Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Biden Plots a Revolution for America's Children

Biden Plots a Revolution for America’s Children

By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist

New York Times

March 24, 2021

National pre-K and affordable day care don’t have to be a dream.

The most revolutionary part of President Biden’s agenda so far is his focus on a constituency that doesn’t write whiny op-ed columns, doesn’t vote, doesn’t hire lobbyists and so has been neglected for half a century: children.

Biden’s proposal to establish a national pre-K and child care system would be a huge step forward for children and for working parents alike. It would make it easier for moms and dads to hold jobs, and above all it would be a lifeline for many disadvantaged children.

Imagine: You drop a kid off at a high-quality prekindergarten program in the morning and pick the child up on the way home from work. That’s how it is in many other advanced countries, and in the United States military.

When my wife and I lived in Japan in the late 1990s, we sent our kids to one of these nurseries, and they were a dream.

But the United States never developed such a system, because for half a century as other countries were investing in children, the United States was stiffing them. Today one of our saddest statistics is this: American children ages 1 to 19 are 57 percent more likely to die than children in other rich countries.

Some of those kids die because the United States doesn’t provide universal health care to children — only to senior citizens, who vote and thus are a priority. Some die because the United States tolerates some of the highest child poverty rates in the industrialized world. And some die because the United States just doesn’t have programs to support children that are routine in Canada and Europe.

So the most historic part of the Biden agenda, to me, is a determined effort to invest in America’s kids and reverse decades of child neglect. Just as Franklin Roosevelt revolutionized conditions for the elderly by instituting Social Security, Biden may be able to do the same for children.

Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan included monthly child allowances and other elements that other countries have used to reduce child poverty. A Columbia University study estimated that these programs, if sustained, could reduce child poverty by about half.

Much of the attention on Biden’s next step is on infrastructure and climate change, and they are critical. But still more important for America’s future, in my view, will be the elements focused on children. While plans are still being developed, it appears that Biden will propose:

• Making his child allowances permanent.
• Expanding home visitation programs that help at-risk moms and dads from pregnancy through early childhood. These lower fetal drug and alcohol exposures, curb lead poisoning, encourage parents to read to their children and reduce domestic violence and child abuse. Home visitation programs like Nurse-Family Partnership have been rigorously tested and greatly improve outcomes.
• Working toward universal access to high-quality pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.
• Ensuring high-quality affordable day care for parents, with costs not to exceed 7 percent of incomes for most parents.

One model the White House is studying is the excellent day care system offered by the U.S. military, because the armed forces don’t want to have to deal with the child care crises that parents routinely face in the civilian world.

Can we afford this Biden revolution in child programs? It will indeed be expensive. And there is a perennial debate over whether it’s better to have programs that are targeted at the neediest (which are more cost-effective) or those that are universal (which are politically more sustainable).

But I’ve written about the heartache in my hometown in rural Oregon: More than one-quarter of the kids on my old school bus are dead from “deaths of despair”: drugs, alcohol and suicide. Taxpayers spent huge sums incarcerating my former classmates when the funds would have been far better spent reducing fetal alcohol exposures and tackling childhood trauma, illiteracy, failure to graduate from high school and a lack of job skills.

One reason our efforts to fight poverty haven’t achieved more is that we often start too late. For some of my middle-aged friends wrestling with homelessness, mental health crises and decades of addiction, with more of a criminal record than an educational record, it may not be possible to turn lives around. For their kids and grandkids, we have to try.

Many early childhood programs pay for themselves when aimed at the most disadvantaged, notes the Nobel-winning economist James Heckman, because they reduce spending on criminal justice, special education, health care and other services. One study by Heckman found that programs for vulnerable young children generated a 13 percent annual rate of return.

So, please, President Biden, push on. This is about America’s future. This is your chance to preside over a Rooseveltian revolution that sprinkles opportunity and averts tragedies for decades to come.

 

The question isn’t whether we can afford to invest in children and break cycles of poverty, educational failure and substance abuse. It’s whether we can afford not to.

Don't Go Back To Sleep - Rumi

Don't Go Back To Sleep

 

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth

across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.

 

• Rumi

 

Novel Overtures to the More-Than-Human World

"Novel Overtures to the More-Than-Human World" is not only focused on climate change and its implications. It does raise compelling issues that may intrigue readers of Reckonings as they have me. 

Climate change affects not only humans like us, but the overwhelming number of species that are not human: yet they are our kin; thus "the More-Than-Human World." It's an awkward construction, yes, but it should be clear to us all that the well-being of our own species, homo sapiens, is intimately, consequentially interwoven with the quality of non-human life with which (with whom?) we share this planet. 

"Nature," we are accustomed to say, or "the natural world," as if it's ours to enjoy, despoil, care for or not, alarm, be alarmed by, admire or ignore. At the bottom of this message is an alternative construction in the essay by David Bollier (http://www.bollier.org/ and https://centerforneweconomics.org/people/david-bollier/). 

Readers may also enjoy Robin Wall Kimmerer's related essay in The Ecologist magazine, "Living beings are our kith and kin."

In Kimmerer's essay and in her altogether admirable book cited below, Kimmerer suggests we need a new pronoun in order to avoid objectifying the world of nature. Her choice, with good reason, is the word kin. I admire that suggestion.  Living together as we do, we are all kin. So why not use as well the words us, our and we? We are one with the forest, the tree, the field, the marsh. Especially when I am quiet, I love our gathering, the soft breeze in our leaves and branches, our face and hair. 

Although the phrase "kith and kin" has become archaic (at least the kith part), originally it meant one's relations. The word kith is Old English, and the original senses were ‘knowledge,’ ‘one's native land,' and ‘friends and neighbors.’ The phrase kith and kin originally denoted one's country and relatives; later one's friends and relatives. (See the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.)

Please read Kimmerer's moving and deeply informed book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013). In its preface she writes:

"I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass, as thick and shining as the plait that hung down my grandmother's back. But
it is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: Indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other."

Here is David Bollier's essay:

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-03-10/novel-overtures-to-the-more-than-human-world/

 

Robin Wall Zimmerer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mirror Lake, Milford Sound, New Zealand

Bennacht - John O'Donohue's lovely blessing

I know I have, in earlier years in the pages of Reckonings, offered this deeply moving blessing by John O'Donohue.

I do so again, just after discussing his attention to grief and its manifold lessons, because the complementarity of the two is so compelling. I wish I could include, as well, his own reading of "Bennacht." He read it in a conversation with Krista Tippett of On Being: https://medium.com/@onbeing/beannacht-a-poem-8c2c29a4d14e. (Scroll down when you come to that page.)

The only two Gaelic words readers may not know are, first, the poem's title, Bennacht, which means blessing, and mid-poem the word "currach."  A currach is an Irish boat principally used for sailing in the west of Ireland. An Oxford dictionary offers this definition: "a small boat made of wickerwork covered with a watertight material [like canvas], propelled with a paddle; a coracle." With that brief introduction, here is John O'Donohue's poem.

 

Beannacht

by John O’Donohue

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.
And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

 

For Grief - a blessing by John O'Donohue

I have become familiar over the years with much of the writing of the Celtic bard John O'Donohue, but until very recently I was unfamiliar with this poem.

"For Grief" came to me through reading the remarkable journal of my dear friend Betsey Crawford, embedded in her altogether lovely website The Soul of the Earth. I'll always remain struck by and grateful for the circuitousness of the ways gifts come to us, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Betsey wrote:

After reading my last essay, A Year of Love and Death, on the losses of 2020, both personal and worldwide, my brother-in-law sent me a poem by John O’Donohue called For Grief. My partner George’s Irishness was a wild and wonderful force in his life. In the years before his death, he explored Celtic spirituality with his usual exuberance and loved John O’Donohue. So I was doubly moved by the poem, which means more to me every day.

_____________________________________

Now to a few of my own thoughts:

Yes, we've all known it, though it still astonishes me how we can occasionally twist ourselves into misshapen forms of ourselves to avoid our consciousness of it. I'll speak briefly for myself in response to John O'Donohue's poem. (Perhaps you would be well advised to read it first, below.)

I must choose my keenest, most primal examples. There are more, even more than I know or sometimes would admit if I did. When my father died in 1950, aged 50, by throwing himself from an 8th story window of the Weylin Hotel in New York City, I was eleven years old. When my mother died of cancer in the oncology ward of Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, aged 69 in 1975, I was in my mid-thirties. I can recall, in both events, all that of which O'Donohue writes so wisely, albeit from the first as a growing child and sometime student, and from the second, as a growing man and sometime both student and teacher.

In different ways and sometimes the same ways, my life did become strange, my ground fragile. I did speak in unfamiliar, unexpected ways. Loss was indeed a black tide, waxing and waning. I did gain my heart back, by grace and with a lot of hard, recurrent work, not yet done. Though in years I have outlived them, continue to remake a life of my own, as sons and daughters should, my work of grief is not yet done, even as O'Donohue truly says it can be.

Reflect with me on the first word of the title of his poem—For Grief. So grief can be a teacher, a guide, and yes, a blessing. There are those I loved and lost from whom I continue to learn but who do not await my return, though something from them, I'm glad to say, is woven into my life.

 

For Grief

When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you becomes fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.

Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.

Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time.

 

George Arthur Wilson (1931-2020)

George Arthur Wilson (1931-2020)

My dear friend George might be touched and amused—or perhaps say "Why not?"—that he reminds me of an Irish saint: 5^th century Brendan the Navigator, the voyager, one of the earliest Irish saints, after Patrick, after Brigid of Kildare.

There is Frederick Buechner’s beautifully composed fictional biography, titled simply Brendan. As Thomas Cahill wrote of that book on its flyleaf (think of George): “A lusty, teeming, festooning, dancing marvel of a book for anyone who cares about Ireland or Christianity or paganism or history or sailing or — reading.”

George was truly an anam cara, a soul friend.

Obituary from the East Hampton Star:

George A. Wilson, Minister and Sailor

By Mark Segal

October 22, 2020

George Arthur Wilson, who started his ministry at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor (among the Hamptons on Long Island, NY), ended it at the Springs Presbyterian Church, and sailed the world between postings, died in Mill Valley, Calif., of late-stage kidney disease on October 15, 2020. He was 89 and had been ill for seven years. 

Mr. Wilson had deep ties to the East End (of Long Island) and its waters, according to his longtime companion, Betsey Crawford. His parents bought 20 acres of land stretching from Old Stone Highway to Neck Path in Springs for $2,800 in 1946. As a teenager, he put an engine on a lifeboat salvaged from a World War II tanker and motored with a friend from the Whitestone Bridge in Queens to Promised Land on Napeague. The journey took 15 hours.

Born in Manhattan on March 14, 1931, to John Wilson and Martha Morton Wilson, Mr. Wilson grew up there and in the Bronx. He graduated from Grove City College in Grove City, Pa., and the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. He married the former Doreen Jones in 1954 and was ordained at the Old Whalers Church in 1956.

His marriage to Ms. Jones and a second marriage to Sally MacAleer ended in divorce. Both women survive.

In 1962 Mr. Wilson moved to Southern California, where he held ministries in San Gabriel, Pomona, and Wilmington. After he answered the call for clergy to accompany the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1965 march to Selma, Ala., his ministry became increasingly involved in social justice. He worked on the campaign for George Brown Jr., the first congressman to speak out against the Vietnam War, and sought to generate interest in a film on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident.

Always drawn to the water, he sailed to Hawaii with his son Mark in 1984 and, when he left California in 1987, he sailed Aliento, his ketch, through the Panama Canal and up the Atlantic Coast to Boston with his son Johnathan.

He held two pastorates in the Boston area.

Mr. Wilson returned to Springs in 1989 for his last ministry. After retiring in 1993, he got his captain's license and began day-chartering Aliento from Three Mile Harbor. "I met George when he returned to Springs," Ms. Crawford said. "He wasn't hard to meet! He was the most exuberant human being I've ever come across."

In 2000 (20 years ago), he sailed with his son Mark and three other crew members to Ireland, from which his parents had emigrated 80 years before. A storm forced a detour to the Azores, and they proceeded to Ireland from there.

In 2011 he took to the road instead of the sea in another vessel, an R.V., with Ms. Crawford. They spent several years traveling from the Canadian Maritimes to the West Coast and from the Mexican border to Alaska before settling in Marin County, just north of San Francisco.

Mr. Wilson was a member of Redwoods Presbyterian Church in Larkspur, where the Rev. Stephanie Ryder officiated at an outdoor service for the family in October 2020. A Zoom memorial service will be held on Sunday, March 14, 2020, his 90th birthday, and his ashes scattered at a buoy just outside Three Mile Harbor.

In addition to Ms. Crawford, he is survived by three sons, Johnathan Wilson of Apple Valley, Calif., David Wilson of Los Angeles, and Mark Wilson of Oakland, Calif., a daughter, Sharyn Pepitone of Davis, Calif., a stepson, Luke Perrier of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, 10 grandchildren, and one great-grandson, who was born 10 days before Mr. Wilson died. A fourth son, Scott, died in infancy.

According to his family, "He carried with him his Irish spirituality, zest for life, and ability to never pass up a good conversation. His warmth and sparkling blue eyes will be missed by many." I deeply miss all those qualities, which were with him to the end.

Betsey has created a page on her website where friends and family can share reminiscences of Mr. Wilson. The link is thesouloftheearth.com/memories-of-george.

Betsey wrote of their last voyages, “It’s impossible to say when journeys begin, when the first call, just a whisper at first… Before we left in August 2011, people would ask me where we were going, and I’d say, ‘All I know is that I’m driving to the end of the driveway and turning left. [We] were heading on adventures. That was the call. I’d rented the house, found a 33-foot trailer and a pickup truck to pull it… So I left, with man and dog, in a Ford F-350 and a Jayco Super Lite Eagle fifth wheel trailer. We named the rig ‘Kaliento’ after my partner George’s beloved boat. Aliento means breath in Spanish (pneuma). George was 80. I was 60. My dog Splash was 10. No spring chickens among us. George is an adventurer at heart, and Splash was a dog of immense patience and flexibility, so they were, though as surprised as everyone else, game for the journey.