Americans boast of our love of children. Childhood is routinely idealized as the happy, worry-free stage in life. We will do anything for our children, for they are the future of our country. 

Of course, the facts of our treatment of our children deny this. If we really loved our children and placed all our hopes of the future in them we would invest gladly and heavily in public education. We would not pass on to them an insupportable national debt. We would not squander their resources. We would not leave them with a corroded infrastructure and irrecoverably polluted land, water, and sky. We would not be shooting them on the streets where they play. We would not slaughter them in their schools. We would not be abusing them at the rate of some 700,000 children per year. We would not have aborted 45,789,558 of them in the period 1970 — 2015.

At the local level: We would not have allowed the state of Missouri to lead the nation in the number of children dropped from Medicaid — 16% in the last two years, as Tony Messenger reports in today’s Post-Dispatch. This is due to a mindless, heartless determination to save state money at the expense of children.

We would not allow a culture to be so inured to criminality as to refuse to disclose the identities of those who murdered their children. The Post-Dispatch reports one parent of a murdered child saying: “Around St. Louis we don’t snitch on people. We keep it in the streets.” “Snitches get stiches,” we were told in Ferguson, but can fear of retribution so paralyze people that they refuse to help defend their community’s children?

We would not allow our government to be hijacked by a man who cannot control his impulses that will bring our country ever closer to war, nor would we allow an entire political party to shelter him with barely believable hypocrisy.

We would not allow this same government to terrorize immigrants by taking children from their parents and subjecting them to imprisonment and abuse, hygienic and medical neglect, and incessant psychological trauma. This is a part of a policy of undisguised cruelty all to please those among us who want to “keep America white.” For I don’t think the American people would tolerate this mistreatment of children if the children were white. These foreign children present in our land are being subjected to what would otherwise be regarded and cruel and unusual punishment.

No, our idealization of childhood and sentimentalized attachment to children cannot protect them from our predatory behaviors. Our children make manifest our traditional national selfishness.