Equitys
Equity
2 Samuel 12:1-7
So, back in the day, one of my favorite things to do at the old Lake Forest Hospital was to stop by the hospital’s nursery and check out the babies. They were behind glass so you could look but you could not touch. Still, you can stand there and marvel at new life. I was especially likely to do this if what had brought me to the hospital was the end of a life. Often, in the midst of caring for that person, I would here the lullaby song that a new baby had been born. It felt like life, itself, were calling to me.
The truth, of course, in a hospital like that was that those babies, in some respects, probably already had a “leg up.” Their parents probably had the insurance to pay not only for their delivery but for the pediatric care that would put them on the right developmental path. They probably weren’t going to be struggling for food or shelter. They were likely going to be surrounded by books and educational toys and educated people. The schools that they would some day attend were likely to be top notch. They were going to have to do all the work that everyone has to do to grow up but they were going to have “the wind at their backs” when it came to support.
You wouldn’t have to travel far to be in a very different situation. A few minutes from Lake Forest, in another hospital nursery, there would no doubt also be parents who loved their newborn child. However, food and medical care and educational resources and a host of other things might be much more scarce. Even just the safety of the world they entered might be vastly different. Was there money in their home for the plugs that covered the electrical outlets in the wall? Would they have access to the nutrition that their brains needed as they grew? Would their parents even be able to afford the best car seat for the journey home?
A member of our church, on behalf of a foundation, put together an intervention in Lake County on behalf of newborns. They identified the community with the slowest developmental scores for children entering kindergarten. The program they developed provided resources from birth for at risk families. The promise was that all school fees would be covered for children if their families joined this program. If they joined they received, among other things, medical care, nutritional advice, and parenting classes. When the first “cohort” of newborns became entering kindergartners, their test scores were profoundly higher than earlier groups.
This is “equity.” Babies don’t get to pick their families. By the time they are born, some of those children have already been exposed to drugs and alcohol or are carried by mothers who have no access to prenatal care. Their parents are born into a particular social and economic point in our society, a point which is determined by the complex combination or luck and hard work and a great deal of forces larger than any one of us. It’s not the baby’s fault or the parents’ fault if that “point” where they land is a tough one. It just “is what it is.” But, if you’re standing there and looking through that nursery window, it’s hard not to pick one of those infants and think, “What would it take to help him or her?”
Of course, it’s completely unfair of me to pick a newborn, right? After all, who doesn’t love babies? Who wouldn’t do whatever we can to help? When we are looking at inequities among teenagers or young adults or grown ups, our views become easily clouded. It’s easier for us to make excuses for society or to find ways to blame those people. These people are still children of God, still our neighbors whom we are called to love, still our brothers and sisters. However, they don’t haunt us quite the same way. If you really look at a baby and really consider their circumstances, it’s tough to look away and just forget.
(This, perhaps not surprisingly from a guy like me, is my “beef” with folks who care so much about a baby before it’s born and then work so hard to do away with Head Start programs and supplemental nutrition programs and health care supports for children once they are born. In many states, we are more than willing to tell women what they are required to do by law now that they are pregnant. Then, we are more than willing to turn on backs on those women and their newborn children.)
The bottom line is that some people get the “short end of the stick” in life. Some people overcome those deficits, usually because someone intervened on their behalf. The child in an abusive family had a teacher at school who cared. The child who had almost no food at home got to have breakfast and lunch at school and took home a backpack of food for the weekend, thanks to a combination of government and church programs. The child who had gifts—in sports, or music, or academics—found a mentor who helped them excel. These needs are a giant argument for all of us to keep our eyes open for ways that we might help. However, such needs and the stories we hear of unlikely successes ought to also lead us to an equal awareness that too many children fall through the cracks. The program that “saved” this child in my city or my state may not exist in another city or state. The child who is the last story on the evening newscast because their story makes us feel so good, may be surrounded by twenty other children who weren’t so fortunate.
If I were just making an argument on the basis of self-interest or national interest—a purely mercenary case—I would argue that it’s not in our interest to waste children’s lives. We should make sure that they have everything they need for their first five years of life because if we don’t we all will pay the price for their brains not having developed, for their skills and talents being lost, for their promise to contribute to our shared future being foiled. When you reduce their SNAP benefits from $2.00 to $1.30 per meal, when you knock their families off Medicaid, when you get rid of preschool opportunities, we are all just going to pay more down the road.
The problem is that this “mercenary” argument, though pragmatic, completely ignores the deeper moral point. Let me put this this way. If you are a Marine, one of the first things that you will learn is that no Marine is ever left behind. There is a fundamental loyalty and fidelity—a brother and sisterhood—on which trust is built. It is not even an option to consider abandoning each other. So, if that’s true for the Marines, why wouldn’t the same thing be true for every child in this country? We can’t afford to leave any child behind, not because it will cost us more if we do but because if we abandon children to save ourselves some money or give someone else a tax break, we will damage both the moral fabric of ourselves and our nation.
Tired of the troubles of the present day? I want you to meet Nathan. Nathan lives in Israel in the heyday of King David’s reign. King David is a legend. As a teenager, he rose and faced down Goliath. What courage! As a young man, he would soothe King Saul in Saul’s worst moments of depression by playing the “secret chord” that only he could play. What talent! David survived Saul’s attempts to slay him and eventually became the king himself. As a king, he was wise and an inspiration to everyone and, it turns out, he wasn’t “hard on the eyes,” either. David was the king that everyone dreamed that they would have and the king whom subsequent generations would dream of having again.
David, though, like every human being, was vulnerable. The man who seemed “bullet proof” took a hit on the day when he spied Bathsheba bathing on a nearby roof. From that point on, the power that he had been given in trust, that he had proven trustworthy to hold over the years, became a license to act out of sheer self-interest. Though she was married, David did whatever it took to sleep with Bathsheba. And when she got pregnant, David did everything he could to bring Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah—a faithful soldier—back from battle to be with Bathsheba so it would look like Uriah was the father. However, Uriah refused to sleep with his wife while his fellow soldiers were still fighting. David, the great king, sent Uriah back to the front with sealed orders to Uriah’s commander to see to it that Uriah died in battle.
Nathan, an average, every day normal guy, comes to David, the king with a legal complaint. David, who loved being a judge, said, “Do tell!” Nathan weaved a tale about a poor man who had next to nothing but loved his family and had one sheep whom he practically treated like family, too. It seems there was a rich guy who had a visitor but he didn’t want to slaughter one of his own sheep to throw the obligatory welcome dinner. So, what did he do? He seized the poor man’s sheep instead.
David is outraged! No man will get away with this in his kingdom! What kind of person was this man, any way? Nathan, the average everyday normal man becomes a prophet and speaks the truth to power: “You are that man!” David, to his credit, does not kill the messenger. Instead, he unravels in shame for the terrible things he had done to Uriah.
Power and privilege blind us. We hear one good story about someone overcoming the odds and convince ourselves that if that person could do that then we don’t need to worry about the rest. We see a person without housing, or hear about a child without enough food, or we learn about a woman who is trapped as a mother in an abusive relationship and work hard to find some way to let that moment pass. We hear a story about someone who abused a system that was designed to help people and we think to ourselves that all of the people on the program was just be scamming us.
Then, someone—some “Nathan,” if you will, dares to speak the truth to us. We’re no king, that’s for sure. However, we know, deep in our hearts, that there are millions of people in this world who would feel like kings if they got to live our lives for a day. This “Nathan” tells us the truth and the point isn’t to feel bad about ourselves. The point is to ask ourselves, “So did I do what I could do? Did I really see the needs of the people around me, those who are so much less fortunate, and do something to make things just a bit more equitable and fair?”