SPARE US THE CHEAP GRACE

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IT IS HARD TO SAY WHAT WAS MORE SHOCKING ABOUT THE death of Elisa Izquierdo--the endless savagery inflicted on her body and mind, or the stubborn inaction of the New York City agencies that were repeatedly informed of her peril. But while the murder of Elisa by her mother is appalling, it is hardly unexpected. In the death zones of America's postmodern ghetto, stripped of jobs and human services and sanitation, plagued by AIDS, tuberculosis, pediatric asthma and endemic clinical depression, largely abandoned by American physicians and devoid of the psychiatric services familiar in most middle-class communities, deaths like these are part of a predictable scenario.

After the headlines of recrimination and pretended shock wear off, we go back to our ordinary lives. Before long, we forget the victims' names. They weren't our children or the children of our neighbors. We do not need to mourn them for too long. But do we have the right to mourn at all? What does it mean when those whom we elect to public office cut back elemental services of life protection for poor children and then show up at the victim's funeral to pay condolence to the relatives and friends? At what point do those of us who have the power to prevent these deaths forfeit the entitlement of mourners?

It is not as if we do not know what might have saved some of these children's lives. We know that intervention programs work when well-trained social workers have a lot of time to dedicate to each and every child. We know that crisis hot lines work best when half of their employees do not burn out and quit each year, and that social workers do a better job when records are computerized instead of being piled up, lost and forgotten on the floor of a back room. We know that when a drug-addicted mother asks for help, as many mothers do, it is essential to provide the help she needs without delay, not after a waiting period of six months to a year, as is common in poor urban neighborhoods.

All these remedies are expensive, and we would demand them if our own children's lives were at stake. And yet we don't demand them for poor children. We wring our hands about the tabloid stories. We castigate the mother. We condemn the social worker. We churn out the familiar criticisms of "bureaucracy" but do not volunteer to use our cleverness to change it. Then the next time an election comes, we vote against the taxes that might make prevention programs possible, while favoring increased expenditures for prisons to incarcerate the children who survive the worst that we have done to them and grow up to be dangerous adults.

What makes this moral contradiction possible?