When there is crime in society, there is no justice.

-Plato

The case of six-year-old Kayla Rolland, the kindergartner shot Tuesday in Mount Morris Township, Mich. by her classmate is a tragedy with two victims.

The little boy who shot her is not some monster with a chip on his shoulder who listened to “the wrong music” and played violent video games. He is a little boy who is incapable, by any standard, to understand his crime. He is a boy whose life has been decimated by poverty.

Though this case may easily be reduced to another great argument for gun control, pragmatically speaking, this boy would still have fallen through the cracks.

According to the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), 20.6 percent of children under the age of six live in poverty in the United States. That means 13.5 million children in the United States are impoverished and, of that number, 4.9 million are six-years old or younger.

We live in a country where Allen Greenspan is hailed as a hero. His every word is gospel to a country brain-washed into believing that nothing is rotten in the state of Denmark.

People praise him and ironically hang on his every word as if he were Christ almighty himself. When you consider that most Americans claim to believe in capitalism and Christ simultaneously, the irony should be enough to make anyone’s head pop.

In a country where 1 percent of the population owns 99 percent of the wealth, can we really afford to be so blind, especially when it comes to the welfare of our children?

They are our children ultimately. When parents fail to provide or cannot provide for their children, it falls to society to fill the void.

The vast majority of us aren’t the ones with our pockets full. We are the shrinking middle class, the working class and the poor.

When you look at the numbers, the vast majority of us are much closer to absolute poverty than we are to being rich.

We love to hang on to the delusion that one day our ship is going to come in so we better not get used to allying ourselves with the poor. We don’t want to get too used to sympathizing with the poor lest something of the mindset rubs off on us. We are fools.

The middle class is shrinking every year and with all due respect to Mr. Greenspan, though there might be more jobs in American than people, those jobs are crap. Perhaps an afternoon working the fryer at Mickey D’s would convince Allen and his minions that not all jobs are equal.

Maybe a week of employment at the whim of a pimply teenage shift manager and his computer-aided schedule would force him to see how limited the lives of most Americans really are.

The poverty line is defined as an annual income of $12,802 for a family of three. Even the standard of poverty is unreasonable. Imagine living on this amount in Iowa and then try to imagine living in a major metropolitan area on the same amount. Increase that amount by $1000 increments until you honestly think you could survive.

Where did you end up? $13,000? $17,000? Would you even be comfortable at $20,000?

The standard used to be $10,500 for a family of four. What happened to that fourth person? I’ll tell you what happened. Admitting that a family of four were impoverished at $17,069 is what happened. You can rest assured these numbers are still far too small, but a reasonable estimate will never be reached because it would be far too unsettling.

From 1979 to 1997, the number of young American children living in poverty rose from 3.5 million to 5.2 million.

Considering that many Americans proudly talk about their ancestors who left Europe to find a better life on these shores, our young child poverty rate is two to three times higher than that of other major Western industrialized nations.

Growing up in poverty has extremely negative effects on a child’s lifelong expectations. There are consequences to health, education and prospects that most of us cannot begin to fathom. We can’t understand what it must be like to go to school and be written off because of our poverty.

We can’t imagine being unable to seek special medical attention if we need it.

This unnamed boy is a victim of conditions beyond his control. No amount of argument in favor of stronger punishments for criminals and greater gun control could have made a difference in this boy’s life.

Living with his mother and his “uncle” in a flophouse while daddy served time set his course. The only unknown factor in this boy’s life was time.

He would have ended up in the same place no matter what because whether you believe in fate or not, children living in poverty have their options taken from them.

They are devalued by society, dismissed by educational systems and forced to find options that conform more to a state of nature than to a democracy.

We can hardly justify complaining about crime in our society any more when, through our own disdain, we help perpetuate the problem.

We focus on the symptoms of the problem while blatantly ignoring the causes of the disease itself.

---

Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.