The time has come to decide what we want to do. I'm convinced the entire population is blind, at least that is my impression from observing the behavior of the people I have seen so far... I cannot say whether there will be a future. What matters for the moment is to see how we can live in the present...

Without a future, the present serves no purpose, it's as if it did not exist. Perhaps, humanity will manage to live without eyes, but then it will cease to be humanity.

Valerie Polakow

Saramago's horrifying vision is that of a world gone mad and blind, and I want to talk about that blindness and the savage policies that ensue against children, policies that permit and promote poverty and homelessness, policies that have placed our youngest children in abysmal and dangerous child-care environments while their mothers on welfare are forced into indentured servitude, policies that criminalize youth as super-predators.

Such policies have created an unprecedented assault on poor children in this society, particularly poor children of color.

In this public assault on children, grave violations of children's rights are taking place in a juvenile-justice system run amok, and in eroded social citizenship rights that deny children a childhood that is free from destitution, from hunger and from homelessness.

The deprivation of educational rights under mandatory expulsion laws, the brutality of youth confinement and incarceration--these are part of the postmodern terrors of a vulnerable childhood in America right now. So, whose children do we see when we construct the meaning of childhood and freedom at the dawn of this new century in the United States? Which young lives matter and which do not?

The withered welfare state
As we look at the withered welfare state, we see how public policies make--and also unmake--young lives. The United States right now stands alone among all industrialized, democratic societies in failing to provide universal social insurance policies for children.

While Social Security for elderly Americans is still considered by some to be an earned entitlement, a Social Security system for children who in turn depend on parents' benefits forms part of a completely different discourse.

Poor parents--specifically, poor, single mothers--are constructed as moral threats, undeserving of government support, and we can see that implemented in practice in the federal welfare legislation of 1996, in which the social safety net has been shredded and an unprecedented assault on poor families has taken place.

	Child Poverty Facts
	Over 12 million American children live in poverty. The United States' child poverty rate is substantially higher--often two to three times higher--than that of most other major Western industrialized nations. In 1997, more than half of all poor children under the age of six lived with their mothers; children under the age of six living with single mothers were five times as likely to be poor than those living with both parents; one in six children under the age of six living with mothers employed full-time were poor. Source: National Center for Children in Poverty (www.nccp.org)

Single mothers who are dependent on aid now have to enter a form of indentured servitude--work-for-food, work-for-your-benefits requirements--that in some states, such as Michigan, New York, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, cause infants as young as 12 weeks old to be placed in very dangerous child-care environments while their mothers, under threat of benefit cuts, are forced into mandatory requirements and workfare settings. As President Clinton and state governors celebrate the declining welfare caseloads--47 percent nationally, 66 percent in Michigan--we should remember that this celebration is really about throwing more than two-thirds of child clients off any form of public assistance. Two-thirds of welfare clients are children, and the number of individuals on welfare has dropped from 14 million to 7 million in 1999. Two-thirds of those are child victims.

There is also growing evidence that adult recipients who are cut from assistance don't actually find jobs but, rather, that these declines in caseloads are due to sanctions for noncompliance.

In New York City, for example, when Rudolph Giuliani took office as mayor he promised to end welfare completely by the end of the century. Well, he almost fulfilled his campaign promise, but not quite. New York City has eliminated 400,000 clients from welfare. And the majority of those are young children.

A recent report by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the Children's Defense Fund documents that as more and more families are being pushed off welfare into the low-wage workforce, 71 percent of workers earn below the federal poverty line for a family of three--an average of $6.60 an hour--and more than three-quarters have no form of health insurance.

The number of destitute children living below half of the federal poverty line, less than $6,400 a year for a family of three, has grown by almost half a million. We're looking at increasing hunger and increasing homelessness, and decreasing access to Medicaid and food stamps.

Lives on the edge in Michigan
The damage to children as we think about the damage of welfare reform is a story yet to be told. I have attempted to begin telling this story by interviewing families with children who have faced this predicament in Michigan. I would like to read you some excerpts from interviews I've done with single mothers who have been coerced into mandatory work requirements and have experienced the terrors of being cut when child care fell through or when they failed to comply.

Kathy is the mother of a 4-year-old, and she tells us: "I was working as a cashier for $5.25 an hour. I had no money for day care. I lost my job, because they said I had to work the night shift. And who was there to care for my daughter? So they fired me.

"Then the eviction notice came. Then I got cut off welfare, because I didn't meet the work requirement. We lost food stamps and Medicaid. Then we ran out of food. It was terrible. And soon after we ended up in a shelter, and my daughter was traumatized. That's when my nightmare began."

Kathy's fall into homelessness with her young daughter, two years after a traumatic experience of domestic violence, was the final straw, as her shattered life continued to spiral downward, eventually causing her to lose her daughter to foster care.

What developmental damage has been done to Kathy's daughter, Sara, living with a homeless but very affectionate and caring mother who because of her inability to shelter her daughter and her inability to find child care saw her family destroyed by the violence of our public policies?

Consider the situation of Chris, the 16-month-old son of Mary. Mary was told she had to work 30 hours a week in exchange for benefits, despite a federal law that explicitly allows the mandatory work requirement to stay at 20 hours a week if a mother has a child under 6. But Michigan routinely violates that practice.

Mary reluctantly placed her son in an unsatisfactory child-care setting. She received a state child subsidy that covered only 70 percent of the cost of care. Mary found herself having to come up with an additional co-payment of $100 a month out of a welfare benefit and low-wage job that brought her a combined income of $700.

	Thinking Point
	How do work-for-welfare programs negatively impact American youth?

She couldn't find subsidized housing. There was a two-year wait in her county. She paid $400 a month for the top floor of a house in a dangerous neighborhood. After paying for child care and housing and using up her food stamps, Mary was left with a deficit. She could not manage. She could not pay for transportation. She could not find a Medicaid provider close to her neighborhood, nor could she afford the co-pays when her son became ill with asthma. She missed work because of his frequent bouts of asthma, and was fired. Her welfare benefits were cut. She couldn't pay the rent. Child-care subsidies were terminated, and Chris was evicted from his child-care setting. And once more she entered the world of welfare's discards.

Those stories are not atypical. They illustrate continuing patterns of desperation. Shari, another mother, told me about having to leave her 20-week-old infant in an unlicensed day-care home where her baby was neither held nor changed regularly. Together with seven other infants, he was strapped in an infant seat and fed by a propped-up bottle.

"The floor was filthy," said Shari. "There were roaches. The refrigerator didn't work right, so I always worried about his milk being bad." Shari chose to quit her mandatory work assignment and take care of her son. However, as a poor mother dependent on state assistance, she did not have the right to exercise that choice without severe penalties. And state retribution was swift: she and her son lost their benefits, and with no network or family in the area Shari fell into the same cycle of homelessness and threats of losing her baby to foster care.

So, as we think about the stories of our youngest children, children to whom developmental damage is being done on a daily basis as a result of our public policies, we also realize that the new welfare legislation constitutes an assault on poor families, because, as Gwendolyn Mink points out, such policies remove poor, single mothers from the welfare state to a police state.

Mothers are forced to choose; they either have to purchase their families' long-term survival by sacrificing basic rights that the rest of us take for granted, or face the very real prospect of losing their children to foster care.

Children taken from parents: why no outrage?
If we think about what's happened in New York City, I'm reminded of an event that took place shortly after Giuliani's sensational "Sensation" exhibition. There was a description in the New York Times about his new plan to invade homeless shelters and to arrest in pre-dawn raids those who might be out of compliance in terms of work requirements or outstanding arrest warrants.

Of course, that resulted in the removal of several children from their parents into foster care, but that didn't arouse the public outrage that his actions surrounding the "Sensation" exhibition did. It aroused a little outrage. But not a huge outrage. Why?

Why are we so willing to accept this assault on parents and children and not see it as a fundamental oppression and violation of human rights? Mothers no longer have the right to mother their own children if they're poor.

The consequences of the public assault

	Discussion
	Many single mothers on welfare must work in order to receive benefits, so they need to find a child-care provider during the day. Do you think work-for-welfare programs force single mothers to sacrifice the health and safety of their children?

It is both interesting and disturbing to see the consequences; think about the situation of the youngest perpetrator of a murder, a 6-year-old boy in Flint, Michigan, who shot a classmate. His mom was a welfare client. She had three children. She was forced into mandatory work assignments in Michigan. She had no access to child care. She couldn't pay her rent, was evicted and became homeless.

In desperation, she sent her two sons, 6 and 8, to live with a brother in another neighborhood. And that's when the tragedy happened. The mother is now being charged with neglect. The Family Independence Agency (the former Department of Social Services) is the agency that should be put on trial in this case. Why were there no interventions to help such a family? Where were school personnel?

Poor children, it seems, are rarely seen as deserving beneficiaries of public money, and the older they are, the fewer crumbs there are to spread around. Educational outcomes for poor children are significantly worse, and as race and poverty intersect, the social capital of children is vastly diminished.

We also know that underresourced schools--fewer books, fewer supplies, teachers lacking certification and training, lower salaries, schools in need of repair--characterize the lives of marginalized children living in the poorest communities.

Consider the plight of homeless children, and the fact that 23 percent of homeless children don't attend school regularly. When they do manage to squeeze through the schoolhouse door, the obstacles they encounter are extensively documented: delayed transfers of records, chronic health problems, grade retention, lack of special education, lack of any kind of remediation, multiple emotional impairments because of the trauma of homelessness--the stress, the shame and the disrupted daily lives.

As we put all this together, and as we think about infants and toddlers and preschool children and school-age children and adolescent youth, we begin to see a picture of multiple systemic assaults. And they do have a cumulative effect.

They take an even more sinister turn as we begin to take a look at the issue of the criminalization and incarceration of children, where thousands of our most troubled youth living in socially toxic environments encounter harsh and brutal treatment in our juvenile-justice system. I want to mention some startling figures from Amnesty International as I conclude.

Amnesty International, in a 1998 report: "Two hundred thousand children a year are prosecuted in general criminal courts. Seven thousand are held in jails before trial. Another 11,000 are in prisons and other long-term adult correctional facilities, in violation of international human rights treaties.

"The United States has still not ratified the convention on the rights of the child. Alone among 192 governments the United States and Somalia are the only two members of the United Nations currently that have not ratified the convention."

As we consider the violations of the human rights of children and the pernicious public policies that target our most vulnerable children, our youngest children, and our youth, the shredded social safety net that has wreaked existential havoc in so many young lives, we realize there is much to be confronted and, more important, much to be done in the name of freedom.