03/25/97 - 09:42 AM ET - Click reload often for latest version
At a time when Americans are struggling to see through the political, racial and economic walls that separate them, Jonathan Kozol comes along with a window.
In his 1991 book, Savage Inequalities, Kozol led readers into the nation's poorest schools. Now, in Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (Crown, $24), he takes them to the South Bronx and introduces them to the kids. The setting is the neighborhood surrounding St. Ann's Church, where the Rev. Martha Overall provides spiritual food and moral support to her flock.
Kozol does nothing to sweeten his message. Like an Old Testament patriarch, he rages at what he calls the greed and "theological evil'' of our time.
He describes the neighborhood as bleak, dark, dirty and unsafe. Children die of gunshots or fire or from falling down elevator shafts. They're depressed, stressed and sick. Most have asthma. There is no place for them to play and their schools are appalling.
"How much do we really value the lives of children?'' he asks. "I know most people value their own child's life, but what about other people's children? On the basis of what I've seen in the South Bronx, it's hard to believe we love these children. The physical degradation of their neighborhood, the chaotic and dysfunctional medical care we give them, the apartheid school system we provide them, the poisons we pump into their neighborhood by putting every kind of toxic-waste incinerator in their neighborhood, all that together does not give me the impression we value their lives.''
When America's poor are discussed by politicians, Kozol says, the focus is on "the alleged character defects of the poor. All the emphasis is on questions of their responsibilities for their own suffering. None of the questions are directed at the values and the conscience of the powerful.''
But the ghetto, he says, wasn't created by those who live in it, nor did it spring up by accident. "It was all done by wealthy people, maybe by my Harvard classmates. The question emerges: Whose values should we be examining? No one ever looks at the values of the privileged.''
To his own surprise, Kozol says, "during those days in the South Bronx, I started reading the Bible again. I found I was thinking of heaven all the time. I long to believe there is a heaven because it seems unbearable that the children I met won't have something wonderful for them after they die. The lives we give them in America aren't enough to justify existence.''
He visited the ghetto dozens of times, passing drug dealers and thugs at all hours of the night. He says he knows what real fear is, and he didn't find it in the Bronx.
"I'm far more terrified of the icy equanimity of corporate attorneys in Manhattan than any drug dealers in the South Bronx,'' he says. "Those corporate attorneys are killing far more people and doing it with the illusion of innocence.''
The problem is not beyond our ability to solve, Kozol says. Rather, "we lack the spiritual will to act on what we know. . . . No matter what some racists or hardhearted people think of women of color, the children have done nothing wrong. They've done nothing, and they're too sweet even to hate us. We're allowing them to die.
"There are many decent people in America who feel they haven't done anything wrong. They'll say, 'I didn't kill these children,' and that's true to a degree. It doesn't take acts of intentional destruction nowadays, because the ghetto is already in place. The killing fields are there. We have banished our outcasts to places where the spiritual and physical fields are poisoned. All it takes is equanimity.''
Inevitably, one must ask if there is anything an individual can do to help a situation that seems long past simple solutions. Kozol has an answer:
"First, I think charity is a pretty crummy substitution for justice, but in the present age of governmental cruelty, it may be all we have. I encourage people to get out their checkbook (and) send the largest check you can'' to St. Ann's Church, 295 St. Ann's Ave., Bronx, N.Y. 10454, Attention: Rev. Overall.
"We've created a fund called Remembering Bernardo, in memory of a child who fell down an elevator shaft.''
But there's another, more important step to take, Kozol says. "What I pray most readers will do is go to the nearest synagogue or church, get down on their knees and look into their own hearts. I don't think anything will change until there is a moral revolution in the hearts of decent people.''
By Anita Manning USA TODAY
