ABSTRACT
Some of the people I knew on the Lower East Side over the past fifteen years or so, especially children, have emerged on conventional life paths. Yet the number of casualties in subtle or grosser forms is large. It is clear that the chain of causality begins with the political, social, and economic policies toward the poor designed at the highest levels of our society. Seemingly forgetting our more generous traditions, we have allowed our leaders to push our society to a historic low point of economic equality, construing the poor as a threat that can only be contained by increased reliance on armed "guard labor" (Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf 1990). The effect of national policies that devalue the lives of poor citizens can be examined on several levels: The individual—how does a growing human organism react to endemic violence? The communal—what happens to a community that exists in a state of siege, subject to removal and potential internal refugee status? The systemic—what are the chances of achieving a healthy democratic society when increasingly larger sectors of its population are deprived of the means of making a sustainable living, and instead are severely punished for finding alternative ways to help their children survive?
