“No
society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of
the members are poor and miserable.”
- Adam
Smith
Okay lets see. Today was a fairly normal
day.
I was being the usual guy who sits in
front of the mapping designer all day dragging objects and coding this and
that. You know usual nerd IT stuff. Then this mail comes around lunch time from
a colleague. It seemed to be one of those forwards that you get in your
inbox from people who themselves got from somebody else, but it being of a huge
size (this one was 3MB) you forward it to everyone else you know an rid your
inbox of its burden soon after to avoid the out-of-space debacle.
The subject of this specific one was
"And we say that we are working hard!!!”
Well well, feeling a tad too sarcastic
today aren’t we.
So I opened it, and behold a big picture
of a dirty bony kid stood there staring back at me with soiled hands and booger
pouring out of his nose. Eww right?
I had figured out the topic of this mail
by now. This was going to be another mopey whiny one about malnutrition,
orphans or something. Don’t get me wrong I have nothing but love for them, but
heck looking at some of the relatives/family one ends up with sometimes makes
me feel envious of those buggers.
Anyways, I scroll down to next picture -
another shirtless kid (surprised?) with some sort of white dust all over him,
maybe concrete.
Unimpressed, I scroll down to the next
image - a greasy kid pushing some sort of lathe drill into metal and such
Aha now I see where this is going, lo and
behold the next image - a really dark girl smiling and holding a handful of
flowers to a car window at a traffic signal.
This was a mail about child labor. I keep
scrolling down with back to back images of kids not yet into their teens doing
minimum wage work like waiting on tables, cleaning dishes at a
restaurant, picking recyclable plastic garbage at the junkyard etc. There was
this one picture of a kid working at a construction site lifting like 5
concrete bricks, each almost as big as his limbs. That I found oddly
impressive.
Well jokes aside, the pictures were a sad
affair and I was especially moved by the one with the little kid picking
garbage in the huge almost-mountain of a landfill junkyard. I could only imagine the repulsive
odor and disgusting gunk in that place. That child definitely harped on the empathy
cord I sadly am born with.
