our children above all else. Of this particular depravity, we are the inventors.
Across America, Republicans and Democrats, each claiming to choose the lesser evil, will give their vote and, hence, their approval to men who claim that it is somehow good for us to place our poorest children in (even more) danger.
I am sorry but, except for out-and-out violent atrocity, I cannot find a greater evil than this. This behavior has nothing to do with any "lesser evil." It is evil. It is amazing to have to point out, in plain language, that it is evil to endanger children. But we seem to have sunk so low that it is necessary. To vote for the behavior of either party is to do evil. Is to join evil. You are not participating in an election process anymore. You are participating in a bipartisan mandate for evil.
We have gotten to this disgusting moment in our history by rationalizing a vote for "the lesser evil" again and again and again -- by abdicating what we really believe and making do with what we're offered. We've done it so often I can't even think of it as a "vote" any longer; to me, a vote for the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate has become nothing but one more way a vassal bows.
We vote to appease our conscience, our guilt at doing nothing more. "I'm a concerned citizen, aren't I? I vote!" That done, our appeasement is complete until it's time to vote again. I give you the best sentence I have heard about democracy in years, from Chris Carter's script for last season's final episode of The X-Files: "If you can appease a man's conscience you can take his freedom away from him."
That is what has happened to us. That, in effect, is what we've voted for. And, even more than our freedom, we've lost our honor.
We've even lost the last shreds of what we say is our religion. Both Dole and Clinton, like the vast majority who will vote for them, claim to be Christian. But they and their supporters have forgotten one of Jesus' most clear injunctions, spoken specifically about poor children: "Even as ye do unto the least of these my brethren, ye do unto me."
So much for Pat Robertson's claim that we live in a Christian country.
James Baldwin said it better than I can:
"The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality. Or, I am saying, in other words, that we, the elders, are the only models children have. What we see in the children is what they have seen in us... I, too, find that a rather chilling formulation, but I can find no way around it."
I get a perverse pleasure, I admit, from my confident belief that the children will take their revenge. Not by violence. Sensational reports on your local evening news to the contrary, studies agree that adult violence toward children is many, many times more frequent than children's (especially teens') violence toward adults. No, like the present "welfare reform," the children's revenge will come as a matter of demographics and budgets.
In America, we have an aging population. In 2010, that great boom of babies born between 1945 and 1965 will begin to retire. We'll need Social Security. We'll need federal assistance. We will, as the years pass, become less and less able to fend for ourselves -- like children.
But Social Security is drying up. Every year the government raids the Social Security Trust Fund to meet its budget. There's nothing in it now but Congressional I.O.U.s. When my generation needs those billions, there will only be one way for the government to get them: Raise taxes. A lot. But the tax base of the future (the young of today) will have grown up in a time when taxes were labeled the worst thing that could happen. They won't take kindly to it.
We'll still have the votes (we'll always outnumber them) but they'll have the strings. It will be very hard to get money out of them if they don't want to give it. And why should they? They are being taught, by our collective example, that taking care of the helpless is a worthless adventure, for the needy have brought their sins upon themselves and must, therefore, be left to work out their fate themselves. They won't sit still when we say that it's not our fault we're old. By our example, we are teaching them to turn away from misfortune. They will have learned the lesson well, and will behave toward us as we are teaching them to behave toward others.
When Social Security was instituted 60 years ago, there were a dozen or more able-bodied workers for every infirm person. There was, in other words, plenty of tax base, and the burden on an individual worker was not onerous. But in 2020, when a 1945 baby will be 75, there will be (depending on what stats come true) only two to four able-bodied workers for every infirm older person. And medical expenses will be even higher than today. That's quite a tax demand on their salaries. We are teaching them, by every means at our disposal, that the demand to be made upon them is unfair -- for we are teaching them that we are not each other's keepers.
In addition, they will have seen two or three generations shunting off their aged and infirm into dubious nursing homes to live lonely and undignified last years until reaching an inevitably messy and expensive death. That is how, by example, we are instructing them to treat us.
Justice, you see, will be served. We will pay dearly for supporting the evil of two lessers. We will pay profusely for our example of using the neediest as political tools.
May they cut us loose. May they turn away. May they let us rot. May we get what we deserve -- for only that will expiate this sin, this shameless abdication. n
