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How We Create a Future of Despair A
story on the abuses of child labor in post war Iraq was recently published
in the online edition of the Gulf News. Reporter Carol J. Williams
quotes Emad Mubdir Jasim, a municipal overseer in the city of Al Sadr,
on the harsh reality of hiring under-aged children for sanitation
work. “Sometimes, for humanitarian reasons, you have to let them
work. Otherwise they might take the wrong way to getting money.”
This kind of thinking is an excellent example of the sick logic on
which capitalism thrives, all too often with the blessing of its ignorant
victims.
How can we as a people say that child labor is “humanitarian” at all? Obviously, the municipal overseer is concerned that the children seeking employment in his region would turn to illegal sources of income were he to turn down their requests for hire. Caught in this manufactured bind, most of us would choose to hire the children as well, seeing it as the “lesser of two evils”. What we fail to truly understand is that choosing the lesser of two evils is still evil. Humanity as a whole currently lacks the patience, knowledge and willpower to choose alternatives to our problems that would better serve the common good. The cultural programming laid out through our schools, religions, media and governments only serve to further reinforce this agenda of low self-esteem. As long as we humans continue to attach the value of worthiness to only what we can produce, then the ills we are seeing daily in Iraq and other war torn parts of the world will continue. In the United States and Europe, the blind eye will continue to turn elsewhere until our economies crash down around us. On that day we will see that our self-righteous governments care as little for us as they do for children collecting trash all over the world in order to survive. Unlearners everywhere must begin to think new thoughts that the current paradigm will surely label as impossible. Chief among these thoughts is that human beings need not “work for a living”. Birthing this reality will require humans to rethink our definitions of ownership and equality. The current worldview holds that ownership of natural resources can belong to the individuals who realize their potential for profit. If you are lucky enough to own the land that oil can be pumped from, to illustrate the situation in the Middle East, you stand to be quite wealthy. While it is true that some clever humans devised many uses for this fossil fuel, these same humans did not invent the oil itself. An enlightened thinker who sought the betterment of the people in an oil-rich country would correctly assert that the oil belongs to the country, and that any benefit derived from it must be equally shared among its people. This would mean that each citizen of the country would receive a dividend check from the profits and royalties of oil sale and distribution each year, regardless of whether they work in the oil industry or not. In this way, the entire population thrives from the use of a natural resource. Capitalism's insistence on individual control and profit creates the greed that empowers human conflict and stifles true innovation. In Iraq, it had propped up a brutal puppet dictator for decades only to be violently replaced under false premises with the far more cunning and deadly rule of an empire. For many confused humans, the US invasion appeared to be the familiar “lesser of two evils.” For a country that is spending more than 4 billion dollars a month in Iraq, as well as raising billions more through the now resumed sales of Iraqi oil, it is unconscionable that adults and children alike are slaving for survival at the rate of three dollars per day. At the same time, corporations such as ExxonMobil have been raking in record profits for their shareholders as the murderous ways of the US have solidified control over another source of oil to exploit. Meanwhile, children in Iraq must face the daily choice to sweep the streets for whatever wage their boss feels like paying them or face a short lived life of crime and starvation. As each child pushes a makeshift broom across the bombed out streets of their once familiar neighborhoods, we should pause to consider the kind of thoughts that these children might be harboring in their hearts. Those who live to be adults will seek to act them out. If we say that children are our future, can we honestly say the future looks bright? Whose Life are You Living? |
