August 28th, 2004

I hate living in a country that, while being the wealthiest nation in the world, has a poverty rate for children of 17.6 percent. That’s almost one out of every five. I don’t care what anyone thinks about welfare, to my mind it’s beyond patently obvious that our children, American children, should not live in poverty. We should be ashamed to be so wealthy and yet give so little to the ones who are most defenseless in our society. They are our future. Even before I had kids of my own I felt this way, and now I feel this way more strongly than ever before. It’s ludicrously hypocritical of our government to propose educational reform, to parrot words like “no child left behind”, when we haven’t even taken care of children’s basic biological needs. It’s our country, they are our children, what kind of monsters are we that we don’t feed and clothe and provide housing for them?

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