Not in remonstrance, but just to ask we not forget… and to do what we can to help… within our reach… in your own way… to go beyond your reach also by helping those who are already helping…

From Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at that moment.

“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”

From the foldings of its robe, the Spirit brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds.

Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers…

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want.

Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy,
for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the
writing be erased…

Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.

“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on Scrooge for the last time with Scrooge’s own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

The bell struck twelve.

Stave 3. The Second of Three Spirits
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CODA
A Christmas Carol was published in 1843. Now we are living in 2009. The cultures of the world continue to drag the children of earth behind the runaway horses of commerce and war. There is an illness in modernity that sneaks about trying to poison us into thinking the issues are too big, too far away, that we are helpless. We aren’t. Not on any count. If we can’t help directly, then we can help those who are already helping the downtrodden and neglected, the abandoned and hungry, the displaced, the egregiously misused. Anything we can do, for even one soul, for all souls, for a moment, or forever… will help. And thank you. So very much, thank you.

The photo of the children with bags and rags over their heads are Filipino children, victims of child prostitution, waiting to testify before Philippine Congressional committee on child prostitution and human rights, as 200 street-children rallied in a downpour outside, in support.

The picture of the young boy in blue jeans being manhandled by soldiers has lost his bladder in terror, and though some think to quell the innocent in the moment is the way to cow others, in fact, often when it is the young who’ve been assaulted, they grow up to feel a hatred against their oppressors that trumps any fear they may have, creating an entire generation of paybacks. Payback for payback then, for eons.

I would never say I know the answers. But, as the Spirit said to Ebenezer, ‘on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased…’ Though hoards are writing doom on the heads of our young, I know our work is to do what is within our power to ever unwrite such heinous theft of our children’s very souls.