Societies may be judged by how they treat their children. As I see it, in a profound sense, the ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of a life it gives to its youngest members. After spending seven years in the United States I have a pretty good idea now of how children are treated here, by this society.

Many Americans, I know, still think of America as a child-centered nation. They like to boast that all children here are equally cherished, protected, nurtured, and offered a field of opportunity unmatched in the world... But the truth is that millions of poor kids are not doing well in this country today. A child in America is now at much greater risk than a child elsewhere in the advanced industrial world. Compared with other advanced countries, children in the United States are much more likely to die before their first birthday, to live in abject poverty, to be homeless and hungry, to be abandoned by their parents, and even to be killed at a very young age...

As the prominent American thinker Noam Chomsky points out, the United States of America is basically waging a perpetually escalating war against its children and their families; which means that the purposeful, conscious social policy of this extreme capitalist system has been to attack and destroy basic social values. As a result there are extremely high rates of child poverty, child homelessness and child hunger in America today. In the United States poor kids now deal with risk and neglect on a scale unimagined in previous generations. Neglect of children has become so endemic to American society that childhood is now miserable for millions of children in this country. According to a UNICEF study conducted in 1993 by economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, "Never before has one generation of American children been less healthy, less cared for, or less prepared for life than their parents at the same age."

America's social well-being in general has fallen dramatically to its lowest point over the last few decades, and poor children of this country are suffering the most, according to an Index of Social Health developed recently by researchers at Fordham University. This report looks at federal government statistics of 16 different social problems, comparing each annual measure with the year in which it was at its best level. In 1973 the Index stood at 77 points; by 1994 (the most recent year covered) it plummeted down to 37, its lowest level ever. "The decline in the social health of children and youth tells us something about the future shape of our society," warns Marc Miringoff, the director of the Fordham's Institute for Innovation in Social Policy, which prepares the index.

And the most amazing thing about this society, as Noam Chomsky notes, is that the people who are carrying out this barbaric war against families and children in this country are able to say that they are... "defending family values," and nobody here cracks up in ridicule. This is a really unique element of American totalitarian culture... "That takes a real totalitarian intellectual climate," Chomsky says...

When a three-year-old boy fell into the gorilla enclosure last year at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, a female gorilla gently picked up the injured child and carried him to safety. Isn't it ironic that this animal instinctively recognized her responsibility to children while those who rule and make social policies in American society with all its so-called "conservative family values" don't? Well, there is a joke that a true American conservative is someone who believes life begins at conception and ends at birth. "Being poor doesn't hurt a child," said one of them, Robert Rector, a social policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing conservative think-tank in Washington,D.C.

I don't want to appear too personal in my writings, but this is a very special subject to me. Since our daughter Gabriella was born here in America, the war against children has really been in our face. Straight away we encountered it: When we took our baby-girl to St.Vincent Hospital in Manhattan for her first medical checkup two weeks after she was born, the doctor there refused to see her just because it turned out that mother's health insurance didn't cover a newborn baby... A two-week-old child was simply denied basic medical help because of financial reasons! It was really something that we, when living in the former Soviet Union, couldn't even imagine. Indeed, it was our first serious encounter with the capitalist interpretation of family values, and with their attitude towards children. That incident was probably the turning-point where I personally came to hate this barbaric system...

You won't find any more accounts about our family's own experiences in this article. It isn't our family's story after all. This is about American families, about American children. We are not Americans. We can leave this country and go back home. But those millions of desperately poor children that happened to be born in this so-called "land of opportunity," have nowhere to go. They must face their present and future misery here. And this article is dedicated to them.