CAGES

If you haven't seen the Pew Center research report detailing findings that America now incarcerates 1 in 100 of its citizens, then read it here.

My how we have fallen.

I look at our daughter's elementary school, Dearborn Park, here in the south end of Seattle and then at its polar-opposite, Lawton Elementary in the lovely, wealthy Queen Anne neighborhood of schools. Dearborn Park ranks on the emergency, needs help list of the school board. Lawton tops out on state testing and special programming beyond the basics. It also has the Spectrum program for gifted students. Dearborn Park is about 82% free lunch qualified and majority minority. Lawton is 0% free lunch qualified; 98+% white (its statistics shows an asterisk for all other racial categories and the asterisk means that the percentage doesn't make up enough of the student body to register as an entire percentage point).

I see the EPA sponsored Mercer Island study results, in which the University of Washington tested for of levels of pesticides in children eating organic v. regular grocery store fare. The study showed that when the children ate regular grocery store fare, pesticides showed up in their bodies, but when they ate organic, no pesticides showed up. Then, I hear a hard-working, middle-class, concerned mother say that with the rising cost of groceries, rent, and oil, she doesn't have a choice but to eat standard fare; she can't feed her family organic, though she'd like to.

I hear Republican candidates say "use less healthcare to make the costs go down" and Democrats say "make everyone buy health care and punish them if they don't, or make some people buy it and hope the others do".

I hear the family case worker at our school ask me on behalf of unnamed students' families if I can give something to help. This week's urgent need is not food, but clothing and basics.

I receive the prayer chain request to pray for a parishioner's child who witnessed a friend get shot.

I look at the payday loan companies in our neighborhood and at our end of town and the casinos and bars versus the coffee shops and quality clothing stores, salons, and emergency clinics in wealthier parts of town. One of the blighted areas of the south end is Skyway. Why doesn't Starbucks or Ladro open a coffee shop in Skyway? Why doesn't PCC open a grocery store there? Where are the useful shops with convenient walking between them? Where are the green spaces and planter boxes to make it pretty and proud?

Then I see the Pew report and I want to scream: "WE ARE ALL IN CAGES!"

My God, have we lost all sense of self and selflessness? Have we lost all sense of the bond of humanity? Have we become so inured to inhumanity, separatism, elitism, degradation of others, privilege, injustice, and selfishness that we can really and truly recreate England of 200 or so years ago with its workhouses, debtors prisons, indentured servitude, prison colonies, slave ships, and blood-class system? Our country was spawned as a reaction, even an antidote, to that hateful, vile system.

Why indeed should we educate our children well, if a decent, thorough education might tell them such history? They might actually wake up and realize that the same is happening and learn its eventual outcome: downfall of a potentially great society and one which many claim to be the great democratic experiment and success.

How successful a democracy are we if we are disenfranchising 1 in 100 people at an ever increasing rate?

Why should we educate our children equally, if we are planning to use 1/100th or more of them as veal? Our children are not oblivious. They are not incapable of learning. They learn very well from our actions. The reason the expectation of college attendance and a successful career is not pandemic in the poor schools is because we have educated these children well that they won't need college and financial success where they are going.

Ten years ago when I moved to Seattle, I watched two consecutive news stories: a report about destroying a homeless encampment in Seattle despite a dearth of shelter beds and food and a report about the Redmond Rabbit Coalition raising $60,000 to transport feral rabbits who were chewing through electrical wires in that city's downtown to a special rabbit sanctuary. I couldn't figure why they didn't cook the rabbits to feed those hungry people who were going without food and shelter and help the people to a sanctuary. This memory floods back whenever issues of inequity and injustice come up.

I fear I am becoming a socialist. I am not yet there, but the thoughts stir. I am not ready to let go the rope of democratic hope.

A few weeks ago, I read an article on the difference in fundraising between poor schools and wealthy schools. Its thoughtfulness lingers, returning on that lazy susan stream of mindfulness whenever I face the challenges at our own school. That article is here.

Mulling this article yet again after reading the Pew Report, it struck me that all the general funds granted to Principals and all the funds raised by all the PTAs in town should be combined distributed in such a way that every child in the district's basic needs are met, and when all the students in all the schools are receiving exactly the same daily experience in school, the next wave of funds could be used to give the specialty items and programs to each and every school equally. After all, Dearborn Park would like marimabas and orchestras and after-school activities (chess, opera, piano lessons, foreign language, knitting, sports, yoga...) with equal transportation and care opportunities as Lawton.

It's not enough this crazed equalization of education plan. I know that. It will not answer all the problems we have created and face now and in the future. But it is something, if only a lightening rod.

Clearly, if we are willing to plop 1/100th of our population in a cage, we have serious challenges that require an entire social overhaul. Now is the time for thinkers, brave prophets, researchers, and doers to find a way other than revolution out of the quagmire we have created and labeled "homeland".