What should not be
The International issue of The Miami Herald, printed and distributed in the Northeastern Caribbean by this newspaper, recently made a rather courageous editorial move. The venerable paper started a series of articles focussing on the plight of huge numbers of children in the Americas. What’s so courageous about that, you may ask. The answer: the first two articles not only opened on the Front Page but carried enormous headlines dominating the entire front of the newspaper. On Monday, November 13, the paper cried out “THROWAWAY CHILDREN” and on November 27 “NOBODY’S CHILDREN.”
If that is not enough of an explanation, consider that newspapers faced in America and Europe with a steady decline in circulation are at their most inventive prepared to shift some entertainment to the front hoping to stem that tide. The Miami Herald opts clearly for “getting real.”
Readers are confronted with children living on garbage dumps of Tegucigalpa (November 13) and roaming the streets in Buenos Aires (November 27). The stories are real and the children have names. You see, the trouble is in the numbers. There are too many of these children with no future condemned to a life of poverty and crime to comprehend the size of this ghastly reality. That is why the reports are about real kids with real names.
Unacceptable misery suffered by the very young is made hard news forcing readers to re-define their social and political priorities. Does it? Tegucigalpa and Buenos Aires are far away. Sure, but high percentages of dropouts, gangs, violent fights, child pornography and drug abuse are not. And all those children also have names and faces. They are for real. Mind you, not as a threat, but as young people hankering for life. The hard news of their stories of failing family life, of no proper rearing, of being left to themselves far too young, you name it, should make us re-define our social and political priorities. Also on our small island too many children have no one but each other. That should not be.
In light of the presentation of the Integrated Youth Policy for St. Maarten with a manifestation on Saturday and the debate on it in the Island Council on Monday, it is something everyone involved needs to keep in mind.
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