The Tragic Plight of Our Children Clearly Reveals Our Deep

Essay

The tragic plight of our children clearly reveals our deep disregard for public well-being. About one out of every five children in this country lives in poverty, including one out of every two black children and two out of every five Hispanic children. Most of our children-neglected by overburdened parents and bombarded by the market values of profit-hungry corporations-are ill-equipped to live lives of spiritual and cultural quality. Faced with these facts, how do we expect ever to constitute a vibrant society?
One essential step is some form of large-scale public intervention to ensure access to basic social goods-housing, food, health care, education, child care, and jobs. We must invigorate the common good with a mixture of government, business, and labor that does not follow any existing blueprint. After a period in which the private sphere has been sacralized and the public square gutted, the temptation is to make a fetish of the public square. We need to resist such dogmatic swings.
-Cornell West
-What is each paragraph's topic sentence? Does West state his opinion about a certain issue? Is this opinion debatable?