Guest AuthorI made the mistake of telling Emeline, the 3-year-old, what we were getting her mother for Christmas.
“Earrings. But don’t tell her. It’s a surprise,” I said, naively.
“Okay, Dad. But I’m not such a good secret-keeper.”
This, unfortunately, turned out to be true. An hour after dinner, she couldn’t contain herself. The beans were spilled.
Just before dinner, I sat her down at the computer to
show her the earrings I was probably going to order.
Emeline approved, and then a brief but interesting conversation about Christmas being a time of giving, sharing and love ensued. These are tougher concepts to communicate to a young person than you might think, but the general idea was met with some acceptance, and was then lost to the distraction of the Elf on a Shelf.
We are people who believe in public service, who believe in giving what you can — and not just during the holidays — who appreciate the things we have worked for, and recognize that there are too many who have not been given the same opportunities. This is not really about politics, though I am well aware there are people who believe that those with less are some sort of opportunists, living off government largesse. The myth of Reagan’s “welfare queens” persists.
I am not sure how anyone, regardless of political affiliation, could read the impressive New York Times series on homeless children (and specifically the tribulations of a homeless New York child named Dasani), and believe these young people are freeloaders, out to scam honest taxpayers.
Reading about the relentless criticism of the poor, you get the sense we have become numb to things that should always cause us collective pain.
House and Senate leaders have apparently reached a budget deal, but a scan of the Washington Post report shows there is no emergency funding to end the unspeakable shame of children living without a home in America. Congratulations, I guess, to the Congress for, well, doing what it is supposed to do.
Meanwhile, from a couple of months ago, the Post reported in one of its back pages that there were a record number of homeless children enrolled in public schools.
Of course the leadership in Congress was happy just to get to a deal, much less address what amounts to a national crisis.
In other distractions, a world leader shook hands with another world leader, and then took a selfie. It is our collective Elf on the Shelf, the patience and attention of a 3-year-old, unable to focus for long on the hard truth that a significant portion of our national future lives in squalor.
One in 45 children experiences homelessness in America every year — that’s more than 1.5 million. These are children who are at risk for a range of troubling health issues, who inevitably remain behind in school, and who, generally speaking, never catch up to their peers.
It is a reality that ought to defy distraction, a cold truth that demands the intervention of serious policy professionals.
Emeline was the first to sign up to bring cookies for the holiday party they’re hosting at her school. And she couldn’t keep the secret from her mother because, well, she’s 3 and just the idea of giving her mother something special was too much to contain.
In other words, she is still learning the true meaning of the holidays, of what it means to give, of what it means to have a responsibility to others. I’ll spare her the statistics on homeless children… for now.
Will we continue to spare ourselves?
