In the ship of Gap, it's women and children last
Barnett
¦"Beggar, Serf, Soldier, Child: Watching as a continent crushes millions of its young," by Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 12 December 2004, p. WK1.
¦"For Africa's Poor, Pregnancy Is Often Life Threatening," by Marc Lacey, New York Times, 12 December 2004, p. A14.
¦"A Harsh Price to Pay in Pursuit of a Dream: For Central American Women, Sexual Coercion Is Hazard on Route to U.S.," by Mary Jordan, Washington Post, 6 December 2004, p. A1.
Across the Gap, child beggars are the norm. It's just one big Charles Dickens' scene with brutal overlords who beat the kids who don't return with their daily quota.
Sengupta, a veteran reporter on Africa, paints a sad story:
I have met father who have sent away their boys to break stones in another country—something they couldn't imagine their own fathers doing. I have met girls who will never go to school because their mothers rely on them to fetch water and firewood, one reason girls' education rate in sub-Saharan Africa remain the lowest in the world. Only 56 percent of girls were attending school between 1996 and 2003, according to Unicef.
In fact, in the roughly 40 years since these countries have freed themselves from Europe's colonial rule, the plight of children in Africa has only grown worse.
Worse means these kids are poorer, more diseased, less educated, and living shorter lives full of more suffering and degradation. Shrinking the Gap is fundamentally about saving these children—pure and simple. Yes, you will kill men along the way, and we—the Core as a whole—will lose loved ones in the process. But tell me a better reason why the killing and genocide and the wars and the children forced into combat units and the mass rapes, etc—give me a better reason to stop all these than to save these kids from this horrible existence.
And if the Core as a whole has to lower its standard of living a bit to make this inclusion happen, tell me what's so wrong about that? Is America's survival based on how much stuff we can buy while kids live in misery throughout much of the Gap?
But it's not just the kids who are terribly marginalized by all this instability and violence that we routinely turn a blind eye to. Just as much it's the women, who seem destined to suffer all sorts of indignities and threats primarily due to their biology. Pregnancy and childbirth "are among the top killers of women" inside the Gap, more so because of all the horrific situations that too many women find themselves in just trying to survive conditions there, or, more ambitiously, to escape those conditions and make their way to the Core.
Where do the mass rapes as a tool of terror occur? Inside the Gap.
How do many women escape this plight? They are forced into becoming sex slaves by "smugglers, border officials, street gang members and others who control the underground route to the United States," and this means "many female migrants are paying an especially harsh price for a chance to land a job in the north, according to government and church officials."
Society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable elements—such as mothers and children. If we're going to have a global society, don't we have to start judging the Core as a whole on what it lets occur to women and children inside the Gap? |
