It seems nearly everyone is bracing for the sequester cuts to hit. To show his solidarity with families that will be impacted by the cuts, President Obama took a 5 percent pay cut, retroactive to March 1. It seems John Kerry and Chuck Hagel have taken similar cuts. Honestly I can appreciate, in a small way, these efforts to show solidarity with those who will feel the budgets cuts. But I'm still enraged that nothing has been done to course-correct these measures.
I am a mother of a boy with Down Syndrome. He is six, and we are early in our journey of traversing the ups and downs of his education and development. Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, has been speaking about the impact that the sequestration will have, saying it's going to hurt the kids. And "hurt" is putting it mildly. As a parent who works closely with special-education teachers and other parents of children with special needs, I know firsthand the benefits such instruction, which is specialized in each case, brings to the lives of our children.
As a mom whose son's growth and well-being is reliant on publicly funded benefits, I am deeply concerned about these sequestration cuts. But as a citizen, I'm absolutely infuriated by the way in which our society mishandles the dangers our children face. We debate whether stricter gun laws are a good idea, labeling GMO foods is necessary, and services for the disabled will continue -- but we don't debate whether we should be protecting our kids. Why is this not the topic, when this is the issue?
As I see it, the Tea Party and the current Republican leadership are succeeding in rendering our government powerless to protect those who need it most, as they further the well-being of large private industry and the increased wealth of the wealthy. Families who can afford to send their children to safe schools, who can afford the best-quality food, and who can pay for whatever services their kids need to thrive, have access to those things. While families who don't have the financial means will suffer under the weight of choosing between speech therapy or rent. Forcing families to shop at higher end markets where GMO labeling is available means that those families will pay more for food in order to know what they are putting in their bodies. (Not to mention more for gas, because there's no great number of high-end markets in poor neighborhoods.) What parent wouldn't love the ability to live in a safer community with better-resourced schools? But the sequester cuts mean that an increasing number of Americans will have to make the painful decisions about how and what to provide to their children.
When our government is hamstrung by a group of conservatives myopically focused on furthering the welfare of those with the greatest power, I have to ask, "Who is really showing solidarity with our children?" As a society, we are choosing not to protect our kids, but to provide them with a lesser-quality education, and to expose them to gun violence and genetically modified foods. These children look to us for their care; they look to us for the resources to assist them in becoming adults who can offer something of value to our society. We are failing them and therefore failing ourselves. One day these children will grow up and be ripe for prisons, hospitals, and worker-bee jobs because their intelligence and possibilities were not harnessed in a way that would serve them and those in their communities.