Chris Jepson: Members of Team America

“Children are the living flowers of the earth, but [some have] the appearance of flowers that have faded prematurely, because they grew in ground where there was no healthy nourishment.” – Maxim Gorky

A bleeding heart liberal? I do not have a particular soft spot in my heart for the entire spectrum of humanity. I don’t. My jaw (my thinking) can set, for example, when I see an impoverished teenage mother with three children. I really do not want to support another man’s offspring. I just don’t.

I am a liberal, not because my heart aches (although, it can) for the problems of my fellow man, but because for me it addresses what kind of society we aspire to be?

Everyone born in the United States is part of Team America. If we do not subscribe to that basic organizing principle, well, to not embrace that societal standard contradicts any definition of what constitutes a just nation. We are equality stakeholders. Equity for all.

Today we are 310 million, on our way to 400 million citizens in the next 35 years, and half a billion people by century’s end. Every one of us, from my perspective, is part of Team America. Can it rationally be any other way?

Consider that. We can argue, as does America’s political right-wing, that “We are not our brother’s keeper.” That essentially it is every American for herself (except, of course, when it comes to her uterus). Intellectually, I understand and appreciate that argument. If we lived in the best of all possible worlds we would all be independent, self-sufficient operators. We’d take care of our own and mind our own business. Live and let live. Ideally, we’d all be responsible citizens and bad things wouldn’t happen to you or your fellow citizen. My Republican father (if alive) would now ask at this point, “What have you been drinking?”

India is what some on the right are OK with America becoming. I see the United States differently.

For that teenage dropout mother, the one pushing a shopping cart full of children, with her belly full of another, not one of her children—not one—asked to be born into poverty with an irresponsible juvenile for a mother. My goodness. Life is about leg-ups, about people who enter our lives and change them for the better. That is what we want for more Americans.

So, to the degree we can, let us “fashion” a society that empowers more of America’s daughters (and sons) to responsibly manage their lives so as to have fewer unintended children. We want a world for our children where the mother and the father capably sustain, nay, more than just sustain, advantage their offspring. How do you approach that challenge? We want, as a culture, to create enriched early childhoods; environments that advance childhood forward.

As a liberal, I consider it wise and pragmatic to collectively discuss how America pursues that objective. To the degree that fewer Americans are born into poverty and more into households of sustaining parents, how do we go about pursuing that objective? Looking 35-50 years out.

A number of America’s challenges have undeniable links to early childhood development. No getting around it.

I recommend fewer babies born into poverty, and for those children who are so born, it behooves us as a culture to wisely consider them our children as well. We are all members of Team America.