Great, an intellectual squirmish with my good buddy Freddy!! Okay, here is what I really think. In the '30's America was a religiously conservative, fairly homogenous society with a restrictive moral code, a dustbowl and huge amounts of poverty. I actually read recently in "The New Industrialist", which is my own personal favorite investment guide, that about 14 million Americans perished because of the depression, and there has been a major cover-up. I'm not sure whether this is well documented, but I have talked to you about enough stuff, Freddy, to know that you wouldn't put something like that past them! The government, that is. Well, that's a side point, I'm in a real girly mood tonight and using pretty circular rather than linear arguments, huh? But back to the point, as bad as that was, America even from the time the first white settlers arrived was a fairly moral society. Children were in the labor force until public education became compulsory, and some of them worked way too hard in bad conditions, but so did a lot of adults during the Industrial Revolution.
In much of the third world, on the other hand, women and children have had many fewer rights than men, much worse than the disparity in America. Not to get even more gloomy, but here it comes anyway, in many parts of the third world girl children are butchered without anaesthesia during female circumcision, taking away any possibility of sexual pleasure during their lifetimes, risking fatal infections, being deformed violently just as they are becoming women. In these same cultures, children are exploited as sources of passive and cheap labor, chained to work stations, beaten, working 16 hour days. Women and children are basically not very highly valued or cherished in these societies. When on top of that, with all the political destabilization in Africa, children are simply left to fend for themselves, and must sell their bodies to eat, the baser individuals take advantage of the situation, procuring and abusing these children. So I guess I would argue that our society, with all its faults, is more cohesive, and has a different, more protected concept of childhood, although this is certainly failing us now in the inner cities where children are killing each other after having never been given a real chance for a go at success. I believe that there are moral and economic reasons why children are treated differently in different places, so I don't totally disagree with you, Freddy. But because I know, having had a child, that all parents bring their children into the world with enormous love and awareness of the fragility of human life, it's like an instinct, very deep and passionate, I tend to believe that economic forces which cause people to become desperate make whatever small principles one can muster in the third world, weighed against survival, go out the window. And I think that we can do something to make the world a more equal playing field economically, so we should do that. And the U.N., or the World Court, or some agency, needs to start addressing child labor and female circumcision, because these practices destroy souls. I guess I'm just a pragmatist, there are lots of different ways to look at all this horror, economics and morals play parts, and it's an interesting intellectual discussion, but I would prefer to spend the energy figuring out how to change what's happening to children everywhere, give each child a chance at health and happiness. |
