The ghost of Christmas present

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One of the things that makes Christmas and New Year's Day bearable is the chance to see "Scrooge" with Alistair Sims once again. There must be a dozen remakes of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol." But none, to my mind, can compare to the 1951 English version with Alistair Sims in the role of Scrooge.

"A Christmas Carol" was written by Dickens in 1843. That was a period when liberals, such as Dickens, thought that capitalism could be reformed just by changing the nature of the individual capitalist. Ebenezer Scrooge goes through his transformation after witnessing the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future.

What could be more horrible than when the ghost of Christmas Present opens his cloak to reveal two starving children huddled and freezing at his feet. The ghost of Christmas Present points and base of world imperialism? For Black children there has been an increase in infant mortality simply because 31 million Americans have no health insurance. There is no prenatal care for millions of pregnant women. The reason is simple: You got no money? You get no medical care.

In the sunny state of California, the government has cut $24 million dollars from the family-planning budget-closing nearly 40 health-care clinics which served poor women and their families. Twenty-five million women and children are living in poverty.

Education in this country is another example of the heartlessness of the ruling class. Over 23 million adults are functionally illiterate and will be condemned to join the ranks of the growing population of impoverished. Two to seven million of our children are "latch-key" children with no supervision. Their parents are at work and unable to be at home to supervise their kids when they come home from school.

Year after year, plans to improve the educational standards for our children are unveiled. But nothing comes of them. Our schools continue to deteriorate.

Reducing class size to no more than 20 children per class, providMary Ellen Mark ing remedial programs for those who are already behind, and expanding quality childcare through our existing school system for all children regardless of income is a basic first step for beginning to improve our educational system. But that costs money, and the U.S. government makes Scrooge look like a bleeding-heart liberal compared to them.

To make bad matters worse, child-labor-law abuses have increased in this country. Violations of those laws have increased by 150 percent since 1983. There were more than 24,000 child-labor violations this year alone. Youngsters, just as in Charles Dickens's time, are still condemned to work in garment sweatshops and in the fields picking fruit and vegetables.

It reminds me of a poem by Sarah N. Cleghorn: "The golf links," she wrote, "lie so near the mill; That almost every day; The laboring children can look out; and see the men at play." That poem was published Jan. 1, 1915, and to the world's shame, has not yet been outlived.

Despite the jubilation by the world's Scrooges over the so-called "failure of communism," it is capitalism which fails our children. It is a failure to most of humanity and most especially to the young people of this world. Happy revolutionary New Year.

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By Svlvia Weinstein