Even the 99 percent have to dig deeper

Stories compel. Statistics numb. When I wrote last week about 30,000 children under the age of 5 who died of starvation in drought-ravaged East Africa in 2011, my guess is the number, tragic as it is, did not linger in the mind.

So let us turn our attention instead to one story, featured on the front page of The New York Times last week, about the Democratic Republic of Congo, where families follow a policy of “delestage,” which means children eat every other day. Reporter Adam Nossiter wrote about Cynthia, 15, and Guellor, 13, who would eat that day while their younger brothers and sisters, Benedicte, 3 Josiane, 6, and Manasse, 9, would get no food. Their mother said, “Yes, sure, the small ones ask for food, but we don’t have any.” This in a family where both parents work but don’t earn enough to put food on the table.

Turn off the TV, shut off the cell phone, look away from the computer and consider this for a moment: how it feels to tell your baby she can’t eat today.

In recent weeks, as magazines and TV have featured Person of the Year stories, I realized that for me, the people of the year are children who seem to suffer disproportionately, in good times and bad. It is children who need our advocacy, money and time. Those of us blessed with “enough” may not turn aside the pleas of babies and children who have no one to speak for them.

If charity begins at home for you, consider the conclusions of the Children’s Defense Fund: America’s children fell deeper into poverty in 2011 due to higher unemployment, increasing foreclosures and hunger. One in five children lives in poverty, and two-thirds of these kids have at least one working parent. This is America, not Congo, and yet, according to the Federal Interagency Forum on Children and Family Statistics, some 70 nations have lower infant mortality rates than ours, including Thailand, Costa Rica, Lebanon and Serbia.

More than 61 percent of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders are reading and doing math below their grade level. For black and Hispanic children, who will be in the majority by 2019, 80 percent perform below grade level. Paying attention?