OT THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN -- Rats Everywhere -- Excerpts from "Amazing Grace" by Jonathan Kozol

[Context: The affect of the Conservative Agenda on the poor children in
the Bronx, why Latte Liberals are really fascists]


On the phone a few nights later, David spells out an other consequence
that he foresees from cuts in public services. "It means we're going to
see more rats in the South Bronx. I think we have enough already."

"Where do you see rats?" I ask.

"You can't miss them," he replies.

"Rats or mice?"

"Rats," he answers. "Ugly rats. They're almost every where. They come
out even in the daytime."

I ask, "Where do they come from?"

"The biggest ones, the water rats, come out of the Bronx River. At four
P.M. or five P.M., when it's beginning to get dark, you see them coming
out in hordes. Very large rats. You see them right here in the street
outside our building. I don't like to see them. I feel nausea when I
see them.

"A supermarket close to the train station had to be shut down because
there were so many rats. They were tearing open the food boxes. There
used to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken on the corner but they had to close
it because it was rat-infested too. They didn't reopen. There's nothing
left there now except an empty store."

He speaks of the threatened cuts in children's programs and AIDS
services. "The mayor [Rudolph Giuliani, 9/11 "Hero"] says that he needs
to take these things away from us, but we don't need to have these
things taken away from us. Once they're gone, a lot of us are going to
go with them."

His distrust of the mayor is visceral, intense. "I don't like him. I
don't like his ways. I don't like the way he speaks about poor people.
I don't like his eyes. I watch his eyes. There's too much coldness
there."

I ask him if he thinks the mayor is ignorant of how poor people view
him and of what they're going through.

"I don't think he's ignorant. He seems to be well educated, though you
can be educated and still be ignorant, but I don't think he's ignorant.
I think he's cruel."

I say to him something that has frequently been said to me. "There's
always been unfairness in the world. There has always been selfishness.
This isn't something new to the United States, or to New York."

"I don't think it's always been this way," he says. "I don't believe
it. I don't think that there was this much selfishness in olden times,
in Bible days. I think there was more kindness and that people helped
each other more. I would like to see it again but I don't think it's
going to happen. Not any time soon."

I tell him about Cliffie, whom I met last summer at St. Ann's, and
Cliffie's anecdote about the slice of pizza that he handed to a man who
asked for it, because "God told us, 'Share!' "

I ask him if the teenagers he knows speak about God or heaven in this
way.
"Some do. But some are too embarrassed. They're afraid to sound like
children. But it isn't bad to sound like children. Children sometimes
understand things that most grown-ups do not see.

"I like to look at children on the train. You don't see many people who
look friendly on the train. But children do. Some of them do. Some of
them look joyful. Some of them say hello to you, even to strangers. No
one else does. They want to be loved."

David's troubled reactions to the cutbacks taking place now in New York
and his belief that they are linked to selfishness or to a wish for
punishment, as much as to necessity, stand in contrast to the mood
apparent in the words of many downtown financiers and politicians when
they comment on these shifts in social policy.

"In some ways this is a bit of a grand experiment," says the director
of the state Municipal Assistance Corporation, a powerful financial
organization that has pushed hard for the fiscal cuts that have, in
turn, led to these cuts in public services.

New Yorkers are going to have to learn "to make more bricks with less
straw." says another official of the corporation, an investment banker
formerly at Lazard Freres.

The biblical experiment of which they speak does not seem particularly
grand, or wise, or in the long run even cost-efficient, from the point
of view of those who work among the poor; but the reduction in taxes
that the mayor has promised seems to be appealing to the middle class
and affluent, and he is, it seems, reading the mood of the electorate
adeptly.

"All right," concedes Anne Roiphe, a columnist in the New York
Observer. "Out there, someone is sleeping on a grate.... Somewhere in
the parts of town where white powders are served in contaminated
needles, someone is daring fate . . . and the emergency rooms are full
of people...." Still, she says, "cruelty is as natural to the city as
fresh air is to the country.... I used to feel this cruelty was wrong,
immoral.... Now I don't know. Maybe it's the fuel that powers the
palace."

Encouraged by this state of mind, she says, "I like the wicked clink of
glasses, the light bouncing off the rhinestone clasp . . ., the
chandeliers glinting against the dark. ... Cruelty is part of the
energy, part of the delight.... I want to ... eat good food till the
millennium.... I am feeling full of nerve. Nerve is what you need to
get through. . . . What you must decide is that shame is bearable."

The author, who calls herself "a cold old liberal" in search of a fur
coat, may be right in calling cruelty "the fuel that powers the palace"
of our satisfactions.

Perhaps this has been true in all societies. Tolstoi described a number
of people in St. Petersburg and Moscow who said things like this 100
years ago. Still, the note of self-congratulation in her voice takes
one aback. It sounds as if she views her new found power to feel
comfortable with shame as therapeutic.

If this is what a person who regards herself as liberal is thinking,
what do conservative New Yorkers feel? What will this mean for children
in the Bronx?