Page 2 of 3

Woe of the Child Actor

There’s nothing sadder in entertainment than watching a child act on stage or on screen because we know that media adventure can and will only damage the future adult in the child.

Continue reading → Woe of the Child Actor

The Real Face of War

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.

Continue reading → The Real Face of War

A Blind Dog and a Dungeon

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.

Continue reading → A Blind Dog and a Dungeon

A Return to the Workhouse

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.

Continue reading → A Return to the Workhouse

Born Poor and Condemned to Lifelong Poverty

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