Doctor bills ‘œWe don’t take that insurance anymore.’

‘œYou don’t? But my daughter was supposed to get her shots today.How much will it cost if I just pay out-of-pocket?’

‘œI don’t know. It depends on what else the doctor does today.’

(pause)

‘œCome on, Cindy; we’re going to the park. We’ll go to the doctor another day.’

‘œBut I thought I was going to get my pokes and a lollipop!’

‘œWe’ll do it another day.’

And so the embarrassed, flustered mother and daughter left my pediatrician’s office.

Even though I was only a witness to, and not a participant in this exchange, I felt my face turning red. I wanted to help the mother, and shield her daughter from it all. My own daughter was much too young to absorb what was going on, but it made me wonder how I would explain this and all the other economic injustices that we confront every day.

How will I explain the clearly physically and mentally ill homeless woman panhandling around the corner from our suburban house? How will I explain my millionaire friend’s ability to shower her daughter with anything and everything, even though she herself doesn’t work? How will I explain the disparities and injustices that we adults tend to normalize?

I want my daughter to have a strong sense of the importance of equality, but I also want her to be able to function in this very dysfunctional world of ours. And I want her to understand both the importance of personal fiscal responsibility AND the structural economic inequalities that still plague our world.

I remember the first time I saw a homeless person. I grew up in a small town where there were no visible homeless people on the streets, so it was on a trip to New York City that I first encountered a person begging. There she was, a woman probably no older than my mom, missing teeth, reeking of whiskey. I had never seen an adult so disempowered. So needy. So desperate.

I grilled my parents: how come nobody was helping her? How come we weren’t helping her? How did she get this way? What if we were homeless? I don’t remember my parents’ answers, but I do remember being dissatisfied with them’”much as I imagine my daughter would have been dissatisfied with my response to the scene that played out at our pediatrician’s office.

The truth is, while I hold some general principals about economic equality and distributive justice, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t always know how to do what in the Jewish tradition we call tikkun olam’”repairing the world. As a queer parent, I plan to share my understanding of social and economic justice with my daughter, but hope to be open to her own possibly very different views on this and every other subject. I guess the best I can do for my daughter is to answer her questions about wealth and poverty as honestly as I can’”which will mean admitting my own shame at not doing more to end the latter and redistribute the former.

But I’m haunted by that mother in my pediatrician’s office: her shame, her daughter’s confusion. And by my own passive witnessing of it all. How do you talk to your children about this stuff? How do you discuss economic justice/injustice? Have your children given you any new insights into all this?