This horrific image — a true Urban Semiotic — is making the rounds of the Internets today along with lots of breast-beating and self-immolation over the appropriateness of showing this child killed in a car-bomb explosion in Baquba, Iraq yesterday. 15 people were killed, including seven policemen. Twenty others were wounded.
Child abuse takes many ghostly forms and has a multiplicity of fathers. I can still remember, decades later, the one time I was enticed by an older man and how the awful hauntings of that dungeon-like experience still threaten me today.
When Ebenezer Scrooge wondered aloud in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” — “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” — in response to a request for a charitable donation, that inquiry should make us wonder today if, indeed, we should make a reformed visit to the workhouse ideal.
There’s an old saying about the crisis of being born: “You can’t pick your parents.” There’s another unspoken — yet harder and uncrackable — chestnut that rings truer and harsher: “You can’t pick your income level.” For children across the world, that reality means millions are condemned to lifelong suffering because they were born into poverty without any sort of clear economic path for breaking free of that chain.
Continue reading → Born Poor and Condemned to Lifelong Poverty
Were you ever lost as a child and the experience shook you so much that the experience sticks with you today? When I was young, my cousin and I were playing together at a park — a proving grounds — during a Fourth of July city celebration and it was a night I will never forget.
Continue reading → The Second Betrayal: Stung in the Smothering Sky
We all know a life is worth six bucks, but as a child I found out the first betrayal is worth five dollars. There are some betrayals that are so base and so entirely intimate that one is seared forever in the sacred memory and by the sanctity of the moment.
Continue reading → The First Betrayal: A Five Dollar Beating
The other day Janna and I were walking around Journal Square. I was looking one way and Janna another when she saw what I missed: A young woman stepping into the street in the middle of traffic.
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