The Children of Tomorrow--Today

I almost missed it as I read through the Friday New York Times this past weekend.  After all, there is a lot to read, and I also tackle the local Fort Myers News Press on the weekend (I need my weekly fix of comic strips!)  But there on page A19 of the Op-Ed section was a piece by Charles Blow titled "These Children Are Our Future."  It's a good headline.  It caused me to ask, 'what children?" and then to read further.  (I got paid for a while to write headlines--it is a real art form.)

It turns out Blow's column was a summary of a recent piece written by David Murphey, a researcher with Child Trends, an organization devoted to research about children. Murphey had taken a lot of statistical data, crunched it, and then had created a portrait of this year's high school graduates.  If you had a statistically typical graduating class of one hundred American high school students what would they look like?  His answers are startling to say the least!

Seventy-one of them have been physically assaulted at some time over the course of their eighteen years of life.  Ten of them would have been raped.  Maybe that all helps explain why sixteen of them carry a weapon.

Fourteen of them seriously considered suicide over the last year, and six of them actually tried to commit it.

Almost half of them are sexually active--and sixty-four of them have had sexual intercourse.  Twenty-one of them had some sort of sexually transmitted disease over the last year, and one of them had an abortion.

Of the one hundred students in this hypothetical class, twenty-two of them live in poverty, and ten in what Murphey calls deep poverty.

Disturbing details, yes?  And to think these children, as the headline reads, are our future.  That is unsettling enough, but even more so is to imagine their futures as individuals.  Yes, some will overcome the difficulties they have enountered in their childhoods.  Some will overcome the impact of physical violence or rape.  Some will climb out of poverty.  But others will not.  We can't change the childhoods of this year's class--but what can we do for next year's and the one after that and the one after that? 

Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me."  I have no doubt he meant all of the children.  Our care and concern for them must be as deep and as wide as is necessary. 

I encourage you to read Charles Blow's article.  It appeared in the June 14 edition of the Times.  Here's the link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/opinion/blow-these-children-are-our-future.html?_r=0  And then, ask yourself, what can I do to welcome the children of the future today.