SPARE US THE CHEAP GRACE

By JONATHAN KOZOL

IT IS HARD TO SAY WHAT WAS MORE SHOCKING ABOUT THE death of Elisa Izquierdo--the endless savagery inflicted on her body and mind, or the stubborn inaction of the New York City agencies that were repeatedly informed of her peril. But while the murder of Elisa by her mother is appalling, it is hardly unexpected. In the death zones of America's postmodern ghetto, stripped of jobs and human services and sanitation, plagued by AIDS, tuberculosis, pediatric asthma and endemic clinical depression, largely abandoned by American physicians and devoid of the psychiatric services familiar in most middle-class communities, deaths like these are part of a predictable scenario.

After the headlines of recrimination and pretended shock wear off, we go back to our ordinary lives. Before long, we forget the victims' names. They weren't our children or the children of our neighbors. We do not need to mourn them for too long. But do we have the right to mourn at all? What does it mean when those whom we elect to public office cut back elemental services of life protection for poor children and then show up at the victim's funeral to pay condolence to the relatives and friends? At what point do those of us who have the power to prevent these deaths forfeit the entitlement of mourners?

It is not as if we do not know what might have saved some of these children's lives. We know that intervention programs work when well-trained social workers have a lot of time to dedicate to each and every child. We know that crisis hot lines work best when half of their employees do not burn out and quit each year, and that social workers do a better job when records are computerized instead of being piled up, lost and forgotten on the floor of a back room. We know that when a drug-addicted mother asks for help, as many mothers do, it is essential to provide the help she needs without delay, not after a waiting period of six months to a year, as is common in poor urban neighborhoods.

All these remedies are expensive, and we would demand them if our own children's lives were at stake. And yet we don't demand them for poor children. We wring our hands about the tabloid stories. We castigate the mother. We condemn the social worker. We churn out the familiar criticisms of "bureaucracy" but do not volunteer to use our cleverness to change it. Then the next time an election comes, we vote against the taxes that might make prevention programs possible, while favoring increased expenditures for prisons to incarcerate the children who survive the worst that we have done to them and grow up to be dangerous adults.

What makes this moral contradiction possible?

Can it be, despite our frequent protestations to the contrary, that our society does not particularly value the essential human worth of certain groups of children? Virtually all the victims we are speaking of are very poor black and Hispanic children. We have been told that our economy no longer has much need for people of their caste and color. Best-selling authors have, in recent years, assured us of their limited intelligence and low degree of "civilizational development." As a woman in Arizona said in regard to immigrant kids from Mexico, "I didn't breed them. I don't want to feed them"--a sentiment also heard in reference to black children on talk-radio stations in New York and other cities. "Put them over there," a black teenager told me once, speaking of the way he felt that he and other blacks were viewed by our society. "Pack them tight. Don't think about them. Keep your hands clean. Maybe they'll kill each other off."

I do not know how many people in our nation would confess such contemplations, which offend the elemental mandates of our cultural beliefs and our religions. No matter how severely some among us may condemn the parents of the poor, it has been an axiom of faith in the U.S. that once a child is born, all condemnations are to be set aside. If we now have chosen to betray this faith, what consequences will this have for our collective spirit, for our soul as a society?

There is an agreeable illusion, evidenced in much of the commentary about Elisa, that those of us who witness the abuse of innocence--so long as we are standing at a certain distance--need not feel complicit in these tragedies. But this is the kind of ethical exemption that Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace." Knowledge carries with it certain theological imperatives. The more we know, the harder it becomes to grant ourselves exemption. "Evil exists," a student in the South Bronx told me in the course of a long conversation about ethics and religion in the fall of 1993. "Somebody has power. Pretending that they don't so they don't need to use it to help people--that is my idea of evil."

Like most Americans, I do not tend to think of a society that has been good to me and to my parents as "evil." But when he said that "somebody has power," it was difficult to disagree. It is possible that icy equanimity and a self-pacifying form of moral abdication by the powerful will take more lives in the long run than any single drug-addicted and disordered parent. Elisa Izquierdo's mother killed only one child. The seemingly anesthetized behavior of the U.S. Congress may kill thousands. Now we are told we must "get tougher" with the poor. How much tougher can we get with children who already have so little? How cold is America prepared to be?

Jonathan Kozol is the author of Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.