This time of year depictions of the Baby Jesus in a manger are everywhere as a commercial cue, an object of worship, as a depiction of the essence of innocence. That biblical diorama with the Christ Child at the radiant center, surrounded by Joseph and Mary, then the three wise men with the shepherds on the periphery, represents a concentric circle of care so many of our world’s children suffer for the lack of.
From the killing fields of Gaza to the shooting galleries that can be any American elementary school, dead children are seen as justifiable collateral casualties to a worthy military objective or hapless incidental victims of a society that worships guns.
Yes, tens of millions of Americans just voted to return a man to the White House who implemented a policy as president that separated thousands of infants and children from their migrant parents exposing them to prison-like conditions, sexual abuse and generational trauma. Days before Christmas, Republicans in Congress tried to ram through a spending bill that strips childhood cancer research from the federal budget.
Inflicting maximum pain on them was the point and millions of Americans evidently embrace that. In the turbulent days ahead of promised partisan retribution we will no doubt all have the option to choose just what kind of America we want to live in, one of faith and abundance or fear and scarcity.
Objectively, a family, a nation, even a civilization’s measure of enduring success has to be the survival and nurturing of its progeny. And yet, even here in the United States, the world’s wealthiest of nations, we are coming up very short.
As a study published in the journal JAMA Network Open last month found, one in four child deaths after an emergency room visit in the U.S. were preventable because they resulted as a consequence of the reality that 80 percent of the nation’s hospitals were poorly equipped to handle pediatric cases. As New York Times reporter Emily Baumgaertner noted, the study found that for just an $11.84 or less investment per child in making the E.R. more child-centered thousands of young lives could be saved every year.
A few weeks later, Baumgaertner reported yet another alarming trend—"from 2019 to 2021, the [U.S.} child death rate rose more steeply than it had in at least half a century” adding that came “despite all of the medical advances and public health gains” made over that same period.
Dr. Coleen Cunningham, the chief pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, told the Times that digging deeper into this data, the uptick was composed of cases in which the deaths were “almost always preventable.”
“Deadly car accidents among tweens and teen climbed nearly 16 percent,” the Times reported. “Murders went up 39 percent. Fatal overdoses more than doubled. New patterns emerged with race and gender, Black and Native children dying at much higher rates than white children. And the disparities — which had been narrowing — were now widening again. Black kids were mostly shot by other people. Native American kids mostly shot themselves.”
The Times continued. “But guns were at the center of it all, replacing car crashes as the leading killer of kids. Gun deaths alone accounted for almost half of the increase in young people. They are now equivalent to 52 school buses of children crashing each year.”
And things are deteriorating for millions of children that are living in the United States where overall childhood poverty spiked from 5.2 percent in 2021 to 12.4 percent in 2022 and then hit 13.7 percent. This unprecedented spike was a direct consequence of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVA) and all of the Congressional Republicans refusing to renew the Expanded Child Tax Credit, consigning millions of children back into poverty after briefly lifting them out of it briefly during COVID.
Newsweek reported, that in addition to the southern and some western states, that have all traditionally had elevated child poverty rates, we saw a 14 percent rate or higher in states with “high levels of wealth like Texas, California, New York and Florida.”
Digging deeper into county-by-county level data compiled state by state by the United Way that looks at households that live nominally above the outdated federal poverty measure but struggle month to month to survive, we see a dystopian picture of a 21st-century feudalism taking hold.
In the Bronx, 54 percent of the households live below poverty or struggle to cover essentials. In Claiborne Parish, Louisiana 72 percent can’t get by without deprivation. In Hudspeth County, Texas its 75 percent, according to the United Way’s Asset Limited-Income Constrained-but Employed matrix.
Unlike the federal poverty measure conceived in the 1960s, the United Way’s ALICE data points includes the local costs of housing, childcare, energy, transportation, food and other living expenses.
This stress at the bottom was happening as wealth concentration at the very top was accelerating. Inequality.org reports that four years ago, the U.S. had 614 billionaires with an aggregate wealth of $2.947 trillion. By March of this year, there were 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion, an astounding 87.6 percent jump.
Meanwhile, the incoming Trump appointees vow to shred the already anemic social safety net through which too children are already falling through.
