Neglect today, prison tomorrow
Today in Chicago, six parents
will be sentenced in Illinois’
largest case of child neglect.
When police investigated reports
of drugs being sold from the window
of a row house, they discovered what
Officer Patricia Warner described as
the worst thing she’d seen in ten years
as a Chicago cop.
Nineteen children, wearing little
more than dirty underwear and soiled
diapers, were huddled together on bare
mattresses scattcrcdon the floor. Dirty
dishes were piled in the sink and on
the floor. Most of the food in the
refrigerator was rotting, and there were
roaches everywhere. Two of the
sm al ler ch i ldrcn were c hew in g on wh at
one officer described as a neck bone
from the dog’s dish. One four-year
old boy with cerebral palsy had ciga
rette bums and welts ail over his body.
Eight of the children were younger
than four, and all but one 14-ycar-old
boy were younger than nine. Most of
J the children did not know their full
names or have a complete change of
clothes.
The parents did not understand
why police began to remove the chil
dren from the apartment. When an
officer asked one of the women to help
with a frightened child who was lying
in a fetal position, she replied, “he
ain’t none of mine.”
The six adults who were at the
apartment were arrested on charges of
misdemeanor child neglect. Another
woman, suspected of being one of the
parents, was in the hospital giving
birth at the time of the arrests.
Police eventually discovered that
28 people lived out of the two-bed
room apartment. The Chicago Tri
bune reported that the adults had a
combined income of $65,000 a year
from public assistance.
Sixty-five thousand dollars and
there was no food, few clothes, little
heat, no soap, shampoo or toothpaste.
Obviously, there were no toys, no
books, no birthday cakes or bicycles.
It doesn’t seem likely that hungry,
neglected children who live in filth
with unmotivated, uneducated
parents have much of & chance of
becoming productive adults.
There were no crayons or Play-doh.
Nineteen children in Chicago had
nothing that every child in the world’s
richest nation should have. They had
roaches, filth, ignorance and squalor,
and the most helpless among them
was probably tortured. These children
represent a raindrop in a sea of dirty
little faces that will never appear on a
right-to-life billboard.
Five of the six arrested parents
were mothers, aged 20 to 26. Three
were described as struggli ng with drug
addictions, and one had been arrested
for prostitution. The mother of the
little boy with cerebral palsy had three
children before she was 19 years old.
The only father among the parents
expressed disgust at the conviction, as
he saw it, of being found “guilty over
some dirt.”
Each of the parents could be fined
up toSl ,000 and sentenced to a year in
prison and two years of probation.
They will appear in Juvenile Court on
May 14 to try to regain custody of their
children, who will either end up in
foster care or be returned to people
who see nothing wrong with raising
children in conditions objectionable
to animal activists.
It doesn’t seem likely that hungry,
neglected children who live in filth
with unmotivatpd, uneducated par
ents have much of a chance ofbecom
i ng produc ti vc adul ts. They ha ve more
ofa chance ofbccoming unmotivated,
uneducated adults involved in some
form of crime.
Congress is poised to approve a
$22 billion investment to fight crime.
but as long as people are indiscrimi
nately producing unwanted, uncared
for children, no amount of money will
reduce crime. The majority of incar
cerated criminals share a background
of abuse and neglect. Most violent
crimes arc committed bymen between
the ages of 15 and 25, and the average
age is becoming progressively
younger.
Most people don’t remember the
way they comprehended the world
when they were very young. Some
times it’s possible to recall the feel
ings associated with moments of fear
or betrayal, but most people literate
enough to read a newspaper could
never associate with the perspectives
of the 19 children in the stinking
Chicago apartment.
So much human behavior is formed
in the first few years oflifc. Children
learn to interpret the world through
the actions of their parents. They are
imprinted with an image of what the
rest of their lives may be like. For
these children, that image is one of a
filthy, crowded, cold, barren apart
ment where parents don’t work and
children share food with a dog.
The mark of that image is as indel
ible as any violent crime, yet the child
neglect is a misdemeanor. As long as
it remains one, Clinton may as well
sink $22 billion into prisons so ne
glected ch ildren have someplace to go
when they grow up.
McAdams is a junior news-editorial ma
jor and a Daily Nebraskan columnist.
-----1 I
Nixon gave us gift of resilience
Richard Nixon finally has met
an obstacle from which there
will be no comeback. Death
overtook the 37th president on Satur
day, and his funeral is today.
Ifa fcwdic-hard Nixon halcrsdrank
toasts, most of us were left with mixed
feelings about the man who occupied
the American political scene for nearly
half a century.
Richard Nixon was the first presi
dent of whom I was personally aware.
At age 8 I sat up with my father and
watched the returns roll in on his
landslide re-election. A year later, I
watched the Watergate hearings dur
ing summer break. Finally, I sat with
my family as Nixon resigned on Aug.
8,1974. My mother was in tears. My
father, a confirmed Nixon hater, sat
stunned in front of the television.
Obituaries and retrospectives never
fail to mention the one fact that distin
guishes Nixon from other occupants
of the White House—he was the first,
and so far only, president to resign.
Photos accompanying the news of n is
death were of his farewell wave on
Aug. 9, 1974, stepping into Marine
One for the last time. Watergate, it
seems, will forever define Richard
Nixon’s tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avc.
Yet, we must ask in the midst of
another presidential scandal, how se
rious was Watergate? What was it? At
its inception, it was nothing more
than the June 1972 break-in at the
Democratic National Headquarters.
Watergate was a third-rate burglary
transformed into high crimes and
misdemeanors by Nixon’s madden
ing inability to admit his mistakes. It
soon became a cover for everything
from J. Edgar Hoover’s domestic sur
veillance to Nixon’s policies in the
Vietnam War. Watergate was politics
as much as anything else.
If Richard Nixon, on the Monday
after the break-in, had gone before the
prcss,and said, “Yes, we did it, and it
was a mistake, and those who took
The truth will hurt, but getting
caught in a half-truth is far worse.
The real tragedy of Nixon’s
presidency is the opportunities
missed because of Watergate.
Earl will pay the legal price—oh, and
y the way, you might be interested to
know what my predecessors were up
to,” he would have served two full
terms and be remembered today as
one of our greatest presidents.
The sainted John F. Kennedy tried
to kill a foreign head of slate, had his
brother install wiretaps (on, among
others, Martin Luther King Jr.) and
had countless extramarital affairs.
Lyndon Johnson stole a Senate elec
tion, made millions on shady business
deals through his political connec
tions and was every bit as inclined to
curtail civil liberties as was Nixon.
Both men gave us Vietnam and the
twisted web of entitlements that
threaten to bankrupt us today.
Apart from Watergate, Nixon’s
legacy is a complicated one. Elected
as a conservative “law and order’’
candidate in 1968, pledging to “bring
us together,” Nixon dismayed his
right-wing supporters. He took us off
the gold standard and instituted wage
and price controls. He declared that
“we arc all Keynesians now” in 1971,
before we all became supply-sidcrs.
He also gave us Harry Blackmun.
Abroad, Nixon was at his best. He
went to China, he went to Russia —
and only he could have. He ended
Vietnam, imperfectly to be sure, and
the morass of Watergate caused much
of the postwar holocausts in Cambo
dia. He signed the first arms control
treaty. Even as Watergate consumed
his presidency in the summer of 1974,
he was welcomed by huge crowds in
Russia and the Middle East.
In reading all the tributes to Nixon,
the word that keeps reappearing is
“rcsil icncc.” He avoided be ingdropped
from the GOP ticket in 1952 and
1956, survived a heartbreak ingly close
defeat in 1960 and the ill-considered
California governor’s race in 1962.
He got knocked down, but he bounced
back up.
What is one to take from the life of
Richard Nixon? It is perhaps the les
son of the pitfalls of pride, in owning
up to your mistakes no matter how
painful. The truth will hurt, but get
tingcaughtinahalf-t,ruth isfar worse.
The real tragedy of Nixon’s presi
dency is the opportunities missed be
cause of Watergate.
It is, though, the story of the power
of perseverance. Nixon loved to say
that a friend told him he would make
an excellent lawyer because he “had
an iron butt.” He wasn’t glamorous,
and he was awkward at times, but he
forced himsclfintothcarcna, possibly
to meet those demons and slay them.
Never knowing when he was beat,
picking himself up time after time,
forcing others to notice and take him
seriously, winning through sheer
power of will — this is Richard
Nixon’s gift to us. It is one that many
in our country would do well to emu
late.
Nixon has truly given his last press
conference, and if some won’t have
him to kick around anymore, the rest
of us will regret that we don’t have
him to look up to anymore.
Kepfleld it a graduate student la history
and a Daily Nebraskan columnist.
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