Presumably, first graders coming to school with empty bellies or bruises could pray their parents’ SNAP benefits don’t get cut so they can eat that weekend.
One finds it hard to imagine that St. Peter would pull up a soul’s voting record at the Pearly Gates. A person’s treatment of their neighbors, both those able to reciprocate and not, speaks louder among the halls of heaven than any earthly construct as self-serving as political party affiliation.
Yet lately, party loyalty and flat-out fanaticism have usurped the neighborliness, Christian values, and good ol’ fashioned common sense our commonwealth and its children so desperately need. This party-over-all attitude puts our neighbors, our children, and our community’s future on the back burner and creates all-powerful idols of very human politicians.
While 76% of Kentuckians claim a religious affiliation according to the Pew Research Center, we are also — inexplicably — one of the worst states for rates of child hunger, child vaccination rates, and child abuse or neglect. We are also fourth in the nation for teen pregnancies – significantly higher than the national average.
Yet this year in our schools, the emphasis is not on feeding hungry children, strengthening child advocate services, or increasing funding of school resources. Instead, students must sit through a minute of silence at the start of each school day, ostensibly to pray but (thanks to the U.S. Constitution) with the option to “reflect” or “meditate.”
Presumably, first graders coming to school with empty bellies or bruises could pray their parents’ SNAP benefits don’t get cut so they can eat that weekend. We are a nation that relies heavily on thoughts and prayers, after all.
Most would agree that prayer must be balanced with very real improvements in the physical care of our community’s children. Yet, Republicans in the U.S. House recently proposed a $23.9 billion cut to the bill funding Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.
Critics have rightfully argued against these deep cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, funding for teacher training, funding for public schools, and funding for low-income students at those schools. The Republicans’ proposed budget also eliminates funding for substance abuse and treatment services as well as mental health services, programs that directly help to decrease the rates of child abuse in our communities.
“House Republicans are leaving working families out to dry by attacking education at all levels, decimating access to job training, cutting funding for reproductive health, and abandoning ongoing health crises,” said committee Democrats in a recent press release. “With an 11 percent cut below 2025, Republicans’ funding bill kicks teachers out of classrooms, harms women and children, and leaves Americans on their own to cope with inflation and the rising cost of living.”
These program cuts will directly affect our commonwealth’s children in immediate and long-lasting ways, harming not only their own health and education but also their quality of life at home, as their parents wrestle with substance abuse, unemployment, and generational poverty.
According to Feed the Children, Kentucky is sixth in the nation in rates of childhood hunger, joining the ranks of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, while less than two-thirds of the commonwealth’s children are fully vaccinated. Even more abysmally unchristian is the commonwealth’s rate of child abuse, double the national average at 14% as reported by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Also on the chopping block is a federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which has been directly credited for significant drops in teen pregnancies in multiple states as well as a national record low of teen births in the years following its inception. In 2017, federal courts returned $200 million in federal funds to this program that President Trump tried to cut during his first term. Yet again, it has been targeted for cuts, despite its direct improvement in the lives of the nation’s teens and their caregivers.
Claiming we are a commonwealth of Christians while depriving our neighbor’s children — or our own children — of crucial social structures necessary for their health does nothing to save us a spot in line at the Pearly Gates. Increasing our community’s risks of childhood hunger, abuse, addiction, or pregnancy reflects poorly on us all, should we simply watch such cuts sail through Congress as “the cost of progress” on the backs of children already suffering the nation’s fiscal neglect.
Perhaps the mandatory moment of silence in our schools should be extended to all public servants, elected officials, and community leaders who would deem budget cuts for the wealthy more valuable than our commonwealth’s children with real and immediate needs.
Thankfully, they wouldn’t have to look far to find an appropriate meditation. “You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land,” we read in Deuteronomy.
Or better still, the growing mantra among public school teachers and food bank volunteers: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
--30--
Comments
