First Posted: 1/22/2015
Editor’s Note: This Optimist column first appeared in the Jan. 24, 1988 edition of the Sunday Dispatch. It has been edited for space.
I never get mad. Ask anyone.
It’s probably my worst quality as a journalist, but I can’t help it. It’s just the way I am.
Actually, “never” is too strong a term. “Rarely” — Okay VERY rarely is more like it.
A student at Wilkes College once asked me in class, “Don’t you ever get mad?”
“Sure I get mad,” I said, “everybody does. But I try not to waste my anger on every little thing. I’m hoarding it. Letting it build up for one big explosion.”
Well, I think I might be there. In fact, I KNOW I am.
I’m not just mad, I’m incensed. Outraged. Fit to be tied.
The problem is I’ve seen one too many newspaper reports of child abuse, and my blood is boiling. Actually, the first one I saw was one too many, but I guess I always hoped I wouldn’t see another.
I can’t imagine the mentality of an adult who would physically abuse a child. What kind of heart is immune to the cries of a little one in pain?
Yet, a day does not go by it seems, that we don’t hear about another case.
And, while physical abuse is the ugliest, most infuriating part of it, the problem is much, much greater. The world’s children, the experts say, have never been worse off than they are today.
Think about that for a minute: Our children were never worse off. That means the days of the breaker boys were better. And those of slavery.
Think of the various plagues, and wars and famines throughout the history. And still they say children were NEVER worse off.
Citing statistics that boggle the mind, the experts point to child abuse, world hunger, child pornography and prostitution, teen drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, and teen suicide.
They talk about runaways, literally thousands of them, walking the streets of New York. Sooner or later, all become prostitutes. It’s the only way they can earn a living. And many are 12 and 13 years old, or younger.
A recent article in Psychology Today Magazine talked about an 11-year-old street walker in New York. She’s been a “working girl” for several years. “She can put a condom on her ‘John’ without him even knowing it,” the article said. “But when asked what she’d like for Christmas, she said a dolly.”
This prostitute, handling four or five tricks a night, is nothing but a baby.
OUR baby, if you accept the notion put fourth in Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure” that the children of a time are the responsibility of all the adults living at that time.
If this is true, then shame on us. Shame on all of us.
It’s time we all got mad. Real mad. It’s time the sensible adults in this country said ENOUGH. It’s time we put our foot down and demanded a better world for children.
And when our elected officials look back at us and ask “How?” we should respond, “We don’t care how. Just do it.”
Mario Cuomo in his State of the Union address in New York called for an international “Decade of the Child” to begin in 1990. I think it’s the best idea I’ve ever heard.
The problems of our beleaguered children didn’t develop overnight, and they aren’t going to be cured that way either. We need, as Gov. Cuomo suggests, an enormous revolutionary effort. We need wide-sweeping programs that not only rescue today’s troubled children, but ensure that children of the future will likewise be treated as the treasures they are.
At the moment, there are many things the 20th century is going to be remembered for. Most of them are ugly. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to overshadow them all by devoting the final 10 years before 2000 to making this a better world for children?
