Listen Up, Mr. Bush

10:30 a.m. The knocking at the front door was loud and persistent. A D.C. police officer wanted to know if I had heard anything unusual around dawn that morning.

Nothing unusual. The streets had been noisy the night before—folks out sitting on their stoops until late and playing music loudly in celebration of the warm weather that had just arrived. People were in and out of the crackhouse across the street. But there had been no gunshots, no cries for help that night.

The police officer took me to the porch two doors down—Thelma's porch. The large front window had been knocked out; shattered glass lay everywhere. Thelma came out and explained that somebody had picked up a chair off her porch and threw it through the window. He was being chased by a man with a gun at the time and took refuge in Thelma's living room.

"This is it for me," Thelma said. "I've lived here for 26 years. Raised my kids here. They all graduated from Cardoza and got good jobs." She nodded toward the high school at the end of the block. "But I can't take it anymore."

It wasn't only the violence that was getting to Thelma. Her landlord had raised the rent, she said, to $1,100 a month—an outrageous sum for a small house on which he refused to do repairs. Thelma vowed to be gone as soon as she could figure out where to go. Her grandchildren, who live with her and play hide-and-seek on the long row of our connected porches, will be gone as well.

A WEEK AFTER the stir out front, I heard a speech by noted author David Halberstam. In commenting on the state of the country, he suggested that a nation should be judged the way neighbors are judged. Do we consider someone a good neighbor because they have the fanciest house? Because they have the toughest security system? Or the most vicious dog? No, said Halberstam, we judge a good neighbor by how they treat children. And by that standard, the United States is failing miserably.

From the corner where Cardoza High School sits, high on a hill, you can see the expanse of Washington, D.C. Some call it the best view in the city. On the eastern edge rises the large dome of the Capitol building. To the west, the Washington Monument pokes up above the other edifices. And down there, not too far away, sits the White House.

I have sometimes pictured taking all of my young friends from the neighborhood to that corner and giving them a chance to shout whatever they want to their president. He wouldn't hear, of course. But perhaps the exercise would be cathartic.

There are some for whom it is too late to shout. Anthony and Eddy—who first came to us more than a decade ago as 3-year-olds at the Sojourners Childcare Center. One stabbed, one gunned down—teen-age victims of a drug trade that snares them young. They grew up in their nation's capital—where infant mortality, HIV infection, and murders are the highest in the country. Their deaths offer silent testimony to the nation's failure.

In this year's first issue of SojoNews, the newspaper of the children's program at Sojourners Neighborhood Center (where children are not allowed to shout), some of them wrote quite clearly what they have to say to Mr. Bush:

Santan Brown: "How is your wife doing? I want you to stop the guns and killing...and help the homeless people and get them houses and money."

Quentin Whitley: "Stop running people off. Stop being the president of me. The reason is because you are white and I am black. You do many things for the white people."

Ieasha Pressley: "If I was president, I would feed the homeless and let the homeless have houses. I do not like anything you have done."

Keyon Riddick: "You are the best president we have. If I was you, I would take the homeless off the street and give them apartments and jobs."

Keisha Riddick: "I listen to you on television. You are very smart. But I would like for you to change by taking these guns away and stop this killing, because too many of us are getting killed. That's what I think...I would like the fighting to stop. Because I don't like it...So say hello from me to your wife."

If only the campaign debates had such honesty...