An image is worth a thousand words. I was waiting for the traffic lights to turn green, when I happened to see a little boy, maybe five or six years old, literally coming out of a garbage container. He was holding some cardboard boxes and threw them at a couple of other boys, a bit older, who caught them and put them in their cart. The scene was absolutely chilling. Kids who should have been at home or at school, turned into unwilling scavengers, collecting rubbish. What has this society done to our children? What have WE done to them? What kind of future (if any) do they have? We’ve become used to seeing them rummaging trash as if it were something rasonable and acceptable. We’ve become insensitive, callous, cold, disregarding them cruelly. We also come across kids begging at the corners, exploited by adults who monitor them closely. They are deprived of their childhood, but nobody seems to care. I remember a moving song by Cat Stevens: “Where do the children play?” Well, they simply don’t. Some of them hardly survive.
Buenos Aires Times, May 24, 2025