My New Year pledge: to remind my politicians that their first goal should be to serve ALL our children, because they are all OUR children. It's easy for us to claim a child as "ours" if she's our team's star athlete or our state's musical prodigy, if he's our town's spelling bee champ or our hospital's cancer success story or our country's Olympic hopeful. We don't care if those kids look nothing like us or their families worship differently or earn less than ours -- they are still "our" heroes. But are we able to extend that acceptance to the other kids, the struggling ones, the ones who might have made mistakes or never managed to overcome the many strikes against them from the start? Trayvon Martin? My kid. Michael Brown? My kid. Neftali Cuello, picking tobacco in North Carolina at age 12? Mine. Children poisoned, left homeless, or left without a viable future by our relentless assault on the environment and the climate? Mine, mine, mine.
So what's the next step, the one that makes them ours, ours, ours? A political sea change, a politics of All Our Children. Here's a start at a manifesto:
1) Our nation's future depends on educated people prepared to function in the future economy. All Our Children deserve a comprehensive, challenging education. We will no longer take for granted that Americans choose their homes based on the quality of the school district, since this presupposes that there will be bad school districts, and that wealth and mobility will determine who escapes them. We will commit to the political changes necessary to ensure that all school districts are worthy of our nation's aspirations.
2) Our future citizens will not be able to compete in the global economy if their country's infrastructure is inferior or crumbling. All Our Children deserve robust investment in 21st-century transportation, energy, and communications networks, including mass transit, high-speed rail, renewable energy, and comprehensive digital access.
3) The lives and health of future generations depend on a stable climate and intact ecosystems. For the sake of All Our Children we will stop investing in fossil fuels, large-scale environmental interventions like mountaintop removal, hydraulic fracturing, clear-cutting of forests, and other economic activity that secures short-term profits at the price of future well-being.
4) Universal health care for All Our Children. If we can't have a single payer system for adults, can't we at least have one for children? Dental and vision care included, because what child can succeed in school with constant toothaches or uncorrected vision problems?
5) Safe streets, homes, and schools for All Our Children. Surely we can keep the guns away from kids. And if police feel they must use force in some situations, they should at the very least be trained never to use deadly force on children.
I'm sure there are dozens more. But it boils down to this: if constituents and reporters would make a point of asking our politicians to account for the impacts of their decisions on All Our Children, maybe they would start making better decisions.