The Future of Us, by Irwin Redlener (preface)

Irwin Redlener

The Future of Us What the Dreams of Children Mean for Twenty-First-Century America Foreword by Jane Pauley WITH A NEW PREFACE AND A NEW AFTERWORD ADDRESSING THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC AND THE HEALTH OF CHILDREN

Preface

On August 3, 2017, just a few weeks before the first edition of this book was published, I found myself speaking through a translator with Malva, an adorable eight-year-old girl sitting on her mom’s lap in a sparse Quonset hut somewhere in Northern Greece. Her dad was on an adjacent chair, holding Malva’s six-year-old sister on his lap. I asked the family how they wound up at this forsaken refugee center more than 1,600 miles from where they had been living in a middle-class suburb of Damascus.

“What was your life like when you were living in Syria?”

“Our lives were just, you know, normal,” said Malva’s father.

“I drove a bus, and my wife was a teacher. We loved our neighborhood. Malva had just started school when our world disappeared.

Fighting everywhere, we were terrified. Many of our friends were killed. Many ran away. And we ran too.”

He went on to describe their extraordinarily dangerous journey.

They paid “transporters” to take them on a rickety boat across the Mediterranean Sea. They were picked up by rescue ships just off

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the southeast coast of Greece, processed, and placed directly into this refugee center.

They were plunged immediately into a surreal world where kindly, mostly young workers from a variety of international agencies were there to make sure they were “settled.” They were given a room in one of several buildings that at one time were, of all things, Mercedes storage facilities. Now the buildings house several hundred Syrian refugees.

I looked over to Malva. “So, what are you thinking about doing when you grow up?”

She smiled at me, waiting for the translator. Without hesitation— and without taking her blue eyes off me—she said, “A doctor!”

I thought about what Malva said, knowing that the family had been in this place for nearly two years, that she had not been in school for all that time, that the prospect of a definitive resettlement in a real neighborhood was years away. Even the roles of her parents were now overtaken by the well-meaning agency workers.

Malva’s aspiration to be a doctor is innocent and understandable.

But it is essentially impossible. She faces a future of erratic education, unstable living conditions, and unrelenting stress.

Malva’s was hardly an isolated case. Through a complex set of forces—wars, climate-induced migration, rebellions, the search for economic opportunity, and geopolitics—over which people on the move have very little control, more than sixty-five million people in the world today are either refugees or “displaced persons.”

This population includes at least thirty million children and youth.

Their futures, for better or worse, will define our own.

If you think this fragile or impossible success trajectory is just a sad reality for children “somewhere else,” please read on.

On August 25, 2017, the Category 4 hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas. Its devastating winds and floods killed nearly one hundred people and caused $125 billion in damage. As of this writing, recovery remains painfully slow and incomplete. x

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Over 25,000 households were still displaced by the start of the next of hurricane season in 2018. Children have missed months of school and have felt the brunt of their families’ stress and struggle.

I traveled through southeast Texas two weeks after the storm.

Driving through the coastal town of Rockport, I saw wrecked buildings and downed power poles everywhere. We pulled into a small roadside grove where many families, children in tow, stood in line for food and diapers. Some of the parents I spoke to were still dazed, traumatized after the total loss of their homes, their businesses, their communities. Sam McKenzie, a lifelong resident of Rockport, had lost her restaurant. But, working with her husband, she established this refuge. Their makeshift center distributed donated supplies from churches and non-profits.

They were a lifeline.

One mom said to me, “We lost everything. I’m worried about my kids. The little one—a three-year old—stopped speaking.” Her eight-year-old son asked, “When can I go back to school?”

What this mother could not have known on that day in Rockport was that it would be a long time before her son would be back in the classroom. And it is entirely unclear whether he would be able to make up for the time lost and the trauma he, along with his family, endured.

I also returned to Flint, Michigan, in 2017, more than a year after my first visit. The situation remained grim. Many homes in Flint’s low-income neighborhoods still had lead-contaminated water flowing from aging, corroded pipes. I visited the home of one family where a seven-year-old girl lived with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. They showed me the water that came out of their kitchen faucet. It looked turbid and it smelled horrible.

I have no idea how much lead was in their water. But the water was clearly unpotable, and the family didn’t and couldn’t drink it.

And I couldn’t blame them. xi

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If I found this kind of problem in my house, I would raise hell.

Inspectors would be out. I’d be speaking to reporters, calling elected officials, and—if necessary—replacing the damaged pipes at my own expense. If all that failed, I would move. But these options are decidedly not available to families living in poverty.

This is a profound disparity of opportunity and access in America. And it’s a different perspective from the vast wealth inequality we already know. These inequities are more deeply rooted.

Solving poverty would mean raising minimum wages across the country and strengthening social safety nets like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which provides cash benefits for people with children who live below the poverty levels. In 2016, the EITC lifted about 5.8 million people out of poverty, including about three million children. The number of poor children in the United States would have been more than a quarter higher without the EITC. The credit also reduced the severity of poverty for another 18.7 million people, including 6.9 million children.

Taking on the disparities in opportunity and access to the levers that change living conditions is not so easy.

Children are disproportionately affected by large-scale disasters.

In September 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. The singer Marc Anthony asked me to help disperse about $7 million that he had raised for disaster relief. I traveled to the island to meet with government officials and residents of the most devastated communities.

Hundreds of thousands of children were affected directly and indirectly, traumatized by the initial ferocity of Hurricane Maria and then faced with its bleak aftermath. Children ages five to seventeen missed an average of 78 days of school. Making up for lost academic time is tough, if not impossible for many.

Managing long-term psychological stress and trauma in children is equally difficult. Even if there were enough trained professionals available—which there are not—Puerto Rico’s many children xii

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living in poverty were already up against serious social and economic adversity long before Hurricane Maria.

But there’s an elephant in the room—another force to be reckoned with in America that is having a profound effect on children.

With the election of Donald J. Trump, we are already seeing evidence that children will face more adversities in the future, from reduced access to health care, to the undermining of public education, to the increased risk of exposure to toxins in our air, soil, and water. The latter will be an inevitable consequence of extreme cutbacks to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Just think about it: more than half of the top scientists and professional staff at the EPA have left the agency since Trump took office. Rollbacks in regulations designed to protect the environment are on the horizon and coming closer to becoming realities, including the scrapping of proposals to prevent dangerous pesticides that affect the developing brains of children from being used near populated areas.

But the most egregious of the Trump administration’s policies is its treatment of immigrant families and children seeking political asylum or economic opportunity. Since the spring of 2018 and early 2019, I have focused on the plight of children who came to America as “unaccompanied minors” or who were brought here by their families. I am especially concerned about children who have been traumatically separated from their parents by agents of Customs and Border Protection or of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Of all of the horrible policies I have seen in my work, starting in the early 1970s when I was caring for children in the sixth poorest county in the United States, the idea of forcibly removing children from the arms of their parents to deter immigration to the United States is the worst. Cruelty as policy is not something that I ever thought would be so overtly fostered and practiced by a modern American government. xiii

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Have there been other abuses of American power and values?

Of course. Think of our history of using torture. Think about the prisoners at Guantanamo. Think of our incursions into the affairs and stability of other countries. For the most part, these are exceptions to formal policies and protocols—and they were called scandals when uncovered.

Separating children from parents was announced gleefully by then attorney general Jeff Sessions in May 2018: “If you don’t like [these policies], then don’t smuggle children over our border.” And many—though not all—government agents carried out these policies with enthusiasm. Thousands of children, including infants, toddlers, and school-aged kids, were separated from parents and siblings for weeks and months. They were detained in shelters, which were generally staffed with caring professionals but who were hardly substitutes for real parents. In many of these detention centers for young children, workers were forbidden to hold or even comfort crying, traumatized toddlers.

In the fall of 2018, I visited child detention centers in Texas and New York City. I saw the sad faces of children in limbo, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that, for the most part, workers seemed to care about the well-being of the children languishing in their facilities. However, there was nothing they could do to stop the separation policies or reunite children with the families they desperately needed.

I next visited an ICE adult detention center in El Paso, Texas.

I met forty-two women who had been incarcerated for weeks— many for months—after illegally crossing the southern border.

Most of these women were escaping violence or the threat of violence by gangs in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras. They had minimal phone contact with their spouses or their children.

They were suffering and sad, but also amazingly resilient and—in their own way—defiant.

I asked these women two questions. First, “If you knew the conditions you’d face once you got to the United States, would you xiv

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still have attempted the journey?” Every single woman said “yes,” they would have still made the trek.

Then I asked, “If your friends back home knew what you were going through, would they still try to get here?”

Again, without a single dissent, each woman said, “Of course.”

Looking for something a little closer to home?

Here are a few things that we need in our minds as we near the 2020 presidential election: • The Trump administration has proposed cutbacks in supplemental food programs for kids in poverty that may cause nearly one million children to lose free or reduced cost school lunches.

• Between 17 percent and 20 percent of American children live in poverty.

• Since Trump was elected president, an additional 400,000 children lost health insurance.

What does this all mean? As you’ll read in the pages ahead, we have our work cut out for us if we intend for the next generation— and those to follow—to filled with hope and opportunity for America itself.

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“In clear, often emotional language, Irwin Redlener explains the costs borne by children and our society for failing to ensure that all children in America have access to quality health care. As cofounder with Redlener of Children’s Health Fund, I have watched him grapple with these issues for more than thirty years. Still an optimistic realist, he offers solutions in The Future of Us that are both feasible and affordable.”

Paul Simon “The Future of Us will inform you, fascinate you, and most of all, inspire you. Redlener, America’s leading advocate for children, and his partner and wife Karen have improved the health and life prospects of millions upon millions of children, but he never flags in his efforts to do more and to remind us—with great urgency and eloquence—how much better we can and must do for America’s and the world’s poor and vulnerable children.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Columbia University “The world needs to listen to the message of the amazing Irwin Redlener—that every child, no matter where or to whom they are born, deserves a chance in life. It truly is ‘the future of us.’ ” Carolyn Miles, president and CEO, Save the Children “This is the book our troubled era has been waiting for. In his beautifully written, fearless exploration of the lives of vulnerable children, Redlener offers us profound insights into ourselves and our society. The Future of Us is not just wise and wonderful, it’s essential for everyone who cares about the well-being of our children and the nation as a whole.”

Bob Herbert, Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos and former New York Times columnist “In an engaging and heartfelt manner, The Future of Us provides snapshots of the appalling conditions facing children living in poverty in America, and then presents much-needed practical solutions to help them. I highly recommend it.”

Dan Klores, Peabody Award–winning filmmaker

Irwin Redlener , a pediatrician, is president emeritus and cofounder of Children’s Health Fund and founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, where he is a senior research scholar.

Jane Pauley is a television journalist and author. She is the anchor of CBS Sunday Morning and was previously cohost of Dateline NBC and NBC’s Today.

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU