My family is comfortable tonight. They will either go to a movie, or eat out, or eat in, or play board games, or surf the net, or play Nintendo...

Most children in 1998 America are poor. This is a startling fact to most middle and upper income Americans. It is true that most of the baby boomer cohort have never had it so good, especially if they are educated, or married, or both. But all around us silent hunger cries out. Single parent homes with many poor children exist on such a scale that, like a Ripley’s believe it or not, a very high percentage of the children in America are poor. We can argue about whether it is 25 % or 50 %.

By poor, I mean that they can not even hold their heads up in "polite" adolescent society. They would be laughed out of the schoolhouse building in most private schools, or in suburban well-to-do neighborhoods. Their clothes wouldn’t fit in. Their interests would be ridiculed. They would value food; instead of making sport of it. McDonald’s is the finest restaurant they have ever known.

They will not be educated. They will not go to prep school. They will not wear designer clothes.

They see it all on TV. TV’s version of middle class American life is the most pornographic art work in existence today; to flaunt as worthless what many can’t have.

And that doesn’t even count the global dimensions of the problem. In Rio and Sao Paulo, in cities all over the world, homeless, asset-less, hopeless children run amok and are devalued as worthless because they can never participate in the dream of materialism.

Someday, historians will look back in disbelief at the cavalier cruelty of our society, that believes in its superiority, while relegating most (certainly over 50 % world wide) of its children to non-existence on the margins of polite society; while unprecedented wealth is squandered irreverently by the haves.