In a pandemic, youth need our help

What I do know is this: Whoever sits in the White House in 2021 will have a mountain of problems, and one of them – courtesy of the dreadful coronavirus – is the raising of our children. They are at risk.

 

So I’m calling on anybody who can to search or ask around and find an organization, a youth club or a public school, and adopt it as your own. Children need your help – and mine.

 

I understand how tough times are. The emotional, spiritual and financial aspects of a global pandemic – one that seemingly won’t end — has worn on us.

 

We suffer coronavirus fatigue. But we are Americans too, which ought to mean we bring an unwavering resolve to nettlesome problems, even if we have a president who doesn’t.

 

For tough times aren’t as tough when we work together – lending an outstretched hand to those who want to grab it. We have example upon example of tough times littered across the pages of our history, including the Great Depression and the recession that fueled the housing market in 2008.

 

To me, 2008 might as well have been 1908, and the children who need our help are products of 2008. They were rolling toward a world, post-Obama, where prospects for success looked sunny.

 

The economy, although favoring the rich over the not-so-rich or the poor, held hope for much more for them.

 

Then came 2020.

 

The America we left in 2019 has been rocked to its foundation, as if a tsunami hit our shores and washed away whatever progress this country was making on all fronts. The rich, however, have gotten richer; the poor, poorer. And I won’t begin to discuss the hurt this pandemic wrought for the middle class.

 

Restaurants are shuttered; businesses of all kind have let employees go; and schools, offering mostly remotely nowadays, remain a work in progress. Parents are burdened; and educators are stressed to teach in an environment no administrator prepared them for.

 

And the children – the boys and girls who represent America’s future? They have taken a Mr. Miyagi kick to the head. The blow has left them wobbling like a drunk after a weekend bender. They are suffering like perhaps no other generation of American youth.

 

No reason to make this post a recounting of whose misery is worse. What good would that do? Misery is misery, simple and pure. And mine is definitely worse than yours, and yours is definitely worse than mine, right?

 

Yet the youth should not suffer under this misery. We must, if at all possible, do what we are able to set their world aright.

 

How can each of us do that?

 

Lend a hand. Volunteer, if we can. Find somebody to mentor. And if you feel blessed financially, take a few of your extra dollars and donate it to an organization or buy things it can use.

 

I’m not rich. I don’t pretend to be. Nor are any of my siblings. But we plan to do more now than we did before 2020. I urge you to do so as well.