OT THE WAR WE SHOULD BE FIGHTING... More Excerpts from "Amazing Grace" by Jonathan Kozol

David's mother goes into the hospital again in February. This time,
she's held for four nights in a downstairs corridor before a bed is
free.

"I took her there on Monday," David tells me on the phone. "It was one
of those bad nights. We got there at seven, but it was so crowded there
was no place to lie down. She sat up for five hours. Then at midnight I
went to a nurse and said she needed to lie down.

"The nurse got mad and snapped at me. She said, 'I can't grant your
request.' My mother had to sit there until three A.M. At three they put
her on a stretcher and a doctor looked at her. He said she needed
X-rays but he said that there was no one free to do them. She didn't
get the X-ray for two days.

"She spent another three nights down there on the stretcher in the
hallway. When they finally found a room for her, she suddenly began to
shiver and her hands were cold. They didn't have no blankets. They ran
out. I took a blanket to her today. No curtains. So they put a sheet
over the window.

"They said the diagnosis was pneumonia and a blood clot in her lungs.
She's on oxygen and an IV. It's six days since she went in."

Alone at home, he mentions it's his birthday. I ask him if she finally
got approved for SSI.

"No, she was turned down again," he says. "Her doctor said he was
surprised."

"What was the reason that they gave?"

"They say she isn't sick enough," he answers.

The following week, when his mother has regained her appetite, David
and his sister take turns cooking food for her because, as he explains,
"the meals served in the hospital are not too good." "You bring her
food?"

"I wrap it in foil so that it stays hot," he says. "I have to make sure
that she eats."

In March, when she's been home for a few weeks, she sends me a long
letter. She doesn't speak of her health or of herself at all but tells
me of a child's accidental death near St. Ann's Church.

"A little boy, an eight-year-old, who lived right near Charlayne, fell
in the elevator shaft of his apartment building. This was a month or so
ago. The little boy died. I think his mother is in jail. Charlayne says
he lived with his grandmother."

In her letter, which comes in an envelope with pictures of blue
geraniums and yellow daisies just over her name in the left corner, she
says that the death of the eight-year-old is being attributed to a
broken elevator door that opened when he leaned against it while he had
been playing in the hallway.

"The city is blaming the family," she writes, "for letting an
eight-year-old go in the hallway. But they got to go out somewhere."
Going outside for youngsters in the building, she explains, means
"going in the hallway" since "the real outside, where they could get
some air, is just too dangerous."

She encloses a clipping from the Daily News that speaks of "garbage
piled five feet high in an airshaft" of the building where the child
died and notes that the telephone company has come to the building "ten
times," in the words of a woman who lives there with three children,
because rats have "eaten through the walls" and "chewed through the
phone lines." In another apartment, the clipping says, the ceiling has
fallen in upon a child's bedroom.

Mrs. Washington also tells me that there have been warnings in the
papers that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who took office two months earlier,
intends to cut back sanitation and inspection services and programs for
children and teenagers, the early stages in what soon will prove to be
wide-sweeping cuts in a variety of services relied on by poor people,
as a consequence of the most drastic cutbacks in the city's budget
since the Great Depression. [That's Rudolph Giuliani, folks, remember
the 9-11 "Hero"]

Subsequent announcements warn the public to expect reductions in
drug-rehabilitation programs-which al ready have a six-month waiting
list and offer care to only one in ten of the half-million heroin and
cocaine addicts in New York, turning away tens of thousands of addicted
people every year-as well as reductions in lead-poisoning prevention
programs and in the control of rats, elimination of programs that help
hungry families in obtaining food stamps, the cancellation of AIDS
services to 600 children and to 16,000 adults, and reductions in the
numbers of orderlies, janitors, security guards, and lab technicians at
the medical facilities that serve the poor, which, says the head of the
city's public hospitals, is going to mean "more frequent" delays in
care and "dirtier hospitals" and longer stays in "waiting areas."

Some people, says the Times, wonder why the city is planning "to cut
services, which would hurt the . . . poorest residents," while once
again planning to cut taxes, "which would help the city's richest."

The paper notes that the AIDS services the mayor intends to cancel were
created to spare the dying from being forced to "wait in long lines."
In a strong editorial, it calls the threatened cancellation of these
services "intolerable" and "inhumane."
A deputy mayor, however, says that these reductions in municipal
expenditures will be "a victory for everybody," and, notes the Times,
on Wall Street the reaction to the mayor's plans is "generally
favorable."

In all, the city intends to lay off 15,000 workers, nearly 5,000 of
them in the agencies that offer social services, which, says a
political analyst in Newsday, "lends an unavoidable racial tincture" to
the mayor's decisions, since the majority of those to be laid off in
social service agencies are black and Hispanic women.

Caseloads of social workers, already as large as 200 children to one
worker in some instances, are certain to grow larger, the newspapers
say. Meanwhile, nearly half the cuts in taxes will, according to
Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger, benefit only the five
percent of the population who have incomes higher than $100,000.

The mayor tells a group of children from a segregated high school that
they'll have to learn to manage without public help. "I think largely
you have to help yourself.... Look at what is there and take advantage
of it," he advises them, but cancels 11,000 city jobs for children of
their age, as well as afterschool programs in which younger children
can be safe while mothers work. He also announces that he wants to
fingerprint welfare recipients in order to be sure they do not file
double applications (which some do) but also, some observers feel, in
order to comply with the desire of conservatives to add a greater
stigma to dependence.

One of the mayor's top deputies proposes that people on welfare in New
York-all "one million, two hundred thousand" of them, he insists, which
includes dependent children-be made to wear "green uniforms" and sent
out on the streets "to pick up papers" and "clean up graffiti"-a plan,
as Mrs. Washington observes, that would place most of the people of
Mott Haven in the same position as the prison inmates who already do
some of these jobs in the South Bronx.

"It's going to make a lot of people feel like they are criminals," she
says, in reference to the plans for uniforms and fingerprinting, both
of which have been reported widely in the news. Speaking of the
promised cuts in hospital funds, she adds, "There's going to be a lot
more blood stained beds."