Invisible Americans

Invisible Americans

Adult nonfiction
The new normal of a pandemic world has hurt some kids a lot more
than others. School closures have taken away many children's main or
only access to nutritious food. Online learning leaves children
lacking reliable access to electronics and the Internet very much
behind. These are kids whose parents don't have the relatively safe
work from home jobs. Either their households have lost all work
income or at least one parent goes out into unsafe jobs without
adequate safety equipment.
The pandemic, however, didn't create inequities; it widened
them. As Jeff Madrick tells us in Invisible Americans: The Tragic
Cost of Child Poverty,
"There are roughly 13 million officially poor children in
America, nearly one in five. If properly measured it would be closer
to one in four, and with more homest assumptions, more than one in
three. In France and Germany only around one in ten children are
poor, and by a more stringent test. In the Nordic nations, only one
in thirty children are poor..."
Those numbers are quite alarming. And Madrick takes us way
beyond the statistics to show the myriad ways in which growing up poor
and precarious irremediably harms children. Low food security causes
physical and cognitive damage. Kids in homes with very low food
security miss meals on a regular basis. Poor kids live in inadequate
and substandard housing in crime ridden neighborhoods and often spend
significant periods of time homeless. Lack of preventitive medical
care or early interventions when illness arises also takes a heavy toll.
"Far too many children in America live lives of hunger, stress,
exclusion from play and the normal activities of childhood, physical
and psychological damage, and inescapable pessimism..."
Why is this going on in the greatest nation in the world?
Madrick also goes there. He covers the history of poverty and
reactions to it in our nation's history, the intersectionality of
poverty and racism, and the myths, such as the welfare queen and the
culture of poverty that lead conservatives to cut even the meager
benefits poor people have access to or tie work requirements to their
availability. He shows how poverty is much more due to long standing
systemic inequities than to any kind of personal choices and behavior.
Does the man have a solution? You'd better believe it. And
it's a lot less complicated than you'd imagine.
Madrick is a rock star. He's one of the very few economists who
can come down from his ivory tower, ditch the jargon, and speak
cogently to those of us who aren't in his field. Invisible Americans
should be in every public and college and university library. It can
be a valuable instructional tool for social work students and addition
to professional development for teachers and guidance counselors.
Basically anyone who cares about the many children who our
country is leaving way behind will find the book to be a must read.
I plan to get my hands on Madrick's earlier volumes. I want to
know as much as I can about why this country is as inequitable as it
was back in the 1920s. You'd think that in a century we'd have made
more progress.
On a purrrsonal note, I'm going to let Lady Tobago take over. She has
a lot to say today.
I haz an admirer. He is a grey boi cat with a white bib and big
ears. He is a cute boi. When I am in my cat patio he comes over and
gazes adoringly up at me. He's just like Romeo in that old school
play by Mr. Shakespeare. So that makes me Juliet. How romantic!
(Tobago)
I didn't see that coming. (Jules)
A great big shout out goes out to the animal companions who do so much
to brighten up these new normal pandemic days.
Tobago and Jules Hathaway


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