False Hope Is Worse Than Despair.

Many Of Us Regard Ourselves As Mildly Liberal Or Centrist Politically, Voice Fairly Pleasant Sentiments About Our Poor Children, Contribute Money To Send Poor Kids To Summer Camp, Feel Benevolent. We're Not Nazis; We're Nice People. We Read Sophisticated Books. We Go To Church. We Go To Synagogue. Meanwhile, We Put Other People's Children Into An Economic And Environmental Death Zone. We Make It Hard For Them To Get Out. We Strip The Place Bare Of Amenities. And We Sit Back And Say To Ourselves, "well, I Hope That They Don't Kill Each Other Off. But If They Do, It's Not My Fault.

We Continue, However, To Write About Important People, Prize-winning People, Blacks Of Grandeur, Women Of Great Fire, Fame Or Wit. We Do Not Write About Ordinary People.

There Is Something Deeply Hypocritical In A Society That Holds An Inner-city Child Only Eight Years Old "accountable" For Her Performance On A High-stakes Standardized Exam But Does Not Hold The High Officials Of Our Government Accountable For Robbing Her Of What They Gave Their Own Kids Six Or Seven Years Before.

Placing The Burden On The Individual To Break Down Doors In Finding Better Education For A Child Is Attractive To Conservatives Because It Reaffirms Their Faith In Individual Ambition And Autonomy. But To Ask An Individual To Break Down Doors That We Have Chained And Bolted In Advance Of His Arrival Is Unfair.

You Have To Remember. . .that For This Little Boy Whom You Have Met, His Life Is Just As Important To Him, As Your Life Is To You. No Matter How Insufficient Or How Shabby It May Seem To Some, It Is The Only One He Has.