THE REFUGEE CRISIS--WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY DEMAND

 The Refugee Crisis--What Does Christianity Demand? 

I am wrestling with this question, challenge, dilemma--call it what you will. It is a classic dilemma: trying to reconcile two "goods". Here are my thoughts. I am praying that our world leaders will reach the right conclusions. 

We know what the bible says. We know if the mantra, "Everyone Counts", means anything we in the United States need to play a leading role helping those women and men fleeing to save their lives and their children's lives from persecution. 

At the same time, governments owe their citizens and their families a safe environment. Governments should not take action which they believe introduce risk of murder of their citizens of the kind that took place in Paris last week. That means as we accept people into our country or any country we should be as sure as humanly possible through our vetting process that they will not do harm. In fact, the vetting process already in place, is extremely rigorous, especially for refugees from Syria. The average clearance time is 18-24 months. As many as 10 U.S Agencies are involved before the refugee is cleared to come to the U.S.

So what concretely do I believe is required of the U.S. and other nations:

1. All nations (West, Arab, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Syria, etc.) under the auspices of the United Nations or other broad based coalition must work together to achieve: a) a cease fire and then political settlement in Syria which will bring a halt to the Civil War and b) marshal the forces to eliminate the ISIS plague and the threat it represents to the civilized world. This is also essential to stop the outward flow of refugees  and enable those who have already left to safely return. We must set aside past grievances, real or manufactured, to do these two things. Specifically, we must work with Russia and, yes, Iran to that end. The discussions in Vienna are encouraging. We must use our leverage to demand participation by Saudi and other Arab nations. 

2. These same nations under the auspices of the United Nations or other broad coalition should create a plan to: 

a) support (and I mean really support) the refugees who have already left their home to locate in a safe location as close as possible to Syria until they can return to their home. This will probably require establishment of "safe zones" protected by joint forces including NATO, Russia, Turkey, Iran and others nations. It will be necessary to give much more financial support to the countries neighboring Syria (e.g. Jordan) to make this possible.  Following the achievement of a political settlement we will need a Marshall Plan like effort to rebuild the infrastructure of Syria to permit a return to viable life. Doing this has to be predicated on a political settlement and the elimination of the ISIS plague. It will require a massive investment far beyond what has been done to date; 

b) continue to draw on the best intelligence and security experts in the world to ensure that the Syrians who have already sought or are seeking asylum in other countries can be "vetted"  to assure they do not pose a threat to the local populations. As I wrote above, my reading indicates that the vetting process for our country is already extremely rigorous and steps will continue to be taken to make it stronger. We will never achieve "zero risk" on this anymore than we can achieve that with our own indigenous population but we have to provide convincing assurance that the risk is minimal. We have to recognize that this will delay and probably limit the number of immigrants who can be accepted. But we should not lead this to turn our back on playing the role we should in aiding those most threatened. We turned our backs before as sadly described in the article below. Let's not have it happen again on our  watch. 

Stepping back we should recognize and ACT on this as the greatest global crisis since WWII other than perhaps the threat of nuclear annihilation . If there ever was a reason for the United Nations or the G-20 to exist this is it. If there ever was a reason for the nations of the world to unite this is it. 

No one should be using this crisis to try to gain political advantage, for example in the U.S. Presidential campaign or anywhere else. 

People should get the facts on the refugee clearance process before shooting from the hip and calling for a ban on immigration.

Let us act on the best evidence of what we know to be true in protecting lives--all lives. 

ope’s fear of Muslim refugees echoes rhetoric of 1930s anti-Semitism

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By Ishaan Tharoor September 2  

A migrant shouts next to Macedonian policemen as she waits to cross the borders from northern Greece to southern Macedonia, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2015. (AP Photo/Giannis Papanikos)

A humanitarian crisis of historic proportions has been growing in Europe, as hundreds of thousands of refugees and economic migrants from the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia have crossed the continent's borders this year alone.

The scale of the influx is now well-documented. According to the European Union's border agency, some 340,000 migrants crossed its borders in first seven months of 2015; in July, the figure was on its own an astonishing 107,500 people. The majority of those making the hazardous crossing across the eastern Mediterranean are Syrian refugees, displaced by a horrifying, grinding civil war that has forced roughly half of the country's population out of their homes.

According to U.N. figures, the current global levels of displacement have not been matched since World War II. In 2014, the number of refugees, asylum-seekers and people forced to flee within their country surged to nearly 60 million people.

[Britain takes in so few refugees they could fit on a subway train.]

It's hard to grasp the scope of this in real terms -- a nation of the displaced -- but it's been hideously dramatized in recent news. Desperate refugees and migrants, at the mercy of smugglers and human traffickers, have been confronted by walls and soldiers, have drowned in the Mediterranean, and suffocated in the back of trucks.

Over the past year, many in Europe have bristled at the influx -- from far-right political movements and fear-mongering tabloids to established politicians and leaders. The resentment has to do, in part, with the burden of coping with the refugees. But it's also activated a good amount of latent xenophobia--leading to anti-Islam protests, attacks on asylum centers and a good deal of bigoted bluster.

Some governments in Eastern Europe have even specifically indicated they don't want to accommodate non-Christian refugees, out of supposed fear over the ability of Muslims to integrate into Western society.

"Refugees are fleeing fear," urged a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency last week. "Refugees are not to be feared."

It's important to recognize that this is hardly the first time the West has warily eyed masses of refugees. And while some characterize Muslim arrivals as a supposedly unique threat, the xenophobia of the present carries direct echoes of a very different moment: The years before World War II, when tens of thousands of German Jews were compelled to flee Nazi Germany.

Consider this 1938 article in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid still known for its bouts of right-wing populism. Its headline warned of "German Jews Pouring Into This Country." And it began as follows:

"The way stateless Jews and Germans are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage. I intend to enforce the law to the fullest."

In these words, Mr Herbert Metcalde, the Old Street Magistrate yesterday referred to the number of aliens entering this country through the 'back door' -- a problem to which The Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.

The number of aliens entering this country can be seen by the number of prosecutions in recent months. It is very difficult for the alien to escape the increasing vigilance of the police and port authorities.

Even if aliens manage to break through the defences, it is not long before they are caught and deported.

No matter the alarming rhetoric of Hitler's fascist state -- and the growing acts of violence against Jews and others -- popular sentiment in Western Europe and the United States was largely indifferent to the plight of German Jews.

"Of all the groups in the 20th century," write the authors of the 1999 book, "Refugees in the Age of Genocide," "refugees from Nazism are now widely and popularly perceived as 'genuine', but at the time German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews were treated with ambivalence and outright hostility as well as sympathy."

Part of that hostility was fueled, as some of the European grievances are now, by stereotypes of the refugees as harbingers of a dangerous ideology, in this instance communism and anarchist violence.

There were also economic concerns. The world was coming off the Great Depression. In France alone, there were a million people unemployed. Resentment against French and foreign Jews (large numbers from Germany and Romania had arrived by the early 1930s) led to "a new wave of antisemitism," detailed by a report put out by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Chamber of Commerce of the city of Metz, for example, grumbled in 1933 that "highly undesirable" Jews "have become a veritable plague for honest French merchants." By 1935, the then French government enacted a series of quotas on certain professions -- effectively blocking Jews out. This was a precursor for the more pernicious and deadly forms of antisemitism to come.

In Britain, as a 2002 article in the Guardian recounts, perhaps as many as half a million German Jewish asylum seekers were turned away by authorities ahead of the outbreak of World War II. Many who were admitted in were given asylum less out of altruism than a need to fill low-paying domestic work "spurned by the native British." The situation was no better elsewhere:

Canada accommodated only 5,000 European Jews between 1933 and 1945, Australia 10,000, South Africa some 6,000. And the US's unyielding quota system meant that, between 1933 and 1937, only 33,000 German Jews were admitted (and only 124,000 between 1938 and 1941).

Meanwhile, those trapped within Nazi-controlled Europe faced the horrors of the Holocaust. Millions were systematically killed. Yet it was only in 1944, when the extent of the genocide had become better known, that the United States made a real effort to rescue European Jews. Even during World War II, let alone before it started, antisemitism was rife in American political and public life.

Unwanted foreigners have always caused consternation among a section of any society. Thankfully, there's an equally vociferous chorus in Europe currently championing the plight of Syrian refugees, and urging others to help make a new home for those displaced by conflict and other hardships.

Everyone deserves the chance to live a better life, activists argue.

THE DEMISE OF CIVILITY AND NEED FOR A COMMOM PURPOSE

The Demise of Civility and the Need for a Common, Unifying Purpose

I’ve lived long enough and read enough history books to know that the vilification of political opponents and those who disagree with us is not new.  We have seen it before and we’ll see it again.

Especially with our two-party system, we are always going to have disagreements on policy and on philosophy and values, too.  That is healthy.  It is human, and it makes for progress.

However, recent events, marked by the broadside pronouncements of Donald Trump and the prosecutorial-like questioning of Hillary Clinton in the House Sub-Committee’s hearing on Benghazi last month, has brought the issue front and center for me in a more dramatic way.

The polarization of discussion has moved beyond what can be considered healthy.  It has moved to vilifying groups of people (e.g., immigrants and Muslims) and to character assassination (e.g., disloyalty to the country and accusations of outright lying).

I wouldn’t take the time to write this if the only thing that worried me about it was the distaste for uncivil and disrespectful discourse.  It is something much more important than that which concerns me.

I am concerned that this kind of attitude creates adversarial relationships that prevent us from working together to resolve the most important issues facing our nation, such as how do we help all young people grow up to be productive adults, stimulate greater growth in our economy, and advance policies and actions that make for a safer world.

It is also turning people off.  This back-biting discourse is one of the reasons voter turnout is at depressingly low levels.

What, I have asked myself, is driving this polarization, and increasing level of uncivil, disrespectful discourse?  I suspect one driver is what has always been with us:  the desire to show “we are right”—the desire to lift ourselves up versus “others” to prove our self-worth.

But there is something else, I believe.  There is the lack of a common, unifying purpose – a robust vision of what we can be as a country and what we can be as a world, for all people.  To be sure, there has never been a point in history when the people of our nation or perhaps any nation were in unanimous agreement on what such a vision would be.  But there have been times where there has been the leadership and vision that has brought the majority of people together.

When those times have been will vary in the eye of the beholder and as interpreted by historians, it will have varied over time.  I will not weigh in on that here.  What I will weigh in on is the conviction that there have been many times when our national leaders, in the Presidential Administration and our Houses of Congress, have worked together without the personal venom we see today and with the conviction that compromise is not equivalent to selling out one’s soul--that, indeed, compromise is essential to achieving outcomes to advance the most important needs and opportunities in our nation.

There is a substantive reason for the change I’m describing, and that is the genuine widening in what a majority of the Republican Party and of the Democratic Party view as the proper role of government in people’s lives.  It goes beyond the scope of this short paper to trace the magnitude of that gap over time.  It would be interesting in this regard to compare the party platforms in different presidential cycles over the past 150 years or so to note the differences that exist, large or small.  Whatever, perhaps exacerbated by gerrymandering and the role of money in elections, the gap in the judged proper role of government held by the majorities of our two parties has widened a great deal over the last 50 years.  As one illustration and drawing from Tim Wise’s excellent book, “Under the Affluence,” I cite this section of the 1956 Republican Party platform: 

“We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs:

            --expansion of social security

            --broadened coverage in unemployment insurance

            --improved housing

            --better health protection for all our people 

We are determined that our government remain morally responsive to the urgent social and economic problems of our people.”

Later, in the same platform, the GOP bragged about the fact that, under the leadership of President Eisenhower, “The federal minimum wage has been raised for more than 2 million workers.  Social security has been extended to an additional 10 million workers, and the benefits raised for 6-1/2 million.”  Going even further, Republicans trumpeted the fact that union membership was up 2 million since 1952 and, later, the platform called for “equal pay for equal work, regardless of sex.”

How does one explain the tremendous difference in position between that platform and mainstream GOP ideology today?  Reading Wise’s book leads me to believe a key reason was that the social benefits, coming after World War II, were seen and in fact were benefiting the broad middle class, the great majority of the population, whereas today, quite incorrectly as it turns out, government support is portrayed by the majority of the members of the Republican Party as going to people who are “less deserving,” who perhaps just haven’t worked hard enough or have gotten themselves into trouble.  In too many ways, government support plans (unlike, say, the GI Bill and housing support which drove the improvement of life and the overall economy so strongly following World War II) are seen to be going to a small minority.  In fact, most of the government-provided benefits today, e.g., social security, Medicare, student loans, expanded health coverage and home mortgage interest deductions are going to the broad public.

I wouldn’t want my earlier example of how Hillary Clinton was quizzed in the Sub-Committee hearing to suggest that denigrating the “opposition” is confined to the right or to the Republican Party.  We see it on the left as well.  We are not going to bring this country together or solve the challenges in front of us by pilloring CEOs and their salaries or characterizing Wall Street and banks as the “source of all evil,” as some critics tend to do.

Yes, in general, CEO salaries have gone past the point of reasonableness.  It’s hard to deny that, when you read that the average salary of the CEOs of S&P 500 companies grew from 42 times the average American worker in 1980 to 372 times the average worker in 2014.  And, whatever it is, pay should be calibrated to performance!  But remember:  these CEOs have worked hard to get where they are.  Their jobs are on the line every day.  The average tenure in CEO jobs is less than it has ever been.

So, too, proper regulation of banks and industry are important matters.  But let’s remember two things; our economy would not begin to be what it is today nor where we need it to be in the future if we do not have thriving, innovating corporations, large and small, providing jobs and quality products and good careers for employees. 

Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, like it or not, we are not going to reduce our increasing income inequality by depicting business leaders as corrupt and mean-spirited.  First of all, it’s not generally true; second, we can be sure it will trigger a defensive reaction that will throttle the advance of social policies which are vital to give people of lesser means equal opportunity.

The bottom line is that we need to recognize that we are all in this together.  Not just in some rhetorical kumbaya sense but because if we are not together, we are not going to accomplish what we need to.

In this regard, we need to recognize that we are the common beneficiaries of many government programs.  The idea that government should be “stamped out,” that less is always better, is a glittering generality that defies knowledge of the realities of life.  Where would we be if we didn’t have government-sponsored research into disease, government-supported infrastructure, social security, or our nation’s defense?  Where would we be if we didn’t have the government underpinning of a law-abiding court system and laws?

Yes, government is sometimes too invasive.  We can ask it to do things that are best done by the private sector.  But this is not an “either/or” issue.  It is a question of choice and balanced judgment based on experience and the particular situation. 

We’ve got to turn away from having government versus non-government become an ideological wedge as opposed to a practical question of how to best provide the benefits that people and society need.

I believe that it will be as we recognize the common benefits being provided by government and by business, while providing constraints where we should, that we will come together as a nation.  That is what characterized the period during my lifetime where we came together more than any other.  That was the period following World War II, when our middle class was growing, benefiting from such government programs as the GI Bill and home loans and while corporate America was booming.

We are not going to go back to that time.  But there are principles of how we came together and what our common mindset was as evidenced by the Republican platform I cited earlier.  While a reading of the two party platforms in 1956 reveals party conflict, there was far greater agreement on the role government should play in advancing the welfare of the public than there is today.

There are many needs and opportunities in front of us which should draw us together across party lines; -- for example, the development of our children from the very earliest of age, the war against drugs, the growth of our economy, the rationalization of our penal codes and prison system, and the improvement of our infrastructure.

We have to stop pitting one group against another.

Whether you agree with my historical analysis or not, we would all agree in hoping, desperately, that we will achieve a more uniting vision and commitment to work together in the next administration.  Our country and the world need it and the people demand it.

We have great challenges ahead of us.  We will be not meet them unless/until we can work together with a far more mutual respect and trust than we have today.

THE SOCIAL, MORAL AND ECONOMIC IMPERATIVE OF OUR GENERATION

THIS IS A TALK WHICH I GAVE IN MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE IN OCTOBER 2015

The Social, Moral and Economic Imperative of Our Generation

In a sense, I feel I’m speaking to you on behalf of the 7-8 million 3 and 4-year-olds in our nation who today do not have access to quality early childhood experiences.  I am worried yet hopeful – worried about the future of our children and the future of our nation, but hopeful, indeed confident that we can do something about it.

We face an overwhelming imperative – to give every child a fair chance to develop his or her God-given abilities.

I view this as the moral, the social and the economic imperative of our generation.  We must give all our children the fair opportunity to grow up to be educated, independent and contributing citizens.  The future of our nation depends on this.

We talk about a lot of deficits today in this country:  budget deficits, trade deficits, job deficits.  But there is one deficit that impacts all the other deficits and it is the deficit in the early development and education of our youngest, children ages 0-5.  A deficit compared to other countries.  A deficit marked by huge income and racial disparities and a deficit we not only know how to close but do so in a way that makes it a financial no brainer.

I first started to work on early childhood education almost 30 years ago.  We remain far from where we should be.  What makes this particularly alarming is the compelling evidence of the impact which early childhood development has on the life- long future of our nation’s young. 

We know the critical gaps in the development of our young adult population:  

Our high school dropout rate is 20%, almost exactly what is was a quarter century ago and it is 40% in many major metro areas. This at a time when an estimated 70% of new jobs will require MORE than a high school education.  No wonder that, in a nation with 10 million unemployed, we have 4 million jobs that can’t be filled with qualified candidates. 

The consequences of being a high school dropout are worse than ever, and they are multi-generational.  Unemployment rates in double digits.  Too little income to support a family.  And it effects the next generation.  Only five percent of non-high school graduates have children who went on to college.  And I cannot get out of my mind that about 70% of the incarcerated men and women in our nation, a nation having the highest incarceration rates in the world, are high school dropouts.  This is tragedy of the highest order.

The root causes of high school drop-outs go way back. 

They go back to whether a child is ready for kindergarten.  Less than half of the children are and poverty makes the decisive difference.  On learning proficiency, we know that our students invariably end up in the bottom half of those tested among all developed nations.  But did you know that the students from the wealthiest families score above all other nations while those from the poorest districts scored the lowest.  Here we witness one of the tragic symptoms of the plague of poverty.

And it goes on.  A generation ago we led the world in the percentage of young adults who had completed college.  In one generation we slipped to 12^th.  And here again, poverty is taking its toll.  Less than 10% of children born into the lowest income quintile will go on to college.

The sad fact is that over 25% of our young people today are simply not developing the workforce and career readiness that we would want, that we would demand, for any one of our children.

Ladies and gentlemen, believe me, it doesn’t have to be this way. We cannot allow it to remain this way. Not if we are to be the Nation we aspire to be.

The last decade has brought us compelling evidence that quality early childhood experience for our children makes a lifelong difference. 

What is that evidence I refer to:

1.     It starts with the undeniable fact that 90% of brain growth, affecting not only cognitive skills but emotional health, occurs in the first five years of life.

2.     Of greatest importance to someone like me who has spent a lifetime trying to ferret out and act on data, we now can document the direct, tightly linked, on-going impact of quality early childhood experience to a) being ready for kindergarten, then on b) reading proficiently in the third grade and that, in turn, on c) graduating from high school and all of life that follows.

 Let me explain. Experience in Southwest Ohio over the past decade shows that 86% of those children who tested “ready for kindergarten” were reading proficiently by the end of the third grade compared to only 59% of those students who were not ready. 

Statistics like this can be mind-numbing but think with me for a moment what would it feel like as a child to be in a class and not be able to read like your fellow students. You feel out of it; inferior; different. So what do you do?  You struggle. You withdraw.  You may opt out. And sadly a lot of students do opt out. Right out of school.  We know that those students not reading proficiently are 4 times more likely to drop out before completing high school; and if they were poor, they were 11 times more likely to drop out. 

3.     Now, and this is vitally important, we now know that quality early childhood experience can help children from all families, including the very poorest families, be ready for kindergarten and hence be reading proficiently by the third grade.  Let me tell you my story of the maps. 

Deeply concerned about the impact of poverty on kindergarten readiness, I compared two maps—one showing kindergarten readiness scores and the other, income levels- for each of the neighborhoods in Greater Cincinnati. The picture that emerged was just what you would expect: almost a direct correlation between the two.  But there were some exceptions. One was Winton Woods, one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Cincinnati, made up almost entirely of government subsidized housing.  Here I found students having kindergarten readiness scores about equal to the highest income neighborhoods. I wanted to understand why. 

What I discovered was a quality pre-kindergarten school with dedicated, well-trained teachers; I observed young children who couldn’t care less that I was in their class room and lots of parent involvement. Not only that, this school reached out to make sure families had other support they needed like health care and food for the table.  The experience in Winton Woods is no exception. We now have statistical evidence that children from the very poorest families can be on a path to success if they are given a quality early childhood experience. 

4.     There are many reasons why business folks like me care deeply about this issue. One is that we are competitive people. We become paranoid when we see someone else doing something better than we are which we know is fundamental for our long-term success. That’s what we see happening now on early childhood experience. We see other developed countries providing 90% of their 4 year olds with quality pre-K while we are covering less than half and maybe as low as 25%. We see China committing to have 70% of its children having not one, not two, but three years of pre-K by the year 2020. Yes, other countries are getting it; and we better, too. The reality is that most families in the United States cannot afford quality pre-K for their children. The cost represents over 25% of the average family’s income. It is wrong, it is unfair for a child’s future to be so influenced by their family’s income, by the zip code in which they are born. We talk in our country today about the widening gap between those with wealth and those without. And it is getting to all-time record levels, with the top 10% accounting for 70% of total wealth. Views on the importance of this will differ but there is one thing we should all be able to agree on:  every child should have a fair chance to make the most of their life by having a fair start.

5.     We have learned something else that explains why hundreds of business leaders like me are doing all we can to provide early childhood experiences for every child.  Put bluntly, it is a financial no-brainer. One study after another--and I have personally reviewed dozens of them-- prove that the cost of quality pre-K at about $8,000 per year pays for itself many fold, at least 2 to 1. Why? Because of the higher taxes that come from higher incomes and from the lower costs of special education, repeat grades, social welfare, health care and incarceration which too often follow those students who fall out of the system. 

I have had people ask me why, in light of all these facts, is it taking so long to provide funding for quality early childhood experience for all children. One reason is that much of the evidence I have cited is relatively recent. Another is that the "voice" of those most affected is faint. Another is that there have been a few studies that have indicated that the cognitive benefits provided by pre-K tend to fade out in time. 

Without going into a lot of detail, the overwhelming majority of studies do underscore the cognitive benefit.  But beyond that, too many analyses miss the lasting impact of quality childhood experience on a child’s emotional and social development. Let me tell you a quick story. I happened to be outside a museum in Cincinnati last spring and saw a group of about 30 kindergarteners from one of our poorest schools eating lunch. Their teachers were sitting together at a nearby table. I went up to the teachers and asked if any of the children in the group had attended pre-Kindergarten. Yes, about 4-5 had they told me. I then asked whether they could they see a difference in the children who had had pre-K and those that didn't. The teachers’ reaction was immediate and electric. They almost arose from their seats. Indeed it did, they exclaimed. I asked in what way. The answer was not what I expected. It was not that they could read more letters or count more numbers. It was that they were willing to share; stay focused on task; work in a group, follow direction; not act out. 

Experts agree it is this impact of social and emotional development in addition to cognitive learning that explains why studies conducted over 20+ and more years show that quality pre-K makes life-long differences in employment, income level, family formation and health. 

Is quality pre-K a magic bullet? No.  I have yet to find one of those. But it is the single most effective and financially rewarding intervention we can make to help all children develop into productive fulfilled adults. 

I liken quality pre-K to a vaccine which, even though not a total or universal cure, makes a life-changing difference for a significant number of children. What’s more, the cost of this vaccine is paid back many times. Yet, despite these facts, we are unconscionably failing to provide this vaccine to over half of our children.  This is crazy. We say it all the time:  our future lies with our children. Yet, we are failing to act on that truth.  

Doing so will require more money. However, not only will this investment come back to us financially; we should keep the cost in perspective. Funding quality pre-K for every 4-year-old in America represents only about 5% of our defense budget.  Even more pointedly, the cost of providing quality development experience to over 5 million four-year-olds is half of what is spent on incarcerating 2.3 million men and women each year.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me sum it up simply.  We need to act on what we have learned works if we are to be the Nation we aspire to be – economically, socially and morally.  I choose the word “morally” intentionally.  I do not see how we can any longer honor this sober promise of our Declaration of Independence if we do not honor what we now know to be true.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

I believe we have reached the point of having the knowledge and the experience to assert that it is the inalienable right of every child to have the quality learning experience during the most important development stage of their life, ages 0-5, that provides them a fair chance to be all they can be.

++++++++++++

I will close my remarks with some good news and a challenge.  The public gets it.  Poll after poll shows that strong majorities of all parties agree on the need to fund quality early childhood development for all children.

And coverage is expanding, albeit slowly.  Governors from over 30 states, red and blue, increased funding in the most recent budget cycle.  An increasing number of cities, including Denver, San Antonio, now New York, are providing universal coverage.  Cincinnati has committed to do the same.

Yes there is momentum.  For the first time, I am convinced universal coverage will happen.  But we have a long, long way to go.  Only about 25% of 3 or 4-year-olds today receive the benefit of quality early childhood experience.  With the evidence in hand, that borders on being criminal.

The time to act is now, here in New Hampshire and across the country.  I challenge you to learn enough about early childhood development that you can become a fierce advocate for its expansion, with your friends, with the business community, with your legislators.  Lobby every government leader you can to provide the funding needed to expand quality early childhood development experiences to all families and all children.  Ask them where they stand on this issue.  Let them know that if they don’t support it, they won’t have your support.  Tell them that loudly and clearly.  Tell them to do it now.  Tell them if we do not do this, we won’t have the community, the nation, the future we need and aspire to.  That is the plain and simple truth.  If not we, who?  If not now, when?  Our children, our community, our very nation are counting on us.

Theodore Roosevelt said something on October 12, 1912 at Madison Square Garden that should inspire us today:  “Perhaps once in a generation there comes a chance for people of a country to play their part wisely and fearlessly in some great battle of the age-long warfare for human rights.  We know there are in life injustices which we are powerless to remedy, but we also know that there is much injustice which can be remedied.  We propose to lift the burdens from the poor and the oppressed.  We propose to stand for the sacred rights of childhood.” 

That is what we are talking about today, Ladies and Gentlemen.  Let us join together to provide the same fair opportunity for all children that we would spend our every dollar and ounce of effort to provide for our children and grandchildren.

Let us give every child a fair chance.  This is the moral, social and economic imperative of our generation.