We started watching “Madam Secretary” a few weeks ago, after hearing high praise for the Netflix series from a number of friends, and now we’re hooked. Last night we watched the episode in which Elizabeth is suffering from PTSD. She went to Iran, in the midst of a civil war, was injured in the assassination of her ally, and watched the anguish of his young son. My hat is off to the writer of this line from that episode: “Whatever we do, our children are in the middle of it.”

How different our policies would be if we paid attention to the impact they would have on children! Look at what the actions of our leaders have done to children in just these past four years:

  • Immigration policies: Children are kept in cages, in concentration camps, without adequate sanitation. Children are separated from parents. Records of children have been lost. Children have been adopted without permission.
  • The environment: Rolling back decades of environmental protections ensures that our children will be sicker than they needed to be, even though they live in an age of refined scientific evidence about the correlation between the environment and health. Abandonment of vigorous, global climate action efforts will force our children to live on a planet that is too hot to support the diversity of life humans need for survival.
  • Racism: In the absence of a national call to teach anti-racism, to study all of our history as a nation in school – especially our history with Native Americans, Black Americans, and immigrants – and to interrupt the structural racism within our institutions, white children of today are likely to be just as bigoted as their parents. The stress on children of color will continue. More Black children will lose their fathers to police violence.
  • Disaster relief: Thousands of children in Puerto Rico, on the west coast, and in the Midwest lost their lives due to political neglect in the midst of hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and storms.
  • Gun control: Failure to address gun control on a national level continues to expose our children to school shootings. Our behavior is costing many children their lives and traumatizing many others.
  • The military: Enormous sums of money have been diverted to military budgets for weaponry, ships, planes, and tanks. Meanwhile, military families and children live at a subsistence level, many of them on welfare.
  • Local politics: The politicians of Flint, Michigan doomed the children of Flint to ill health from toxic water. School boards in several states decide to publicly shame children whose parents haven’t paid their school lunch bills. In urban areas, police handcuff and arrest black children who “look suspicious” or are “in the area.”
  • The pandemic: Failure to create and enact a national plan to control the CoVid-19 virus, combined with deliberate disinformation efforts, put children’s lives at risk under the false assumption that they were not likely to get sick. Over 600,000 children have tested positive for CoVid. A disproportionate number of childhood deaths (over 70%) are minorities. At no time, has the administration addressed the data showing the severity of CoVid among BIPOC. As schools re-open, cases of CoVid among children rises. As the cases rise, so do the number of deaths among children.
  • Unqualified cabinet members: Placing a person with no public school experience at the head of the country’s educational efforts has led to funds being drained away from public education, and attention being diverted to private educational enterprises. There are roughly 100,000 public schools in the U.S., with 3.2 million public school teachers – all depending on support and leadership from a Secretary of Education who works tirelessly to improve our national public education system. During the pandemic, the complete absence of leadership at the federal level led to millions of children, teachers, and administrators being at the mercy of inadequate funds and resources to conduct remote learning, no solutions to the dangers of masks for young children, no help for early childhood teachers and caregivers charged with fostering children’s socialization skills while covering their faces with masks.

 

It’s easy to understand the popularity of Madam Secretary. A world crisis emerges in each episode, and by the end of the hour the crisis is resolved. The people involved in world affairs have critical reasoning skills, keen minds, and enviable emotional intelligence. They are ethically principled people. Their overall maturity makes viewers glad to watch them taking care of things – we can admire them for the actions they take and the way they conduct themselves on the job.

The question Elizabeth wants to ask all the time now, is, “How is this action going to affect my children? Your children? Our children?” She understands that every choice made by her staff, by every cabinet officer, and by the President, relates to the quality of life our children will have.

If only we could help all adults to understand that. Whatever we do, our children are in the middle of it.