MY SON HAS READ THE INTERNET

In today’s New York Times there is an article by John Schwartz in which he writes about the future as though we should all assume it is irredeemably screwed. He is nostalgic for the fifties and sixties, and for “….the future we imagined back when it was something to be hoped for rather than feared”. While Mr. Schwartz is entitled to his nihilism and low expectations, I personally think he is bonkers. And I say this because I’ve recently noticed that my 17 year old son Jeffrey has read the Internet.

It started as a dinner table joke. A year or so ago, I noticed that there appeared to be no topic that could be mentioned, certainly if it was anywhere in the sciences, where I knew more than Jeffrey. And I’m 56 and he’s 17. As I pride myself on having been alert, inquisitive and an addicted reader of everything in sight for at least 40 years, this seemed quite odd. So I’ve been studying Jeffrey like a kind of anthropologist and have reached the conclusion that Something Very Big is going on all of a sudden, and it is a seismic shift in culture and society that will soon give the lie to Mr. Schwartz’s negativity. In fact, I think it indicates that an unprecedented wave of progress and improvement will soon be upon us, led by young people like Jeffrey who right now are still teenagers.

OK, so he hasn’t actually read the entire Internet. He’s trying, but it is rather too big for even the autodidactic brainiac who is my son. But I’m telling you that, no kidding, since he was ten years old, this young man has spent around four hours a day, 365 days a year, reading the Internet. And interestingly, very little of this seems to have been distractive entertainment. No, it appears as though he’s been methodically reading just about everything he could access without a password in the widest possible aspects of all the applied sciences and beyond and through them in politics, sociology and generally The World We Live In. And I calculate he’s been reading the Internet so far for about ten thousand hours. I’m not kidding: do the math. And not only has he made that personal investment in the combined online output of two millennia of intellectual writing, but he has wired himself online into a substantial network of deep thinkers, including a bunch of PhD’s as well as abundant other young people who are also reading the knowledge base we call the Internet. And they are endlessly discussing seriously deep stuff online and often as a result face to face.

So what is going on here? Well, apparently, and only in the last decade, we have abolished geography as an impediment to learning. When I used to sit in the Cambridge University Library, which is a mandated Copyright Library that contains as a result pretty much every book you could ever want to read, I was still at a serious disadvantage in acquiring knowledge as against Jeffrey sitting in his teenager’s bedroom in West Los Angeles. First of all, I had to know what I was looking for, so there were few random serendipitous discoveries of tangential knowledge: The professor gave you a list, you went and found the books and you read them. Every so often, you’d use the bibliography in book A to go onwards under your own steam to book B, but mostly, you just read the suggested books to go deeper into your subject. And you pretty much had to start the book at the beginning and read it through to find the relevant stuff. Me, mostly I knew in advance what I wanted to find out, I found it, I read it and left the building.

Not Jeffrey. His reading of the Internet has a whole different methodology and it has little to do with school curricula, assigned reading and “How To Ace the ACT and SAT”. He takes care of those for sure, but he left them behind long ago as a sole basis for his reading. Instead, he has many advantages that I never had: He can word search. He can hyper-click. He can read ten things at a time in ten open windows. He can search the whole massive, aggregate chunk of human knowledge that exists on the Internet by concept and he can meet and discuss it as he sees fit, often with the author, often with others with common interest in the material. He is sitting in a virtual University Library, but with all the books open at once, and with the aisles full of interested parties in one seamless, endless seminar or teach-in, a kind of exogenous brain of all the knowledge of the world. And he's a Rising Senior in high school. Go figure.

I don’t think this has ever been possible before in the ten millennia of human intellectual development. And it makes me a pretty huge optimist as young people like Jeffrey grow up and start asserting themselves intellectually, in politics, as scientists, as thought-leaders and as citizens of the world. And I suspect they might even rescue us from the dysfunctions of old-style democracy.

Consider if you will, the mind of Henry the Eighth, king of Great Britain. Some five centuries ago, he was much more than a womanizer and beheader of inconvenient wives. He was very, very smart…. but that alone did not make him a great leader. The thing was that he knew pretty much everything a human being could know in that place, at that time. When he met with his military advisors, he knew as much as them about the art and science of warfare. When he met with agricultural experts, he was their match in knowing all about farming. His understanding of the weather was as good as anyone else’s he could consult. In fact, in the twenty separate and unrelated areas of knowledge important for a king to make a decision, important for him to be a great leader, he was a world expert, all on his own. He did not always get things right, leaders never do, but he had the huge advantage of being able to process all available resources of knowledge inside his own head, and on the fly. No need for a whole bunch of committee meetings for Henry.

Now think of a modern day leader. Let’s use Bill Clinton in the White House, not because of some other unfortunate similarities to Henry the Eighth, but because when we add in Al Gore as Vice-President, even President Clinton’s most ardent opponents should concede that the two of them together had Very Big Brains at work. They had the Rhodes Scholar intellect we want at work in the White House. But for good or bad, the world in which they operated was one heck of a lot more complicated than in Henry’s simpler age.

And why? Precisely because Henry was pretty much the last leader who could Know Everything Available. Since then, the database of human knowledge has grown exponentially every year…. call it the intellectual parallel to Moore’s Law…. but the poor old human brain has remained exactly the same size, operating at the same speed, with the same mental processes dealing with all the information. So that even the smartest among us until recently have had to go deeper and deeper in order to be an expert in anything at all. But importantly, in order to do so with those same-sized brains, we’ve had to go narrower and narrower. I was joking with the radiologist recently who analyzed the scans of my knee. “How are knees” I asked, “more or less interesting than elbows?” “Oh”, he replied “I don’t do elbows these days. I’m the knee man here”. I was relieved that he confirmed he did actually do both left and right knees, and I took some great comfort from the fact that he must be really good at knees if that’s all he did professionally.

The problem however is obvious: Life is Not Knees. And the colossal challenges that face our civilization are intrinsically multi-disciplinary. If the fixed size of the brain’s traditional capacity to learn has remained static, how can we ever hope to conquer those hellaciously complicated problems that involve twenty disciplines, all of whose experts are in intellectual silos: deep but very, very narrow? And especially when human nature makes grown-ups invariably believe their own silo is more important, more compelling, than all those other silos they little understand.

Well, corporations and governments have taken different stabs at that precise problem over time, with mixed success. Our President has a Cabinet of specialized leaders reporting to him or her. The hope is that they will each know more than the President about their own area of responsibility. In the case of a smart leadership, the Clinton / Gore way to lead was to convene world-class experts and attempt to make them cooperate. But the challenge is that N.I.H. stands for more in such a room than the National Institutes of Health. Though the experts are asked to leave their “Not Invented Here” attitudes at the door, human nature brings them into the room.

When Steven Spielberg and I founded The Starbright Foundation in 1990, we wanted a fearless Campaign Chairman, who would aggressively ask people for big donations to our then fledgling non-profit studio. Kathy Kennedy brilliantly suggest General Norman Schwarzkopf. So off I went to meet him in Tampa. There I was jawing on about how in Starbright we were generalists trying to make a wildly diverse bunch of specialist experts cooperate for the first time to create our special software for sick kids: writers, directors, artists, oncologists, hematologists, psychiatrists…. A set of experts who had never before encountered most of those other experts professionally. And I was saying that our job was to be the generalists in the middle, constantly yanking back the strategy which every expert seemed to want to yank left or right to serve their own narrow silo of expertise. We were the strategic drivers, they were the collaborating resources.

General Schwarzkopf interrupted me: “What do you know about the U.S. Army?” he asked. “Almost nothing” I answered. “Well” he said. “When you join the Army, we don’t just give you a rank. We also give you a Specialty: You are a rifleman or a cook or a driver or a signalman. And we give you a pin that says so. And it does not matter how much we promote you over the years; you still keep your Speciality”.

“Until one day, if you are a damn good leader, we may decide to make you a General. And in the ceremony when you get your Star, we take away your Specialty Pin…. Because you are no longer a Specialist. You are a General”.

I sat there stunned by the enormity of the revelation…. It had never occurred to me before that in an Army, the consequence of failure is death and injury and loss of your defined mission. So you’d better get your act together and put the generalist, the General in charge of the experts.

That’s all well and good, but how are our leaders in any area to possibly possess the necessary knowledge to tame the experts and lead them back to valuing their collaboration with other experts in support of the common mission? How exactly do we do that?

Well, with great difficulty I think! This is arguably now the biggest systemic challenge to the world and to Life As We know It: The leaders know a lot less about each relevant discipline than the experts they must keep in line. Oh dear! Is there hope, and if so, where?

Well, I think it is in Jeffrey Samuelson and, in this country at least, the eighty million other members of Jeff’s Generation Y, the Millennials all around us. It is not only that they are more pro-social, more engaged in their world than any generation in the last three, nor that they are more concerned and more viral in their relationships on and off line.

It dawns on me that the biggest advantage that these 15 to 30 year olds are going to have is that the inspired generalists among them will simply know a great deal more than any previous generation in the history of the human race. The technology of the Internet has granted them easy access to much of the Knowledge Of The World and a toolkit to explore it quickly, widely and deeply. By doing this, they will be empowering their brains to go much farther into the heady world of finding multi-disciplinary solutions for our vast multi-disciplinary challenges. A good brain is good at pattern recognition…. the arena to apply it was just multiplied by a billion billion pages of information. The mind boggles, and that’s a good thing.

So my hat is off to the Gen Y generalists, to our future thought leaders, the crackers of cancer, of Alzheimers, of Global Warming and who knows, of the tribalism, hatred, ignorance, hunger and poverty that afflict our planet every minute of every day.

And to Jeffrey and those like you, I salute you for your dedication to threading your way through all those screens of other people’s thoughts and research. And please also take the time to go sit on a hill every so often and just think about solutions using your unprecedented breadth of knowledge. Remember that Einstein, devoid of an Internet, said “Imagination is more important than knowledge”…. and to that add the thought that if your base of knowledge is exponentially larger, your thinking outside the box of the present, your invention of new solutions, new paradigms, the unprecedented path forward every which way, will truly be a wonder to behold. So please keep reading the Internet Jeff, and go even wider and deeper. I expect great things from you and your friends. And thank you for the ennobling burst of optimism you deliver about our future. The New York Times guy hasn’t met you, and he’s completely wrong. Si, se puede.

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Peter Samuelson is a media executive, producer and pro-social entrepreneur who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children. http://www.samuelson.la/ peter@samuelson.la

THE YEAR WE BROKE DEMOCRACY

It was a priceless heirloom, passed down through the generations for well over two hundred years and for those more ancient Europeans, twice as long as that. It was once much more than the least-bad it has become…. for our grandparents democracy was fought over, won and re-won with the blood of millions, a bastion of protection against the forces of darkness, of anarchy, of totalitarianism and fascism. Our democracy was a simple idea entrenched with every far-sighted effort to make it permanent by wise owls long dead, who thought it likely more people would know better than less people, that the majority would tend to be more right than the few. That regular elections would constantly draw the leaders back in line with those who elected them. That election by the majority would ensure most people had nobody to blame but themselves and that would make them self-correcting. And we have reversed their oversights and prejudices in massive revisions over time to correct racism and sexism.

Then some time in the first few years of the twenty-first century, we accidentally dropped democracy on the floor and broke it. Time to get out the glue. We broke it resoundingly by the confluence of money, media, fear and the parallel death-throes of public education. These great evolutionary waves interacted, magnified each other and together they drove a jagged stake into the heart of democracy.

Which was the egg, which the chicken and does it even matter? The media run candidates for office on a treadmill of charisma, good looks, height and curb-appeal. Would FDR have a prayer of election today in a campaign inevitably featuring his wheelchair? Those soundbites the media require drive our candidates to few words to express complex issues. The superficial focus of the popular media drives attention to the candidates’ clothing, their haircuts, their media-friendliness, all in 15 second clips. So long as we make the delivery of news subject to the same lowest common denominator economic rules as television entertainment, the spiral in the integrity, accuracy and importance of its contents will be ever downwards. Just follow the money: Paris Hilton will always trump Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because she sells more Ragu Sauce.

Beyond that there is the mandatory purchase by candidates of television advertising: buy it in vast quantities or wither away. And with that advertising comes the primacy of the money: one candidate raises over one hundred million dollars in a year and six more are close behind. The money buys the advertising, so without bucketloads of money there can be no serious campaign. The democracy we created to do away with the rule of the rich and insensitive few has become a contest of who has or can raise the most advertising spend. And if a Michael Bloomberg simply took one fifth of his personal wealth, outspent the other candidates five-to-one and took the White House, would we really see democracy at work, democracy to be proud of? What is buying an election and what is buying it through buying the advertising?

And most of the money raised comes directly or indirectly from the special interests, from the companies who stand to benefit, from the new elite high-net-worth barons of this new Elizabethan court: if you need money in bucketloads, you prize the ones bearing the biggest buckets. In our selection of candidates, we have been driven away from the best ideas, the best leadership, the most honest….. and towards the best fundraisers.

Which then leads to our repetitively dysfunctional elections themselves, where relentless mass media combined with frequent polling have driven democracy into the awkward world of the evenly split electorate, the world of 50.1% trumping 49.9%. Is it coincidence or the collision of statistics with mass-media advertising that so many recent elections are won by the thinnest of margins, leaving almost exactly half the electorate dissatisfied? Could it be that we have now built perfect engines of attack and counter-attack? Might it be that the computerized Rovian brains running our candidates’ campaigns have created a circular eddy of analysis leading to counter-attack, of thrust leading to parry….. and if the pollsters and the Carvilles and the Roves are all using the same software and the same tactics, does the relentless calculus of mass media advertising not virtually guarantee a tie? Any movement away from the middle leads to an equal and opposite advertising barrage, precisely targeted to the shifting demographics of the support-base. That pushback then leads to yet another counterattack that exactly nullifies the shift. The new, equally split electorate sits on the Center Court at Wimbledon, but in this game of tennis all ball speeds and direction are computerized to exactly counter the computerized media balls lobbed from the other direction. If two Cray computers are programmed to use the same chess software, they will play to a tie. Welcome to the democratic election of leadership for the free world.

The logic of democracy is that more people will make better decisions than less. Flying in the face of this is the level of knowledge, of awareness, of shrewdness and of exposure to the world among those who vote. If two generations of low-ranking public education, disgracefully fallen behind that of so many other nations, has decimated the electorate’s alertness to the issues…. if the media drives people away from the thoughtful and towards the soundbite…. if so few Americans have ever left their country, so few own a passport, so few experience the neighbors down the road…. at what point does the dearth of the necessary building-blocks for sound choice by the electorate trump the hope that “more are more likely to choose right”? Do the people who advocate "sending the illegals home" really think there is any way to export 11 million people, even if they wanted to leave? Do the people who advocate "keeping jobs here" realise that then they will have to pay more for their toys than the price of labor in China will support?

Witness the crazed new dance of three zombies spiraling downwards with arms interlocked: fear, media and fascism. Scared people have always voted away from their fear: The Germans elected Hitler in reaction to the chaos around them. The terrorists have realized, like the Nazis before them, that the willingness to use violence, to kill, to maim, to scare the wife and kids, will cower all but the most stubborn opponent. And in our brave new world of continuous television news, diminished by those soundbites calibrated to every under-curious short attention span, fear sells very well indeed. Fear sells even better than the schadenfreude of our latest celebrity-fallen-from-grace story. And when more people watch the latest threat, the latest explosion, advertising revenue rises and our media report more profit. Such is free enterprise: never has asymmetrical warfare been more potent than in this new era of a populist media that ever craves the latest horror.

So how do we fix democracy, how do we find the right glue? How do we persuade the well-educated few, the uber-class, that mass public education of a world-challenging level is ultimately the preserver of their freedom too? And if public education is to remain under-funded and its recipients oftentimes under-curious and open to irrational persuasion (“Oh look, a Famous Actor appeared with a politician, so I’ll vote for him!”), how do we make an arabesque around it and bring critical thinking and a community of the global, the thoughtful and the curious to our voters? Well, how about if we use the same new media the forces of darkness are using successfully to run our democracy into the ground?

There is considerable evidence that our new breed of young people, children of the self-interested Baby Boomers, younger than the hedonistic Generation X, this new Millennial Generation is significantly more engaged in the world than any group since the Great Generation who battled Hitler and Hirohito. In preserving their own freedom and restoring that of others, those who came of age in the Second World War often became permanently socially engaged themselves. Every college applicant these days performs meaningful voluntary service; for half that habit sticks even when it is no longer self-interested. 85% of Millennials aged 15 to 25, will change brands if the new offering has a social benefit. And Gen Y’s young people are nothing if not media-fluent. They build community online, they read foreign news streams, they text, blog, date, discuss, activate and cross-pollinate with far less regard to geography than their parents. They are the only future we have and we should be glad, because with a little encouragement they will take over and build a new, more vibrant democracy. The Founding Fathers would want no less!

Social Networks already experiment with peer referral, with peer ratings and the systematic badging of expertise. Not Ebay itself, but Ebay’s users provide a sophisticated review of any potential buyer’s or seller’s business ethics, their history, a full codification of their reputation. Let us now develop an evolving set of competitive systems to rate our politicians, our leaders and for sure those young peers who voice public opinions. If an elected official lies repeatedly, why can we not codify that? And if a publisher of political and social opinion oftentimes and empirically ‘gets it wrong’, why can we not record that? Why can we rate restaurants but not leaders? Why do we have to rely on media susceptible to their own bias to remind us of the prior track records of those asking us to follow them? I hear you say, “But truth is in the eye of the beholder”…. Well firstly, no, it is not; a great deal of empirical truth can be measured independent of opinion. And secondly, OK, so first profile the seeker of truth, then supply a range of relevant opinions placing the target’s reputation in that context. Those online dating services look not only at the sought but also at the seeker before suggesting a match.

While we are at it, why can we not codify the media voices so that their reputation is not some vague and ill-defined sense buffeted by their own and their rivals’ media blasts? Why can GuideStar codify all the major non-profits in America but we can’t get our empirical measuring arms around the journalists any more than the politicians? Why do we assume it is good to be influenced by polls telling us what others think? Why should any prior polling rationally influence voters in an election? Why can’t we see track-records parsed the way we measure racehorses? Come on guys, where’s the algorithm? This is our civilization at stake here and we are not sheep. Where’s the beef?

Let’s encourage our young people to meet online the young people who are not like them. Let’s encourage the lowering of borders, of geography, of nation states, of religion and of fear: are we using our new media as well as we can to show that what unites young people across the world is more powerful than what divides them? Hats off to Nick Negroponte and his $130 dollar third-world wireless laptop computer: now let’s build the MySpaces and the Facebooks and the rest of the social networks to unite kids across the world, regardless of the hatreds and lack of understanding of their parents. We have the real-time translation capabilities: turn them on. And let's ensure please that the communities and the blogs and their buzz are inclusive and facing outwards.... what a terrible irony if all this new technology only creates narrow communities of those who are already alike and already agree! Let's use cheap, widely available technology to bridge the gap between rich and poor and between those who misunderstand or hate each other.... let's build wider links, not more techie silos grouping people into subsets of the ignorant and intolerant! Techology is powerful but totally dumb: it is our responsibility to use it properly.

And let’s go further. Remember Negroponte’s ‘Wired’ article a decade ago about the ‘Exogenous Brain’, the concept that many minds linked electronically could crack complex problems together, beyond the ability of any constituent part? Ant hills of complex, ever-evolving and self-correcting organic reasoning and knowledge applied to complex and intractable problems beyond the conquest of most any individual…. Well, hell, that was ten years ago…. where’s the software? We have Wikipedia and Wiki- this and that: compendiums of knowledge from many contributors on millions of subjects. But that’s what it is: facts neatly set down. No disrespect to facts of course, but where’s Wiki 2.0? Where is the Opinion Wiki, the Solutions Wiki? Where is the software that drives interlocking waves of thousands of agile minds towards solutions to the complex problems that face us every day? Please go invent it!

And let’s please, please focus on where our young people are getting their information. Let’s work to lower their reliance on the news-gathering and selection whims of three major conglomerates. How do we drive global, independent news to young American eyes and ears to create a wide sense of those neighbors down the road and how they see things? Sure, there is the Google News aggregator, but where is the easily accessible television? LinkTV aims to use its non-profit platform as an international aggregator of news and culture to open American eyes to The World Out There.... but as yet it is much too narrowly distributed. Diversity of information, culture and opinion is totally available from all over our planet: we need to translate and channel it much more widely to our young American Millennials.

Let’s consider mandatory voting, as is done successfully in Australia. If we want to live in a democracy, we should vote our franchise. And can we really not make online voting safe enough to use? We safely transfer trillions of dollars electronically every day, all around the world. Is secure online voting really beyond our reach? Why not run it in parallel to the traditional not-so-hot hanging chads until we see that it works better?

Let’s educate and encourage our Millennials to speak truth to power. It is not only because we have no Draft that there is so little mass protest of the Iraq War: it is also because our young people feel disengaged from the halls of their leaders and under-powered in stating their views: they do not generally believe anyone much is listening over there. So let us adapt and adopt the sophisticated social networking tools used to sell music and films and macramé and bring them to opinion and dissent and attitude. And let’s publicize those truths to power that are generated, not just drop them into some Senator’s unread email file for electronic shredding. And at least send a receipt!

Democracy is passing through a bleak and bumpy patch, buffeted by the strong adverse winds of money, fear and a bottom-feeding media…. But democracy is still the best hope we have for an aspirational future to support and nurture the most people to their best possible lives. We must use every tool in our new media and social arsenals to evolve and empower our American democracy beyond the thrall of the bombers, the self-interested elites and the totalitarian fear-mongers. We need to deliver a Democracy 2.0 based on education, knowledge, community empowerment and responsive leadership. We have the tools to build this new virtuous circle and we need to hurry to deliver them. We have the technology. Let’s turn it on.

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Peter Samuelson (peter@samuelson.la) is a motion picture and television producer, media executive and consultant and the founder of three non-profit philanthropies: The Starlight-Starbright Childrens Foundation (http://www.starlight.org/), the First Star Public Policy Initiative (http://www.firststar.org/) and EDAR ("Everyone Deserves A Roof" http://www.edar.org/). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Saryl and four children.

WHOSE FUTURE?

Wake up America! There is no national future except in the children you are raising right now. They are the future. Great to protect Homeland Security. Terrific to preserve the planet. Wonderful to fix Social Security and health care. But America only has future life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness through its children…. all our children…. and serious attention to their most vulnerable members has been almost non-existent.

They don’t vote. They don’t have the very constitutional rights that would help keep them safe. They don’t have money. They don’t have lobbyists on K Street. They are short. In olden times the theory was they were imperfect adults. But they grow up on our watch, and if we screw up their childhood, we screw up America’s future for generations to come.

But, you ask, abused and neglected children are somebody else’s problem, right? Your children are fine. You love them. You keep them safe. You educate them well. They know right from wrong. You lead by example, right? Wrong. The burden of abuse and neglect is yours too…. If we want to live here, we need to own the problem that envelops us, lest we bequeath a plague of social awfulness onto our own children: a curse that otherwise rolls on to be their problem and ours in the future. We pay attention now to the cancer within or we see it blight our own next generations: a rolling, growing, evil tide of misery, helplessness, criminality and despair that rolls on for ever, a cursed tide of evil that is monstrous and malevolent. And unnecessary. It is time to wake up and fix the curse just about every other first world nation has already sorted out much better than us.

Witness our American calamity:
· 5.5 million children involved in reports of abuse or neglect each year.
· 1,200 children killed each year by their abusers: four each day.
· 1.2 million American children currently in foster homes, institutionalized or homeless.
· An average 1,690 children determined by investigation to have been raped each week.
· Over 32% of convicted killers in the U.S. were sexually abused as children.
· 60% of teens who become pregnant were sexually abused as children.
· 95% of teen prostitutes were sexually abused.· The U.S Department of Justice states that rape and sexual abuse of children in the United States costs the victims $1.5 billion in medical expenses and $21.5 billion in indirect costs per year.
· A 2001 study shows annual Direct Costs of child abuse and neglect total $24 billon and Indirect Costs $70 billion, for a total societal cost in the U.S. of $94 billion per year.
· The annual incident rate of child abuse and neglect in the U.S. (40 children per 1,000) is 10 times that for all forms of cancer (3.9 individuals per 1,000), yet U.S. government funding devotes only 5 cents of every $100 for child maltreatment research compared to $2 for cancer research.

Why, you ask? Why, in this richest nation on the face of the earth have we permitted this curse to self-replicate in our midst?
· States Rights: Terrific for freedom; lousy for protecting children: every scintilla of best practice was worked out years ago and has been successfully implemented somewhere among the 2,200 independent jurisdictions that have self-invented methods for dealing with abuse and neglect. But at least 80% of the country has never heard or learned those lessons…. Over three quarters of the country leaves their children in a Dark Ages of inept, broken, shambling bureaucratic ineptitude.
· Over half American children who appear in official dependency hearings where their interests are at stake have no lawyer.
· Most official consideration of American children’s best interests in Abuse, Neglect and Dependency determinations takes place without the child being heard, without the necessary resources and without the trained, qualified investigation and deliberation that would best serve the child.
· The presumption of governmental secrecy in 36 of the 50 States, whether or not it is necessary to protect the child, and frequently after the child’s death, allows patterns of ineptitude and bureaucratic misfeasance to roll on for ever without the light of day holding them to press and public account. In the 14 States with open hearings and guidelines to protect he child’s identity, errors are corrected because Americans, once they know, demand no less.
· Unlike all adult Americans, American children harmed by State decisions and actions have no right to seek redress or damages. As a result, agencies mandated to protect children are not required to protect them and face no legal consequences for their repetitive failures, even if they come to light.
· We mostly do not adequately train the grown-ups through whose hands pass the abused and neglected children: in the State of Texas, the number of weeks of training required to become a State-certified manicurist exceeds the number of weeks of training required to become a State-certified investigating social worker.

Why here, in America?
· Children are offered specific protection by the constitutions of over 80 sovereign nations, including under the new Iraqi Constitution, but not by that of the United States of America.
· 193 nations, including two non-party nations, have ratified the United Nations Convention on The Rights Of The Child. Only two have not: Somalia and the United States of America.

What is it about America that only lets us fix things after they are broken, that inhibits our willingness to prevent them from breaking in the first place, when the total cost is much, much less? How can a nation of can-do high achievers not wish to loosen this clearly-delineated vice of awfulness and to change systems that permit generations of abused and neglected children from carrying their life-long curses into adulthoods of unhappiness and oftentimes socially-damaging behavior? Why do we tolerate vicious circles and not reverse them into virtuous ones with already clearly-known better practices?

It is time to get angry. It is time to get mad as hell and not to take this any more. It is time to realize this rolling curse is not inevitable and exists through failures of leadership at State, Federal and local levels. Time to realize that best practices thrive happily in a few places among us…. Time to insist they be delivered to the other 80% of the nation’s children in dire circumstances. Time to stand up for the kids!

A Man Never Stands So Tall As When He Stoops To Hold The Hand Of A Child In Need. Neither does a nation.

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Peter Samuelson (petersam@who.net) is a Motion Picture producer, executive and founder of three non-profit philanthropies: The Starlight-Starbright Childrens Foundation (www.starlight.org), the First Star Public Policy Initiative (www.firststar.org) and EDAR ("Everyone Deserves A Roof"). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Saryl and four children.

A CHILD'S PLACE

When in the course of human events, it becomes imperative for American CHILDREN to finally assume alongside adult citizens of this vibrant and ever-evolving democracy, the position to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle every human being, one more worthy than CHILDREN’S past and present standing as mere chattel under law, a decent respect for the opinions of humankind requires those who seek such improvement to declare the causes that so entitle CHILDREN within any society claiming to be free, democratic and civilized.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created first as CHILDREN; that CHILDREN are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that governments serve no higher purpose than to secure these rights for CHILDREN alongside adults. Whenever any part of government becomes dismissive or destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who witness the everyday suffering of thousands of CHILDREN to insist upon the institution of new laws, new procedures and new attitudes throughout government and society to secure the safety and happiness of CHILDREN, who are our only possible future.

History indeed suggests that the entrenched systems and bureaucracies of government, which often operate in secrecy to determine the fate of afflicted CHILDREN, can not easily be changed. Experience has shown that children are in no position to advocate for themselves and adults often lack the knowledge and sense of moral outrage necessary to right these broken systems by abolishing the institutional forms and processes to which they are accustomed.
Let us recognize that most abuse and neglect of CHILDREN begins in the home, in those individual families that are unable or unwilling to nurture the CHILDREN they bring into the world, who instead become their innocent victims. A government of and for the people should encourage preventative education in CHILD development to support families and forestall these frequent tragedies. Instead our public institutions oftentimes compound individual cases of abuse and neglect by arriving late, after the fact and wielding only blunt instruments to effect change.

When the long train of wrongs done to those CHILDREN we grind painfully through the mis-shapen cogs and gears of our justice and welfare systems becomes evident and when CHILDREN are killed, maimed and scarred for life by ungodly governmental ineptness and repetitive official failures, it is the duty of every responsible adult who was ever a CHILD to throw down these broken tentacles of government, and to provide new guards for the future safety of our CHILDREN.

The patient suffering of abused and neglected CHILDREN historically had no voice to protest, but now a rising tide of public indignation at regular appalling revelations of the terrible experience meted out to innocent CHILDREN by a fundamentally broken and archaic system compels that caring public to demand henceforth that the official treatment of CHILDREN in harm’s way be worthy of this great nation.

The history of our nation is an unfortunate litany of repeated injuries and usurpations towards children, advertant and inadvertent; by the standards of much of the rest of the world our treatment of children should cause us shame. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:
· Nearly two million American children reported as victims of abuse or neglect are corroborated each year. .
· Well over 1,000 American children die each year of abuse or neglect: more than three each day.
· A million American children are currently in foster homes, institutionalized or homeless.
· 8,000 American children are raped each week.
· Over half American children who appear in official hearings where their interests are at stake have no lawyer.
· Most official consideration of a child’s Best Interests in Abuse, Neglect and Dependency determinations takes place without the child being heard, without the necessary resources and without the trained, qualified investigation and deliberation that would best serve the child.
· The presumption of governmental secrecy, whether or not it is necessary to serve the child’s need for privacy and oftentimes even after the child’s death, frequently allows official misfeasance to continue unchecked by public awareness and protest.
· Unlike all adults, a child harmed by state decisions and actions has no right to seek redress or damages. As a result, agencies mandated to protect children are not required to protect them and face no legal consequences for their repetitive failures.
· Children are offered specific protections by the constitutions of over 80 sovereign nations, but not by that of the United States.
· Alongside Somalia, the United States is one of only two nations out of 193 that have failed to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of The Child.

In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object: putting CHILDREN first. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and National legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We trust that recognition of CHILDREN’S natural pre-eminence in society and of the disgraceful position to which they have in fact been relegated will lead to thoughtful reflection and thus public agitation for change by other adults of good will, embracing every part of the country.
For the support of this declaration of the inalienable prerogatives of all our CHILDREN, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

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Peter Samuelson is Founder and serving President of First Star (www.firststar.org) a 501(c)(3) charity tasked with addressing the appalling situation of abused and neglected children in our midst.

Bill Gates Ate My Weekend.

You’ve been there, and recently. So have I. Much too often. You did what the software said. You did it twice. You booted off, you booted on, you did it a third time. You meticulously followed the vastly user-unfriendly instructions of Microsoft or Symantec or any one of the dozens of software companies whose $49.95 disks have become principal threads in your life and indispensable paths to living Life As We Know It.

You did precisely what they said and the screen froze blue, or it gave you cryptic Error 8000405071b, or it turned the computer off, or it erased your data and mysteriously accused you of pilot error without the courtesy of an explanation. So you went onto Google and you entered the symptoms and you discovered thousands of other poor souls out there plaintively crying in the same wilderness because they too lost their way, hit and run victims of the same careless and dismissive software techno-barons. The blogosphere seethes with shared psychosis, the gnawing frustration of dealing with software that actually, really, probably won’t do what you assumed it would do because they promised you in the advertising.

Let’s be honest: personal computer software is the least user-friendly consumer product in our personal worlds. If a car dared to act the same way, the brakes would sometimes without warning only function if you first turned the car off and then back on and waited patiently for the right to cause the thing to cease motion. And the pedals might reboot reversed…. there would be a little text document extruding from the dashboard telling you that the work-around was to sit backwards.

My Toshiba laptop is less than two years old. Thank God I bought the extended warranty. So far the screen has failed, the DVD/CD drive has failed and finally the hard disk has failed. Of course I was backed up! But you can’t just transfer programs back over to the new hard drive. Data yes, programs mostly no. And tell me this, Bill Gates: If I’m the owner of the old hard drive, the new hard drive, the backup and the software you sold me, how come it took eight hours of support tech to get all the same stuff to work again in your Windows XP? Why are your security protections so confusing that the owner can’t get past the Administrator protections to get his own damn documents without a thousand dollars of tech help? And why did the expert at $125 an hour have to research the solutions online? Why am I paying for that and not you, huh?

The new psychotic state is profound but little studied: pathetic, despairing white hot rage descends like a veil when you realize the computer software suddenly won’t let you run your life. Like having a stroke, one indispensable lobe of your command and control goes AWOL. You use the computer to make your life easier and it often does, except for that week-long period every few months when it refuses to cooperate, rejects you and retreats into an obtuse refusal to explain what the heck is happening. A whole industry of I.T. guys lives to help you out at great expense, except if you fancy chatting with a person twelve thousand miles away with an echo who will be happy to read you scripted lines from the computer screen he’s facing in Jaipur.

The computer is the least evolved, most imperfect consumer device in history. Its user interface is so flawed that only arrogance can explain why such bright people have perpetuated its frustrations. We’ve made them very rich, but we have not made them responsive. Their focus is to make software ever more complicated, ever more evolved. They compete on bells and whistles. But years ago they left customer service, reliability, predictability and robustness far behind. And now they survive against stiff competition because all their competitors equally ignore the glazed-eyed customer who really, please I’m begging you here, would just like to get at his email.

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Peter Samuelson is a motion picture producer and philanthropist and lives in Los Angeles. petersam@who.net www.stormbreaker.com

NARCISSISM IN WASHINGTON, DANGER IN THE WORLD

Approximately one percent of the population suffers from the serious character disorder of narcissism and many more people exhibit telling narcissistic traits. The self-absorbed, impulsive and contemptuous behavior of a narcissist represents one of the most corrosive challenges to any family or workplace. There are signs that narcissism may be the signature personality disorder of our time: fueled by media adulation, our sports, entertainment and political ‘stars’ are not only narcissistically rampant, but appear to be replicating across our culture, our economy and now noticeably in Washington.

Narcissism’s origins are sometimes attributed to the failure of a small child to make the transition from perceiving himself the sole center of his mother’s universe to being one of the several children in kindergarten between whom a teacher divides attention. When the toddler fails to adapt to being one member of a larger community, great misery can result not only for the resulting life-long narcissist but even more so for those around him or her. And yes, three-quarters of narcissists are men.

A narcissist believes he is invulnerable. His excessive need for approval creates rage and depression when the flattery he craves is not satisfied. He rarely listens to those around him and mostly cannot recall anything said in his presence unless it is affirming. Narcissists have such a distorted view of their place in the world that they are frequently in trouble with the law, engage in substance abuse, make insensitive parents and inflict a bewildering chaos on those whose lives they touch. Narcissists lack the capacity for empathy and thus are often contemptuous, cruel and critical. This interpersonal sadism is totally irrational, entirely self-motivated and almost impossible to treat. Narcissists can only be dealt with symptomatically: “So you do not sleep and you feel depressed?”, “You feel an emptiness?”, “You feel wounded and misunderstood?”, “You think people are attacking you?” Mental health professionals frequently state that narcissists are their most challenging clients: As soon as the “N-word” is mentioned, most of them are never again seen in therapy.

As a film producer, I’ve had stressful, demeaning and oftentimes quietly hilarious experiences with true narcissists. I once worked with a star, a legend in his own mind, who would not act if anyone on the set was wearing green. I worked with another who arrived an hour late every day, reared up on the back wheel of his gigantic motorbike. And with an executive who, on a very hot and humid day, obliviously leaned over to the oscillating table fan and pressed the button so that it would point only at him. We can laugh discreetly at the model who is so proud of her hobby: taking pictures of herself in mirrors and at the one who said what she loved best about being pregnant was that “everyone paid me so much attention”. Studies of Acquired Situational Narcissism by Robert Millman, Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical School have demonstrated that in pop-culture saturated America, the narcissism latent in some individuals can dominate their lives when a tidal wave of celebrity perks, irrational adulation and fawning acolytes suddenly falls on swelling heads courtesy of our fame-obsessed media.

Luckily, in our personal lives and in the pages of the tabloids we don’t meet narcissists with the power of life or death over others, nor with the ability to send powerful military forces to impose their will. We rarely see the grandiose personal fantasies of an average narcissist threaten very large numbers of people. Most everyday narcissists don’t possess Weapons of Mass Destruction. But when narcissism does inhabit the most senior leadership of a world power, its corrosive effects are felt among the whole family of nations.

The United States in the last four years has entirely squandered the empathy most of the world felt for us immediately after 9-11. Right after those appalling events, the French Foreign Minister proclaimed “Today we are all American”. Possibly never before in history has so warm a relationship between nations been so quickly reduced to hostility, belligerence and ostracism. And just like the classic narcissist, we strut ever onwards, oblivious to jaws dropped around the world by those who used to be our friends and colleagues.

It was not only the Republicans who voted for a pre-emptive war, but many of the Democrats in Congress alongside them. Our willful refusal to have the patience to harness the United Nations in sorting out Saddam Hussein was not a party political decision…. no, this huge mistake – one of the biggest in the last hundred years of government - was made on both sides of the aisle. Our intelligence was faulty and we sent a good man to the U.N. to trumpet it in all its error…. But even given the CIA debacle, we still could have empowered the United Nations to take out the tyrant: when we cut off discussion by invading Iraq, the French were down to asking for only a couple of months of ultimatum before they would support joint U.N. military intervention. But we didn’t and still don’t like those blue helmets. Pity the poor boys and girls who wear our helmets now. It is lonely as well as deadly over there: we’ve lost 2000 plus troops and perhaps 15 times that number of Iraqi civilians are dead. And how many troops and bystanders have been maimed?

The United States has tried to impose its will by force, with a tell-tale narcissistic lack of long-term planning and with a seeming lack of interest in understanding the complex realities it seeks to change. Through the skillful use of fear and with the help of a mostly hypnotized media, the narcissists’ manipulative skills were seen in the sudden replacement of the uncatchable bin Laden by Saddam as our preferred single enemy. Now that the core rationale of this particular Middle East adventure has been proven false, we witness the narcissist’s deliberately sown verbal confusion, his lack of remorse or guilt, his failure to accept responsibility and a colossal sense of authoritarian entitlement: we are America, therefore it is to be expected that we will impose our will on the rest of the world.

Pax Americana was the stated goal (in exactly those words) in the year 2000 manifesto Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Permanent military bases should be placed throughout the world and up in space to impose U.S. hegemony and maximize our commercial and political interests. A narcissist often helpfully publishes his plans far in advance: for him it’s the truth, so why not? Mein Kampf came out in 1925. When one is so sure of being right, like the Crusaders, any amount of blood can be justified on the way to the Holy Land. Only the ends matter…and God will forgive the means.

With the obliviousness of the narcissistic bully this entitlement has led us into a naïve attempt to change the world without the courtesy of first trying to understand it. The widespread rage and bewilderment in Europe among our erstwhile allies runs parallel to the shock and horror which greet the narcissist’s grandiose fantasies, cruelty and lack of empathy in an individual family unit. The social isolation we increasingly feel as our plans go awry has no effect on us…. we do not bother to listen and we are so sure we are right that those who disagree must be unpatriotic or just plain stupid.

We kick carelessly through international treaties and shared long-term common purpose… Kyoto, the ABM Treaty with Russia, the vetoed U.S. support of a World Court to try war crimes…without realizing that the previously admired American Cowboy looks awfully destructive if he lies, if he fails to listen, if he misuses his position to feed self-entitlement and if he exhibits the self-same amoral lack of conscience of a classic narcissist. As Hitler wrote “In the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a great lie than to a small one”.

One has to wonder what further incursion could have been made in the last three years against the verifiable risks of growing terrorism if we had deployed the same resources of money, of materiel, and most of all of thousands of human lives to attacking the terrorists themselves rather than Saddam’s despicable regime, one of many despicable regimes in the world who represent little threat to the United States and which had no serious link to the forces of evil which really should scare us. Smoke and mirrors and hypnotic delusion. And if, as we now know, there was zero Al Quaeda presence in Iraq before the war, there sure is now: we’ve lit a blazing beacon for those who hate us.

Meanwhile, a secretive authoritarianism at home, hallmark of the individual narcissist, seeks to roll back some important threads of the very fabric of our laws, our privacy, our Constitution and hundreds of years of checks and balances for a runaway narcissistic political fantasy. Freud wrote of “The Exceptions”, those who feel “entitled to live outside the limitations that apply to ordinary people”. Through what Freud termed Projection, the individual deals with internal conflict and stress by “falsely attributing to another his own unacceptable feelings, impulses or thoughts”. Think of the Swift Boat campaign and of those elephantine flip-flops: It’s bin Laden, no it’s Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, no it’s democracy, no it’s nation – building: we were so opposed to that ten minutes ago, weren’t we? We need neither a Department of Homeland Security, nor a 9 – 11 Commission, but then we need both. We do/don’t/do like Chalabi, do/don’t/do work with Baathists, don’t/do need more troops or money to finish the job. And we do/don’t want CO2 limits and for sure we either do or don’t want to leave gay marriage to the States. So let’s follow Freud and project our own indecisiveness elsewhere. This particular bird-brained flu can be seen on both sides of the aisle: knee-jerk, polarized finger-pointing has paralyzed responsible government.

“The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and to denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” When Nazi Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering uttered these words at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, he spoke on behalf of a defeated, vicious narcissistic regime which was so sure of the truth and virtue in its lies that it almost brought down the world.

While they wreak their havoc on others, bullies of every stripe are sad sacks inside. Cry for America and cry for the world.

DO AS I SAY, DON'T DO AS I DO

We argue a lot as Americans whether we should have invaded Iraq in the first place. We clearly didn’t have reliable intelligence, we should or shouldn’t have believed it, we deposed a hideous tyrant who gassed his own people, but over 2000 American families grieve their lost sons and daughters. We have brought freedom and democracy to Iraqis, but over two million Iraqis have fled to neighboring countries because their own is so unsafe. Happily, we can all agree that the new Iraqi Constitution, recently approved by Iraqis themselves by referendum, is a very good thing indeed. I sat down and read their Constitution to see what kind of a document we’re spending six hundred billion dollars and so many lives to create. You can download the Associated Press translation at http://www.almendhar.com/english_17/print.asx

I was genuinely moved. This is an astonishingly thorough, culturally and tribally sensitive statement of the highest and best aspirations any nation could have for its people and for the best way to conduct government and civic affairs. And when I compared the Iraqi Constitution with our own United States Constitution, some sections frankly made me jealous.

I am particularly interested in children’s rights. I believe that the way a country treats all its children is the best litmus test of how civilized the grown-ups really are. Kids are the future and if you marginalize them, you don’t have the right to expect much of your country in the years to come. So my eyes were opened wide by the sections of the Iraqi Constitution beginning at Article 29: “The family is the foundation of society….the state shall guarantee the protection of motherhood, childhood and old age and shall take care of juveniles and youths and provide them with agreeable conditions to develop their capabilities. Children have the right to upbringing, education and care from their parents; parents have the right to respect and care from their children, especially in times of want, disability or old age. Economic exploitation of children in any form is banned and the state shall take measures to guarantee their protection. Violence and abuse in the family, school and society shall be forbidden. The state guarantees social and health insurance, the basics for a free and honorable life for the individual and the family, especially children and women, works to protect them from illiteracy, fear and poverty and provides them with housing and the means to rehabilitate and take care of them. This shall be regulated by law. Every Iraqi has the right to health service, and the state is in charge of public health and guarantees the means of protection and treatment by building different kinds of hospitals and health institutions”.

Here’s why it made me jealous: the United States ranks last or almost last in the First World by the statistics of childhood abuse and neglect. The Europeans, the Australians, the Japanese and a whole lot of other nations have clearly worked out better ways to protect their children in harm’s way… ways that mostly seem to elude us. We have 3 million kids abused each year and 1200 of them die. Many of the 2,200 jurisdictions that run children’s services for needy kids mess it up big time, and they all have different problems: in Florida they lose children in state custody. Where are those hundreds of children? In several of our major cities there is no institutional memory and they put kids back into the same dangerous place where they are re-molested and sometimes killed by the people who caused them harm in the first place. 68% of adult male prisoners in the United States were abused or neglected as children. 50% of all obese American women were sexually molested in childhood. The direct and indirect costs of abuse and neglect of children exceed a hundred billion dollars a year.

Could this be related to the fact that children seem to have been forgotten by those brilliant men who drafted our Constitution? And could it be that those other brilliant men (and possibly a couple of women) we have sent to Washington ever since have not seen fit to improve matters much at all? The comparison with the Iraqi Constitution is telling: Iraqis think enough of their children to actually list their entitlements to well-being in the Constitution. Our Constitution makes no such commitments. If the Iraqis are willing to write down the protections they offer their children, might they take them a little more seriously when it comes to actually protecting them? Isn’t that one big reason for having a constitution in the first place?

The inescapable truth emerges that we are contributing the six hundred billion dollars and maiming thousands of American soldiers to guarantee protections for Iraqi children which we don’t give our own kids. We don’t guarantee our children healthcare and we don’t obligate our government to work to protect them from poverty: one in five of our children is growing up below the poverty line. Maybe this explains why the infant mortality rate among African American babies in New York is worse than in Cuba? Iraqi children and others are guaranteed the right to live in a healthy environment. There are no such Federal protections in the United States and the result is that many of our kids grow up in environments which are a hazard to their health and to any kind of happy future.

But, but, but I hear you say, will the Iraqis actually enforce these wonderful constitutional rights? Two answers: firstly, we for sure don’t enforce them ourselves and more importantly, the constitution of a nation is the fountainhead of all its jurisprudence, its case law and its evolving set of social standards for minimum behavior by people and companies and by the government itself….there is a clear advantage to writing down human entitlements that are essential to growing up whole and undamaged, rather than simply listing prohibitions. Bear in mind also that we don’t prohibit many of the things that stand in the way of our children’s right to reach adulthood intact as “highest and best” members of the community. Go figure.

I wouldn’t like to go live in Iraq. I would much rather enjoy my life and raise my children in the United States. But that is because I am a prosperous middle class member of the community and I can assure my children have the opportunity to reach their full potential. That is not true of our forty million poor families and of the children they raise….in many cases, their kids would be better off in Iraq.

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Peter Samuelson (petersam@who.net) founded First Star (http://www.firststar.org/ ) the national advocacy organization for child victims of abuse and neglect and Starlight-Starbright (www.slsb.org), the charity that helps seriously ill children. In his civilian life he is a film producer and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children.

WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS, CHILDREN!

I had almost left the tent without seeing her. When do we ever look up? Except that she started crying, I turned and there she was: a little kid of eight or nine wobbling in the middle of the tightrope fifty feet above the center ring of the three. No net, just her, a rope, a hard floor and me. I’ll never know how she got to the middle, but there she was, precariously balanced, terrified, crying out. Arms outstretched, little toes clenched from the stress of keeping her balance. Doing her best up there not to fall.

And I was apparently the only one left to help her. The audience was gone, the lights were dimmed, there was no more sparkle. The circus workers had finished and the clowns had plodded away. Leaving just me and a little girl on a rope up above: her tears, my rising panic and a vein pumping adrenalin not to let her die. I called out carefully, I asked her name, I told her not to move. I never took my eyes off her while I dialed 911 and I kept her up there by willpower until the fire boys came and their ladder went up and she came down on the shoulder of a burly guy in a yellow hat. We applauded him and her both. They wrapped the little girl in a blanket and took her away in an ambulance, but not before she looked up and smiled and said thank you. I thanked God she didn’t fall and that I had my cellphone and that 911 worked and that there was a 911 to call. We have a system for emergencies, and it worked.

We Americans are great at dealing with crisis. We can fix anything. Rebuild a city, replace a heart, rescue the toddler from the well: if a town has bad guys, we’ll send in a steely-eyed sheriff to clean it up. But what we are really, really lousy at doing is preventing bad things from happening in the first place: we just won’t take the time, spend the money or develop the political will…. We’d rather pick up the pieces nobly after the next catastrophe. Last April in New Orleans I asked the Sheriff about the levees. He said they were around 23 feet tall. I asked about the biggest storm surge they expected and he guessed it would be around 30 feet in his lifetime. I just looked at him. He tossed it off, “There’s no political will to spend ten billion dollars to build the levees higher”. And he laughed, even though the cost of rebuilding the whole city would be twenty times that. Go figure. Cowboys must have invented our philosophy of life: Count on us to kick anything broken back into shape, but prevention is for girlie men.

The child on the tightrope is a victim of abuse or neglect, one of three million a year in these United States. The swaying, frayed tightrope is our nation’s unnecessarily crappy child welfare system, a disgrace among the civilized nations of the planet. 1500 children a year fall off the rope on our watch and die. Tens of thousands are harmed by foster care and protective custody systems that are supposed to help them. We ask our social workers, the vast majority of them inadequately trained, to keep safe as many as a hundred kids each on the Children and Family Services tightrope. In Texas, the number of weeks of training required to be a state certified manicurist exceeds the weeks of training to be State certified as a social worker.

And what is the swaying, frayed rope? A system that is broken in most of the 2200 jurisdictions which under State Rights have self-invented solutions oftentimes as bad as the dysfunctions they seek to cure. Systems with no institutional memory because the social workers burn out from overload and leave and because many of the Judges can’t wait to escape from Dependency Court postings which they see as the bottom of the career totem pole, just one notch above Traffic Court. And so many of our major cities put kids back into harm’s way by bureaucratic error, where they are molested again, beaten up again and sometimes killed. Sorry, Brianna, Washington DC failed you: they lost the file.

And we deliberately turn off the klieg lights that might illuminate the crappy state of the tightrope: Courtesy of the ruling DeShaney vs. Winnebago County, the Supreme Court decided a child could not sue a governmental agency that put her back into harm’s way and should have known better. If mistakes cost lives but no money, where is the imperative for fixing the broken system? In 34 of our States, we wrong-headedly turn off the searchlights altogether: we seal hearings regarding children, in the misguided belief that this is necessary to protect them. But ask Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz of the Minnesota Supreme Court…. They’ve had open hearings in Minnesota for years; no child has ever been identified in the press, who operate under a protective protocol just as the adult victim is protected in rape cases. But because the press have access to shine their bright lights on the process itself, the bureaucrats charged with helping these special children have nowhere to hide. Repetitive errors are stopped. The system corrects itself, or the eleven ‘clock news asks why. Why can’t we do that in the other two thirds of the country, huh?

Child abuse and neglect costs the United States over a hundred billion dollars a year. Sixty-eight percent of adult male convicts were abused or neglected as children. Fifty percent of obese women were sexually molested as girls. And the awfulness oftentimes rolls on from generation to generation. I asked the Warden at a Columbus Ohio lock-up facility for children convicted of sexual crimes against other children how many he guessed had themselves been molested. 97% or 98%, he guessed. And so the blighting curse of abuse rolls on. Tell me, what actually is the future of the nation we pridefully care about if not through its children? Biologists compare how animals raise each others’ offspring when determining which are the higher species. By their rules, aren’t we down with the trout that lay thousands of eggs and hope a few don’t get eaten by predators? And God bless the children of Iraq: they deserve the extra rights and protections we’ve enabled in their new constitution. Just explain to me please why American children lack most of those rights and protections under our own?

The little abused and neglected girl did not choose to stand on the ratty tightrope: some miserable grown-up put her there. If it is too much to ask that we teach people to parent, can we at least agree to shorten the tightrope and install some handrails? They have them in other countries: Why is an abused child better off in Toronto than in Detroit? We’ve just found a boy placed in 60 different foster homes by age 18: how can he even stand upright after that turmoil? And why can’t we use distance learning to train the tens of thousands of practicing lawyers who will volunteer to serve for free as children’s advocates? Must we always knee-jerk whine at the lack of funds when volunteers just want to be trained? Believe me, kids is kids everywhere. If we have to have 2200 different jurisdictions to protect them, wouldn’t it at least be smart to compare the practices and outcomes in each to determine which models work best? Dare one suggest that if the research klieg light were turned on, well-meaning communities might like to adopt the best protocols rather than the worst?

Suffer the little children. They are the future of these United States. We can do much better by them and so by us. The knowledge exists; we just need the will. Hello? Hello? Anyone else think the wobbling little girl needs catching?

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Peter Samuelson (petersam@who.net) founded First Star (http://www.firststar.org/ ), the national advocacy organization for child victims of abuse and neglect and Starlight-Starbright, the charity that helps seriously ill children (www.slsb.org). In his civilian life he is a motion picture producer and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children.

AN EVEN MORE MODEST PROPOSAL

Two hundred and seventy-six years ago, the great British satirist Jonathan Swift shocked everyone with a modest proposal: In the midst of a famine, Ireland could escape the burden of poor children by …. well, eating them. The author of Gulliver’s Travels pointed out that his society was unwilling to actually feed these hungry, dependent children, so what would be so shocking about eating them? He reminded everyone that the moral decision to let the children die had already been made by default by the Government and by the people who elected it . . . so what was so wrong with his proposal? If nothing else, it would be less wasteful.

Swift’s Modest Proposal would be altogether too shocking, excessive and ridiculous for our times. So allow me to propose something infinitely more humane and generous for our nation’s million plus abused and neglected children: . . . Let’s decide to treat them legally like animals.

We’ve long demonstrated that we are prepared to protect and nurture our pets much better than we’ll ever agree to watch over other people’s children. We have extensive laws that protect animals from abuse and neglect, and in many situations these legal protections are much better than those we apply to children in harm’s way. In these United States, a man who beats his dog is uniformly prosecuted, while a man’s right to beat his child is inherently protected. A century ago, laws protecting animals were already in place. Let us recall that the very first organization to stand up for children was an animal rights charity. Go figure.

Punishment to Fit the Crime?

In September, the national media pounced on the story of eleven Ohio children confined to cages by their adoptive parents. "Although most of the 'boxes' were not locked," authorities said in a statement, "the children were afraid to leave their 'boxes' at night even to use the bathroom because an alarm would sound and the parents would react in anger." The children’s crates were fashioned from wood and chicken wire and clearly did not include the designer mattresses that cushion America’s most pampered pets (I note that Asprey & Garrard offer a hand-crafted chocolate brown alligator-skin pet carrier with cashmere throw for $19,000). The children, all of whom have special needs, were removed from the home and are now in different foster care. Although the parents are under investigation, criminal charges have not yet been filed.

In a 2004 issue of the Stanford Law Review, Jill Elaine Hasday noted that:
“By the end of the nineteenth century, a majority of common law courts held that a parent could inflict reasonable or moderate correction on his child, and rarely convicted a parent for exceeding the bounds of reasonableness or moderation. [As of 2004], every state still recognizes a parent's authority to impose corporal punishment on his child. At least thirty states and the District of Columbia, for instance, have codified a parent's right to inflict "reasonable" corporal punishment. At least thirteen states have codified a parent's right to impose corporal punishment in slightly different terms. These statutes preserve a substantial portion of the common law regime.”

No political will on children

Let’s be honest here: There is no decisive will in Government or among the majority of voters to put kids first. We don’t agree with giving children national primacy as the future of our society. So why don’t we fess up and use the existing framework of laws that protect animals? Just define children before age 18 as animals and bingo, we’ll go a long way to providing the protections kids have in other countries. OK, so we’ve decided the United States should be the only nation (besides Somalia) of 194 not to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. OK, so we have 2,225 juveniles locked up for life without possibility of parole, while the entire rest of the world combined has a grand total of twelve…. But at least by giving children the rights we give animals in this country we might reduce the thousand plus who die each year of abuse or neglect, and the couple of million who suffer with no right to a lawyer, no right to sue for redress when the Government harms them, no right to be heard when their fate is being determined, no right to be safe. And who knows, we might even find a few of those many kids who are wards of a state but the state has somehow lost them….

Why we don’t put children first

We give an elevated national standing to so many worthy issues: National Security, the fight against terrorism, rebuilding the Gulf States, Social Security, tax cuts and so on, not to mention pork-barrel projects for politicians of every stripe. . . these issues for good or bad are given a kind of Golden Ticket among national priorities. Without debating any of them here, why has the position of children as our gating factor, the glass ceiling of future prosperity, stability and arguably as our only future, not been given at least a couple of those Golden Tickets? OK, so two might be too many. But what about the same little brass ticket we give to pets?

Impact of ignoring children’s needs

How did we develop this blind-spot? Is it that children don't vote? Is it that they don't lobby? Is it that we still viscerally feel kids are the chattel property of their parents? Is it that we still have the Victorian sense children are imperfectly developed grown-ups, not fully human until they come of age? Are we always to be the nation that believes in fixing things after they break, rather than avoiding the breakage through prevention? Can’t we find political will to rise above policies that are invariably reactive and rarely pre-emptive? Do we really believe grown-ups have bigger rights to abuse and neglect than children have to be protected from the abusers and neglecters? Yet isn't that totally short-sighted when the kids mostly outlive the parents and when we know abuse and neglect often roll from generation to generation?

My modest proposal

We know over half of all adult male prisoners were abused or neglected as children. We know fully half of obese women were sexually abused as children. We know a lack of prenatal care greatly increases the cost of remedial medical and other services after birth. We know education can break cycles of poverty and low adult achievement. We know these things and yet our nation consistently relegates the fate of children to the bottom of the totem pole of priorities. We appropriately spend billions of dollars to defend our nation but a relative handful of pennies to ensure it will be a safe home to valuable citizens for generations to come.

Let’s be honest with one another: There is no political will to put kids first. So let’s just agree to put them tenth by defining them as animals. It will be a huge step-up among national priorities for the abused and neglected kids who are currently not even standing on the ladder.

Oh, and by the way, if you think this idea is daft, there is an alternative: We could treat the kids as human and actually protect them better. That's why we have First Star. No point cursing the gathering darkness. Candles, anyone?

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Peter Samuelson is a film producer, Founder Chairman of the Starlight Starbright Foundation (http://www.starlight.org/) and Founder President of the First Star Public Policy Initiative (http://www.firststar.org/). He can be reached at petersam@who.net

JEFF SKOLL LIFTS UP A PLANET

I am writing this on my laptop on the train from Oxford to London after attending and speaking at the annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School of Oxford University. The wheels of the train go round and round, and so do my thoughts. To paraphrase a poem written by John Gillespie Magee just before he died at 19 during the Second World War, I feel as though “I put out my hand and touched the face of God”. Big words, but what actually happened west of London was even bigger.

Jeff Skoll was the first employee and President of eBay, the world’s online auction site. He led from the front in developing a new paradigm for peer to peer transactions that eliminates geography. In the process he changed the very essence of business around the world. He is a visionary, a big brain and a natural leader. He is also, after the IPO of eBay, one of the world’s wealthiest men.

Almost everyone in his situation does one of two things: they either relentlessly carry on trying to make gazillions of extra dollars, trying to prove that their early success wasn’t a fluke, or else they retire and try to find happiness in the illusory, never-ending pursuit of luxury, excess and dissipation. Yet others run after ultimate power, ultimate beauty, ultimate sex or the ultimately meaningful yacht…. of which in the end there is none available. S.S. Oxymoron indeed.

Jeff Skoll decided instead that he would try to make the world a much better place. This is all the more shocking because, of course, he actually can and he is. His vision was to live in a peaceful and mutually prosperous world where all people, regardless of location, race or economic status could reach their maximum potential, not hate each other and generally live happier. In mighty ways he’s doing exactly that, pulling huge levers which in turn coax great social wheels to turn. He’s a kind of Pied Piper of social change and 600 of us from 40 countries followed him to Oxford to try to help.

The Skoll Foundation invests tens of millions of dollars in social entrepreneurs through three award programs and celebrates them through special initiatives like the four-part PBS series, The New Heroes, hosted by Robert Redford. And it connects social entrepreneurs with philanthropists, nonprofit volunteers and professionals online at http://www.socialedge.org/ …. a kind of eBay for ideas on how to make the world a better place and concrete plans for how to get there. Nick Negroponte, writing one of those great essays on the last page of Wired Magazine once coined the phrase “the exogenous brain”: the idea that using the streamlined communication now possible on-line, we can save the planet by joining into new communities where one person states a challenge and two thousand other people easily contribute wave after wave of solutions which nourish and modify each other until the nut finally cracks and the challenge is addressed. The idea is that many people thinking together become a bigger brain than the sum of the parts. The Skoll World Forum is exactly that, among the spires and church bells of a University town where people have been thinking about life for a thousand years.

I was invited to speak on a panel with people like Jake Eberts who produced Gandhi. We addressed how popular media networks can be used to drive social change in innovative ways. And along the way, we discussed the Skoll Foundation’s licensing of Gandhi to translate it into Arabic and show it this year to virtually the entire population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Will the historic hero of passive resistance in pursuit of national aspiration prove a helpful role model in a tragic hot-spot of hatred and mutual distrust? Time will tell, but it sure beats the vortex of suicide bombings and as my Grandmother would have said, “It sure can’t hurt”. A big lever pulled, a great example of thinking outside a repetitive old box and maybe the best use of celluloid since Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List taught millions of school kids around the world where hatred leads.

Social entrepreneurs from around the world sat in Oxford with leading figures from Hollywood, big business, philanthropy and academia to discuss how to leverage networks for social change. It was like an ant hill of electric people who care about important things that make the planet revolve. Davos with a higher purpose. And we met and were inspired by some honest-to-goodness real heroes: Amitabha Sadangi, who worked out how to pump clean water to hundreds of villages. Nina Smith, who created the Rugmark so we Yuppies can avoid gracing our living rooms with carpets made by enslaved, kidnapped children. Rodrigo Baggio, who brought the Internet, computers and skills to thousands of kids living in slums. Gillian Caldwell, whose Witness program gets video cameras into the hands of oppressed victims around the world to shout for freedom and justice. Victoria Hale, who brings life-saving drugs to dying people who haven’t the money to buy them. Stan Thekaekara, who touches and lifts up the Untouchables…. Leverage, leverage, leverage.

And we talked about Participant Productions, Skoll’s film company that invests in inspiring stories to get them seen, developed, packaged, shot and distributed to the largest possible audience. If their Syriana, from the writer/director of Traffic and with George Clooney and Matt Damon in it, bursts forth in September through the marketing muscle of Warner Brothers, might we better understand the effects of our dependence on oil? Might there be a public mandate to cure the addiction? What a shocking thought: film measured by the metrics of saving our children’s future and not just by the metrics of studio economics. Who would have thunk it?

Jeff Skoll did. And in cafes and cloisters and restaurants and courtyards, six hundred accomplished experts met in an ancient haven of thinkers. They mapped out better futures and then went forth to make them happen. The wheels of the train go round and round. So do my thoughts, and so does our world.

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Peter Samuelson is founder of the Starlight-Starbright Foundation (http://www.slsb.org/) and of First Star (http://www.firststar.org/). He lives in Holmby Hills with his wife and four children and in his civilian life is a film producer. He can be reached at petersam@who.net.

RAISING KIDS WHO CARE

Once upon a time there was a family of four. They lived happily together in a big house on a knoll in Brentwood (or Bel Air or Beverly Hills or Holmby Hills). They were prosperous and blessed by good health and an abundant lifestyle. They loved their children dearly and paid every good attention to raising them in a loving way, doting on their every need. Endless hours went into planning their education, their playdates with friends, their food, clothing and toys. The children were happy, loving, healthy and intelligent and the parents were very proud of them.

But all was not well in Camelot. The parents knew, because they read the newspapers and watched the eleven o’clock news that their perfect little cocoon of happiness and contentment was not exactly typical of the rest of the world. They knew that a million children each year are abused or neglected in the United States and that 1000 die. They knew that 3.5 million men, women and children sleep homeless in their great country, 39% of them being children. They knew terribly ill little kids fight hideous diseases, that 13 million American children live in poverty and… that very few others were as fortunate as their family. They knew the top 1% of Americans earn as much as the bottom 38% combined. Their eyes were wide open. They knew these things well, and so it had been important since the time they met and began to flourish in wealth and in life generally that they share as they could and try to make the world a better place for those less fortunate living around them. These two wonderful grown-ups gave generously to charity, recycled, mentored, attended events, big-brothered, big-sistered and put themselves out for the general good however and wherever they reasonably could.

But the same was not yet true for their two much loved children. It was not that they were spoiled or that they had a bad bone in their little bodies. On the contrary, they had great compassion for the weak and the suffering, witness the procession of stray animals, wounded birds and much adored pets in, on and around these children’s lives. And on one occasion in kindergarten, they had seen their daughter take the hand of a crying child and say, “I’ll be your friend”. But what these two wonderful kids did not have at all was any knowledge of the magical stardust we call charity. The Mom and the Dad felt terribly challenged trying to find for their children any whichway opportunities to be charitable, to act charitable or to give charitably. What was to be done?

It was not as if their nine-year-old daughter was going to regularly volunteer ten hours a week in a soup kitchen nor that their thirteen-year-old son would be easily assisting with repeated special visits to entertain seriously ill children his own age. They needed to work within the limits imposed by busy schedules and active lives. But they needed to do something….they realized their children were fully aware of the latest clothing on offer at Robinsons but much less aware of the needs of those less fortunate living around them.

And then they found a book. It wasn’t just any book but a rather special volume, big, bold and impressive. It was called “The Giving Book” by a lady called Ellen Sabin and it claimed to “open the door to a lifetime of giving”. So they opened it up and saw that there was a letter from parents to their children in the front just itching to have the names of each added: Dear ________; Because you are such a nice, wonderful, kind and caring person I am giving you this Giving Book. When you use it you will be making the world a better place, making many people happy and healthy and making me very proud of you. You can use this book to help so many people because you - and your actions - are powerful. You make a big difference because you are so special. Love from, _________.” They saw in the book a whole system described in child-friendly terms to enable children to understand charity, to do charity and to make charity a part of their own lives.

“Yes!” they shouted at each other, “Here’s what we’ve been looking for!” This was a fully integrated plan designed for kids between six and eleven or so, a kind of scrapbook of charitable achievements, suggestions and activities. And so they bought it….in fact they bought two…

The book helped their precious children to record their ideas, dreams and wishes for the world. It made them the author of their own charitable story and helped them create their journey into compassion, philanthropy and the power of their own actions. The kids loved it. The parents were proud of them and it made all four of them appreciate the magnificent lives that hard work, skill, intelligence, and luck had created for them. They lived happily ever after. So did the people around them that they helped. And the planet smiled.

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Peter Samuelson is founder of the Starlight-Starbright Foundation (http://www.slsb.org/) and of First Star (http://www.firststar.org/). He lives in Holmby Hills with his wife and four children and in his civilian life is a film producer. He can be reached at petersam@who.net. The Giving Book is available in bookstores or from http://www.wateringcanpress.com/

CARPE DIEM

I once developed a script about hobos traveling the American West who stowed away on freight trains. Outside of Phoenix there were two rail lines that came from great distances and for several hundred yards ran exactly parallel, separated by only a six foot gap. If you were a hobo traveling from the southeast to the northwest, you could save a great deal of time if you seized the moment and with impeccable timing jumped the gap from one train speeding along, to the other. This very dangerous maneuver symbolized in the script the moment in our lives when we are faced with a great but dangerous opportunity. We either take it, or we do not.

So it was that last year I realized the two magnificent children’s charities I had founded, The Starlight Foundation and The Starbright Foundation, had the potential to merge and become greater than the sum of their parts. I had always felt, since 1990, that Starlight and Starbright were twins separated at birth….here finally was a chance to put things right, “highest and best”. The question was whether or not I would have the nerve to jump. And if I did, how could I possibly encourage forty other people to jump with me?

In 1982 my cousin introduced me to an eleven-year-old British boy, Sean Honnoraty, hospitalized in London with an inoperable brain tumor. Sean’s great wish was to see Disneyland. We decided he should fly to Los Angeles with his mother, Brenda, a considerable logistical challenge. Sean had a wonderful time as did Brenda, watching Sean enjoy himself. Mother, son and my cousin moved into my condominium….so over a two-week period I came to know Sean well. When he returned to London and then died a few weeks later, I was terribly upset of course, but felt we had contributed something important to his last days.

I had my epiphany ten days later at lunch with an executive from HBO. Half way through the meal, we ran out of business to discuss and he asked me, “So what else is new?” I told him the story of Sean’s visit and of his death. The man from HBO wept right at the lunch table. I was thunderstruck: though I was as deeply embarrassed as him, I realized there and then the enormous power of what we had accomplished for Sean.

I called a meeting of a dozen entertainment industry executives and others and simply told the story. I suggested we could replicate the wish and do some more good. When the lawyer in the room asked what we wanted to call the new charity, an attractive young lady suggested we remember the children’s rhyme “Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight…”. I had had one previous date with her. She was present, honestly, because I knew I would need an accountant! The fact that Saryl and I have now been married two decades underlines what wonderful personal serendipity for me rode on the back of founding Starlight.

By 1990, Starlight had grown into a prodigious international charity providing psychosocial services to seriously ill children in Australia, Canada, The United States and the United Kingdom through a network of Chapters and offices. One of the programs we had developed placed thousands of audio-visual Fun Centers into children’s hospitals. It occurred to me that perhaps we could manufacture software tailor-made to the needs of seriously ill children, rather than only showing them off-the-shelf entertainment. I managed to get a meeting with Steven Spielberg, which unexpectedly ran on for two exhilarating hours. By the end of the meeting, Steven had agreed to chair a new charitable activity: producing videos and interactive software for seriously ill children. He also made a substantial donation and became an important partner in creating the new entity.

I originally wanted Starbright to be a program of Starlight…it seemed self-evident then and ever since that software needed the distribution network of our Chapters while the distribution network needed an ever-fresh array of products and services. There was a concern, however, at Starlight that building a non-profit studio was risky and that within a charity it could make problems for the whole organization. So the prudent and expeditious thing to do was to form Starbright as a separate 501(c)3 non-profit with its own Board and budget. So we did just that.

We first built Starbright World, a cutting-edge interactive on-line network linking seriously ill children in hospitals throughout North America. Children play, learn and interact through picture and sound with kids separated by thousands of miles. We also produced an array of interactive software to teach children about disease management in highly attractive and compelling ways. And we had a lot of fun.

But I always thought these two magnificent organizations would do much better if put back together. Between them we raised ….and also spent ….over a hundred million dollars on seriously ill children, but I would see crazy missed opportunities as I traveled around the country: In the same corridor of the hospital for example there would be two doors: A Starlight Room would contain a superb, kid-friendly environment and hardware running…. plain old commercial software. Fifty feet further would be a Starbright Room where compelling software tailor-made for seriously ill children played…. on standard computers in a regular hospital room…. The people at the hospital couldn’t understand the logic and neither could I.

Most people believe that mergers and acquisitions are only a for-profit Wall Street activity. But eighteen months ago we embarked on a great adventure: merging these two well-established non-profits into one glorious Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation. It took a great deal of professional effort involving law firms (Morrison & Foerster, Latham & Watkins, Kaye Scholer), accountancy (Deloitte & Touche), public relations (Sitric & Co., Addison) and the tireless efforts of a very high-powered joint committee known as Team Twinkle, which met regularly and in secret.

This process reached a happy conclusion last year when both boards voted through a full merger. We have already seen proof that our original hypothesis for merger holds water: More ill children are being served better over the long term and with diminished downside risk. The moral and pragmatic stockholders of our two organizations, seriously ill children, their families and the health care professionals looking after them have greatly benefited. Through Cause Related Marketing, the network of Starlight chapters dovetails seamlessly with the star power and products of Starbright. Starbright has brought serious scientific research to the array of psychosocial services proven by years of experience at Starlight. We’ve put Starbright software on Starlight hardware. We’ve merged two Boards so seamlessly that I have difficulty remembering who came from where. Most of all, by enhancing safety, longevity and permanency we have best served our special children. We’ve maybe created a perpetuity and through it an enduring legacy.

There is always fear of the unknown and it is always difficult to conquer the uncertainties which surround a new construction, a new relationship and a new definition of family. But sometimes when two trains run parallel one has to take the longest possible view, a deep breath and simply jump. Leadership is in the careful analysis of risk and reward and then in the presentation of a compelling proposition that will cause people to do the unprecedented and to do it brilliantly.

I am deeply grateful to all those individuals who worked so vigorously to make this rare non-profit merger come to pass. I thank you and, much more importantly, so do the two and a half million seriously ill children who are now helped by Starlight Starbright every year.

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Peter Samuelson is founder of the Starlight-Starbright Foundation (http://www.slsb.org/) and of First Star (http://www.firststar.org/). He lives in Holmby Hills with his wife and four children and in his civilian life is a film producer. He can be reached at petersam@who.net.

THESE ARE OUR KIDS AS WELL AS THEIRS

Whether Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Liberal, Americans should surely support unanimously, vigorously and with a whole heart the well-being of all our children…. after all, they are the only future we have. Yet First Star’s distinguished child welfare experts tell us repeatedly and clearly that threats just as scary as those of Homeland Security endanger the safety and future of many American children: right here, right now: abuse, neglect and the real perils of our nation's broken-down child welfare and foster care systems. The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System shows that more than three million children were involved in reports of abuse and neglect in 2002. Of those children, 896,000 were victims and 1,390 died. Appallingly, three quarters of these deaths were under the age of five.

Many more maltreated children die an emotional death and suffer unimaginable stress, severe anxiety, depression and low self-esteem that blight their prospects for a happy, productive life: half the adult males in our prisons were abused or neglected as children…. what does that cost us? Thousands of abused kids think about or attempt suicide. In 2001, over half a million children were in foster care. What's worst is that in many cases they are placed there into harm's way by the government which claims to be protecting them through foster care. The dictionary defines "foster" as "to bring up, nurture, promote the growth and development of, nurse or cherish." Foster care should always provide security and protection from an unsafe home. Unfortunately, often it is even worse. And too many children become stuck in perpetual foster care motion: moved repeatedly from house to house and never finding permanency. Both children and society pay a heavy price for this unstable, precarious reality. The federal government sets standards to protect children and find safe, permanent homes for them. Yet not one state has fully complied. By many measures the United States ranks dead last or almost last among First World nations in the way we handle these special children…. But they have no lobbyists, they don’t vote and so they have no real voice to protest.

Hello, America: this is happening on our watch! William Gray (D-PA), former Majority Whip and Chairman of the House Budget Committee, who serves as Vice Chair of the non-partisan Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, notes, "The foster care system is in disrepair. Every state has now failed the federal foster care reviews and we've seen far too many news stories of children missing from the system or injured while in care..." The Commission recently released far-reaching recommendations to overhaul the nation's foster care system. Formulated by leading experts, these recommendations represent intensive analysis and interviews with professionals, parents and children. Commission Chairman Bill Frenzel (R-MN) says that these recommendations include "greater accountability by both child welfare agencies and courts; giving states a flexible, reliable source of federal funding, new options and incentives to seek safety and permanence for children in foster care and helping courts secure the tools, information and training needed to fulfill their responsibilities to children." What is not to like?

Much of this work to put kids first involves changing their status as chattel or property under our legal system. How can it be right that in half the country a man who beats a dog goes to jail but the one who beats a child the same way is never prosecuted?

First Star (www.firststar.org ), the charity I founded in 1999, is working day and night right now on three critically important issues for children in the upcoming 109th Congress: to guarantee abused children in all fifty states the right to a competent attorney during court proceedings where their future is held in the balance, to eliminate legal and regulatory barriers that prevent those children’s advocates from exchanging information vital to keeping them out of dangerous situations and to shine the light of day where bureaucracy is hidden in shadows away from public scrutiny and accountability. First Star recently sponsored our third bipartisan Congressional Roundtable on Children on Capitol Hill, co-chaired by Congresswomen Mary Bono (R-CA) and Loretta Sanchez (D-CA). Members of Congress used the First Star event to draft a letter urging President Bush to work specifically to eradicate our national plague of child maltreatment. The Co-Chairs are asking every member of the upcoming Congress to join in reforming the current broken child welfare and foster care systems. Congressional member-advocates of the First Star Roundtable are raising the consciousness of their fellow-members and constituents regarding the abuse and neglect of children.

I hope and pray as an American Dad that President Bush will prioritize the rights of our children during his upcoming second term. Likewise, I hope every member of the 109th Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, will join First Star in reforming the current child welfare and foster care systems. Their disrepair poses a true threat to our nation and to the safety and happiness of our nation's most vulnerable children. Let's nurture these kids and give them a fair chance for healthy and bright futures. What better investment can we make? If not, who are we? And if not now, when?

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Film producer Peter Samuelson (“Wilde", “Tom & Viv”, “Arlington Road”, "Stormbreaker") has founded two major charities for children: Starlight-Starbright (1982) www.slsb.org and First Star (1999) www.firststar.org He lives in Holmby Hills with his wife and four children and may be reached at petersam@who.net

LEADERSHIP IS NOT JUST FOR EXPERTS

In the October issue of Privilege Magazine, I suggested that philanthropists can force new solutions to major challenges in our lives, in our children’s lives, and in the direction of our society as a whole. As a result of the article, I received many emails and have had the great pleasure of discussing philanthropic plans over breakfast with a wide spectrum of readers. I would like to think the advice I gave, based on my own experiences in Starlight Starbright and First Star, may have had some small strategic value and brought a rather large dose of encouragement to some splendid people.

One common thread in these invigorating conversations at Nate & Al’s was that people are concerned if they are not themselves expert that they may lack the knowledge necessary to exert leadership in complex areas. “How,” as one person asked me, “can I hope to effect change through investing my money in cancer research when I know nothing about cancer beyond what I’ve read in the newspaper?” The answer cuts directly to the core problem of many apparently insoluble challenges to our future health and happiness: there is simply so much knowledge that generalists fear to tread in areas full of experts. Areas that cry out for direction, purpose, coordination and plain old-fashioned leadership.

King Henry VIII of Great Britain was not very clever at marriage, but as a king he was probably the last world leader who really did know as much about every subject relevant to running a country as his most knowledgeable experts. He could debate Agriculture with his agronomists, Military Strategy with his generals, Economics with his economists (such as they were!) and Philosophy with his philosophers. He knew as much about the Law as any lawyer and could lecture all comers on History. Was this because he was a highly intelligent man with a king-sized brain?

Far from it: the simple fact was that in the sixteenth century human knowledge was not yet very extensive. You actually could know just about all of it if you applied your mind. Those days are long gone. The exponential growth of knowledge since then has not resulted in a commensurate increase in the size of the human brain nor in our mental capacity. We are the same old computers trying to process vastly more complex rafts of knowledge and interrelationships of facts. So how have we coped?

We have responded to daunting amounts of knowledge by narrowing our fields of study and expertise. I recently had trouble with my left knee and was stunned by a conversation with the Radiologist at the local university hospital. “Tell me” I asked, “how do knees rank against ankles: are they more or less interesting?” The Radiologist replied, “I only do knees, I don’t do ankles, elbows, or any other part of the body. But I do knees from all across the country: the MRI’s come in to me electronically and I make recommendations…but I am the knee man and nothing else.” I immediately had to check that yes, he did right as well as left knees. In Business, in Government and in Science we have been forced to drill down very deep to reach the cutting edge of knowledge and expertise. To get there, we have been forced to yield our flanks: our view of the world is very, very narrow and our experts see things only through the prism their own vastly specialized knowledge.

This would be fine if the problems afflicting the world could be solved by applying a single area of knowledge. But this is far from true: as the specialists have become more specialized the world has become more complex. How actually could one dare to state an opinion on the Middle East without a profound knowledge of history, comparative religion, agriculture, geography, warfare, and land sciences? How could one really begin to apply scarce resources “highest and best” in medical research without first knowing everything about the interrelated sciences which affect the human body?

But we do: we are a society run by specialists who do not personally possess broad knowledge anywhere near the cutting edge of the multiple areas which together comprise the challenges they seek to address. The needs of the large portions of mankind who slip through the cracks of our attention are daunting precisely because they require collaborations of the knowledgeable which rarely take place. For good or for bad, such is the arrogance of leadership that our lack of knowledge rarely seems to hold back the firmness of our opinions. What then are we to do about this?

Firstly, I suggest that an intelligent generalist, especially one with the power to make significant philanthropic contributions, can drive measurable answers intractable challenges. Secondly, a business entrepreneur who understands the intricate relationship between goal and process can add greatly to the leadership required to crack complex social and medical problems.

I remember some years ago engineering a meeting with General Norman Schwarzkopf. I flew to Tampa to persuade him to become Campaign Chairman of the Starbright Foundation. I was describing how Starbright brought together three different areas of expertise: pediatric medicine, high technology and the entertainment industry, and that we were always yanking the experts back into the middle, towards the goal we’d set for the Charity. He stopped me abruptly. “What do you know about the United States Army?” he asked. “Absolutely nothing, sir” I replied. “Well let me explain it” he went on. “When you join the Army you are not just given a rank, you are also given a specialty. You’re a rifleman, a cook, a signalman….it doesn’t matter how much you’re promoted up the ranks: you always wear your specialty badge until the day they make you a General. And in the ceremony they take away your specialty badge…. because you are no longer a specialist, you’re a General and you are now responsible for the overall goals of the military operation.” I realized at that moment why focusing on goals in the Army had raised generalists to a position of supreme power. The Army realized that if they put a specialist in charge, they would always be pulled away from the goal and towards the special focus of that individual. Not only was generalism the origin of the word General, but it made absolute sense in a life or death battle situation to put in charge someone who could think about overall goals and purposes without getting bogged down in the lattice-work of supporting specialized thinking.

I am reminded of the story of the eminent architects who met in an expensive restaurant over lunch to discuss how on earth they could retrofit an elevator into a particular old building where it was now required by the Americans with Disabilities Act. After agonizing discussion of various solutions, none really workable, the young waiter leaned in and asked, “I do apologize but I have an idea to where you could put the elevator.” The architects were somewhat contemptuous but asked him to tell them where he, a mere server, might think of locating the elevator when they could not. “What if you put it up the outside of the building?” he asked. And they did. When the financier Michael Milken was forced to address prostate cancer because of his own illness, he did not just inject money into the existing field of research. He redesigned the whole plan of attack. He applied those same intellectual skills he had developed in the bond market with considerable success to new challenges of research medicine, where dozens of highly specialized researchers had tried hard, but never previously worked together “highest and best”.

As philanthropists we can do more than just give money to specialists: we can actually coach them to reassess their impact on their goals and readdress the goals themselves.

When I started First Star (http://www.firststar.org/) six years ago, I had nothing but a vague idea that children’s constitutional rights were lacking in the United States and that this directly resulted in our poor performance against the rest of the First World in addressing the needs of abused and neglected children. Over these six years we have brought together five hundred world-class experts from the fields of child psychology, the judiciary, the legislative and executive branches of government, social work, medicine and law enforcement. On not a single occasion has one of these experts asked me why on earth I think I can presume to exert leadership in a field of two dozen specialties, in none of which am I an expert. On the contrary, I am told all the time that what has been lacking in the past is leadership. That the solutions we have driven by colliding the different expertises together are self-evident, splendid and much to be desired….I take from this that the failure all along has been one of leadership and not one of knowledge.

Similarly, when Valerie Sobel lost her child she made lemonade out of her bitter lemons: she formed the Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation to provide immediate financial help to families where the serious illness of a child is causing the single mother to lose her grip on financial sufficiency and to fall below the poverty line. Valerie Sobel has made a measurable difference in the lives of hundreds of afflicted families with a philanthropy she invented herself, by understanding a need and daring to address it. No amount of organizational training or specialized knowledge could have replaced her over-arching concern, compassion, intelligence and refusal to take ‘no’ for an answer in creating her charity.

If you have been lucky enough to accumulate wealth, you have the power to change the world as you know it. Do not be held back by vague ideas that only a specialist with decades of training can drive solutions to difficult problems. Sometimes exactly what it takes is someone who can question old assumptions. That person can be you, and the world may be a better place if you dare to lead from the front.

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Peter Samuelson is Founder of the Starlight-Starbright Foundation (www.slsb.org) and of First Star (http://www.firststar.org/). He lives in Holmby Hills with his wife and four children and in his civilian life is a film producer. He can be reached at petersam@who.net

THE ROBIN HOOD EFFECT

I spend a lot of time persuading people that selflessness can be selfish. Arguing self-interest in philanthropy may seem like an oxymoron but in fact it is often the difference between success and failure in fundraising for those of us building non-profit organizations. From my two decades of experience not only does the strategy clearly work, but in addition I suggest its ethics and morality can oftentimes be admirable and appropriate.

Most of us feel the urge to do good deeds and support those less fortunate than ourselves based on our shared belief that we are “all in this thing together” and that the strong should support the weak. Quite often we learn this motivation as a core tenet of our religion or when we are taught a philosophy of life. Certainly, I have taught four children that civilization is fragile and that it is the responsibility of each and every member to improve it and to further build resilient and ambitious social structures to pass on to our children and through them to theirs.

But recent research shows us that there is also self-interest in helping those less fortunate. Ichiro Kawachi in collaboration with the Social Environment Working Group of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health has demonstrated that the degree of income inequality in a society is related to the health status of that population. Greater income inequality is linked to lower life expectancy, higher mortality rates and worse self-rated health, for the wealthy as well as for the poor, at the U.S. state level. Higher mortality at the U.S. metropolitan level, as well as higher rates of obesity at the U.S. state level are also linked to income inequality. This association may seem astonishing but it is statistically robust when corrected for differentials of age, race, sex and individual socio-economic characteristics. The bottom line is that affluent people live shorter and less healthy lives the more the people around them are poor.

Why exactly this demonstrable correlation exists is still subject to debate. One can imagine however that one’s own health is jeopardized if the man making the salad in a restaurant has inadequate health care and thus a higher incidence of communicable disease. Having worked in several third world countries where the gulf between rich and poor is gigantic, I can attest to the incremental stress among the affluent caused by protecting themselves…. through high walls, armored cars and armed bodyguards, from the potential for theft, violence and dislike by those impoverished souls around them. And stress, as we know, shortens life.

One of most important areas where self-interest is an entirely appropriate motivation for philanthropy is in the brilliant sponsorships I have been able to encourage by Fortune 500 companies. There was a time many years ago when I would fly into the headquarters city of a major corporation. I would visit with the corporation’s Foundation staff and I would basically beg for their help in supporting one of my children’s charities “You know that we do good work, you know that we’re efficient and that seriously ill children need your help. You are yourself a parent…could you please see a way to making a donation to support these special kids in need?” When things went well I would receive a twenty-five thousand dollar donation for Starlight-Starbright and be politely asked not to return for another year.

At a certain point, I realized that a worthy cause is capable of presenting a net gain to a major corporation. Put bluntly, a worthy cause can help sell their product or service. So I started visiting with the Executive Vice President for Marketing, rather than with the Foundation division of each company. My pitch would be quite different, “In our recent national promotion with Colgate-Palmolive, Starlight-Starbright demonstrated a twenty-five percent uplift in the brand’s Nielsen Scantrack market share. We think we can similarly create a dramatic benefit for your own corporation which will also be very good for Starlight-Starbright’s special children”. The results were astonishing: instead of receiving twenty-five thousand dollars from the corporation’s foundation we were suddenly receiving two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from a Cause Related Marketing campaign. Some of these Starlight-Starbright promotions have generated in excess of a million dollars each year. I am sure they also sold a great deal of product…and I say ‘God bless America’ in this regard…. a perfect example of the corporation acting responsibly not only to society but also to its stockholders: a true win-win.

And what a wonderful thing to understand that a fifty cent donation to charity triggered by a consumer’s purchase of a product or service generates more of an uplift in sales than a fifty cent discount coupon to the same consumer! This means that, generally speaking, consumers are more ready to help needy children than they are their own pocketbooks. It gives one hope for the future….

I still teach my kids that altruism is an ennobling part of character that enriches the giver as well as our whole civilization. I still teach them that any act, however small, by which we build society makes us part of the virtuous forces which heal the world and build a better life for our descendants. I still teach them that it is better to give a man a job than just to give him money, better to build a bridge then to swim the river, and a terrific thing to apply entrepreneurial skills in a non-profit, philanthropic direction.

But I also tell them that Starlight-Starbright and First Star are the best possible opportunities to meet like-minded souls, brilliant people who have self-selected themselves as worthy citizen whose enthusiasm for life, children and the future will make great friendships blossom. I accurately tell them of the many marriages that have happened between thousands of brilliant volunteers who found a common bond in helping seriously ill kids. I tell them that this is how their Mom and Dad fell in love.

When I lecture in business schools I always tell the students that their career track or volunteer track in philanthropy will be about ten times faster than in an ordinary business for profit….the charities of America are so needy, so eager and so ready to embrace new ways of achieving their goals that generally speaking the rise of a smart and dedicated young person can be meteoric. People know in the meetings of my philanthropies that it is a dangerous thing to suggest a good idea….one immediately finds oneself the head of a taskforce charged with driving its study and implementation.

And for me personally, I laugh when someone talks to me as though I was some noble soul dedicating time and resources to non-profit causes. I know secretly in my heart that the greatest gift I’ve ever received was the realization that through good works I would make myself very, very happy. I constantly receive much more than I give.

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Peter Samuelson is the founder of the Starlight-Starbright Foundation (http://www.slsb.org/) and of First Star (http://www.firststar.org/). He lives in Holmby Hills with his wife and four children and in his civilian life is a film producer. He can be reached at petersam@who.net

LIGHTING A FEW BRIGHT CANDLES

What is the meaning of wealth? This is a question I have wrestled with intermittently for the last twenty-five years. At a certain point, if one is lucky, hard work creates what one needs to live comfortably. Continuous observation suggests that leaving vast sums of money to one’s kids is to place a curse on their heads that will more likely challenge than nurture them. So what does one do with the rest?

The laws of thermodynamics teach us that all systems in the Universe if left unmanaged eventually decay into random nothingness. If that is true, then the quest for civilization is a never ending one: If we wish to bequeath something honorable, helpful and loving to our children’s children’s children we had better pay attention to the systems within our society which keep it afloat. Passive inactivity is a recipe for decay and atrophy. It really is not an option to sit on one’s hands.

It seems to me that there are gigantic opportunities for people who thrive in business to apply the self-same skills to righting some of the wrongs around us. I have tried to focus through a self-invented “entrepreneurial philanthropy” on the grievous challenges of seriously ill children and of those kids who are abused and neglected. It makes no sense to me that in this greatest civilization the world has ever put forth, we so often systematically marginalize our children and other people’s children, even though they are our only future. The dark side of the “can do” of the American Dream is to try to fix things after they have broken rather than preventing them from breaking in the first place. For example, two-thirds of the adult males in our prisons were abused or neglected as children. Would it not make some sense to diminish this threat in the future? If self-esteem is so closely tied to living a productive life, should we not be trying to build it wherever we can in our society?

There is so much we can productively do by using our resources of intellect, entrepreneurship and a sense that anything is possible if one breaks it down into bite-sized chunks. And, yes, it sometimes takes money as well. Why, as another example, are we not building bridges to develop a strong, prosperous Islamic middle class, probably the only long-term solution to present upheaval in the world, awfulness that will otherwise confront our children for decades to come? And can we really not do better for homeless people sleeping rough amongst us than to give them the cardboard box our Sub-Zero came in?

Some of the most exciting things I have ever done have been through collaborations with like-minded people in philanthropy. An entrepreneur can helpfully exert his or her lateral thinking to serve the planet, not just to take from it. It’s really no use to curse the gathering darkness--much better to light a few bright candles I think.

There is a poem by Shelley called Ozymandias about a gigantic crumbled statue in the desert. Erected by a long-forgotten emperor, only the legs still stand. “Look upon my works, ye Mighty and despair!” reads the inscription. That’s all that's left! As Theilard de Chardin wrote, “Now is the time to build the Earth.” If we want our lives to amount to anything worth remembering, should we not pay attention to the true and lasting value of our legacy—and have some wonderful excitement while doing so?

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Film producer Peter Samuelson (“Wilde", “Tom & Viv”, “Arlington Road”) has founded three charities for children: Starlight (1982), Starbright (1990) and First Star (1999). He teaches entrepreneurial philanthropy and is at work on a book, “Giving A Damn.” He lives in Holmby Hills with his wife and four children and may be reached at petersam@who.net.