A Charitable Project Worthy of Billions: The Nation's Capital

To the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:

Imagine a nation's capital that was truly a model U.S. city, where justice was established, domestic tranquility ensured and the blessings of liberty secured for all who live here. Pie in the sky? Perhaps. But that is also the spirit that gave birth to the United States. Can we really celebrate an ideal that we cannot envision?

The fabled "shining city on the hill" is but a vanishing mirage. The city that played host to the national observance is anything but a more perfect union, with the economic gap between rich and poor the widest in the country. No offense intended. But let's face it. With the combined fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the foundation will hand out more per year than the gross domestic products of nearly 40 countries. Why not use some of that money to reduce the adverse impact of economic disparity -- starting here?

The Gates Foundation supports several D.C. public schools. But why not help them all? The foundation will eventually donate about $3 billion a year. Put a year's worth of funds into transforming the entire system. Show the nation what a city of world-class schools would look like, and what it takes to have one. Prove that all children can excel in school, regardless of race or income. Make "leave no child behind" more than a slogan. A prototype is always the most expensive in a line of production; duplicating the D.C. effort in other school systems would no doubt prove to be a lot less expensive -- especially in the long run. After all, it still costs more to keep a man in prison than send him to college.

And then there is the health of the city, which is all too often a byproduct of ignorance. No city in the United States has a higher rate of AIDS infection than the District, just to name the most sensational of diseases. The inability of the city to slow the spread of HIV is symptomatic of failures to address the epidemic of heart disease, cancer and strokes -- the leading killers of District residents.

When it comes to health, the District is not unlike a Third World country. And the situation is getting worse. The city estimates that as many as 25,000 residents are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and many of them do not know it. It has been known for years, however, that the disease would eventually explode into an epidemic if appropriate action wasn't take to slow its spread. But the action taken proved insufficient.

It's as if the District fights AIDS the same way Microsoft fights computer viruses -- by intentionally allowing an isolated system to become infected and then developing prevention strategies based on how the virus spreads. In computers, the infected systems are called "digital sentinels." In the District, they are called gays and low-income African Americans.

In a speech given in 2002, Gates explained the importance of philanthropy in fighting AIDS in poor countries. "If we took the world and we re-sorted the neighborhoods to be in random locations so that most of the neighborhoods that you would live next to would reflect the average living conditions in the world at large, then these problems would get addressed. They'd get addressed on pure humanitarian grounds."

Not so in the District, where poor neighborhoods are often close to those with average incomes and above -- and cries for help still go unanswered. Show us what a "pure humanitarian" effort would look like in the fight against AIDS, and perhaps the humanity of the more fortunate among us will be ignited.

Is such a request naive? Perhaps. As David Walsh wrote recently on the World Socialist Web site, "There is . . . something intrinsically degrading and demeaning about philanthropy. A society in need of philanthropists is one rooted in inequality, in which the deprivation of the many is supposedly addressed by the largesse of the few. No one can seriously suggest that social problems will be solved in this manner. Especially in America, where an aristocracy has taken shape before our eyes over the past decade and the Bush administration is taking blind, reckless measures to eliminate all restrictions on the accumulation of personal wealth."

Still, if Gates and Buffett want to give away billions of dollars through the foundation, then I say let's use some of it to build a better America -- starting with the capital of the free world. Why not educate a cadre of leaders who might one day take us closer to the ideal of justice and mercy for all? Last night, we lighted up the sky with fireworks for America's birthday; tonight we go back to holding candlelight vigils for those who die of AIDS and violence, even as others suffer unnecessarily from the twin scourges of ignorance and economic deprivation.

We can do better, and we need all the help we can get.

E-mail:milloyc@washpost.com