We Teach All Hearts To BreakI cannot reference the above quote to any author or source, because I've nicked it from some 60s graffiti immortalized in photograph by Peter Sanders, who I hope, will not sue me.
I’ve done so because it is relevant to what we are. It is relevant because our kindness, our yearning for innocence, our intrinsic despair necessitates hurting those we wish to protect the most.
For our children, for our younger siblings, for our most loved ones we build the illusion of a world which promises great things in the years to come. In our effort to keep them innocent, we cover their eyes and ears. In our need to keep them dreaming and believing, because we stopped long ago, we deceive them. We prepare the painfully hopeful, unassuming victim. We set in motion the events. We, who have been taught, teach other hearts to break.
And yet disillusionment is just one more harrowing experience that man must rise above. And in the breaking is something great, something which offers all that was innocent, and all that was good, and all that was worth hoping for, without the ignorance or the illusion of childhood. It takes one choice, and I think we owe it to them and to ourselves to give our all to help them make the right one. All it takes is to inspire.
In a world where the mammoth degree of pain and suffering is so overwhelming, inspiration has become a dire need. Inspiration to dispel the helplessness which turns to lethargy; to remind us that with every life lost, with every cry unheard or ignored, we lose that much more of what makes us human.
Snap. Make Poverty History style.
Today 19,250 children under the age of 16 are trapped in Cambodia's thriving sex industry. Yet, 19,250 is just a number, and we've become too desensitized to terms like 'child trafficking', and 'kiddy porn' to be remotely moved.
The lethargy sets in after a brief shudder or frown at the thought, and you swiftly navigate to another page.
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Are you still here? Do you also feel that the 21st Century's stupendous technological advances are hollow boasts of our humanity, if slavery is still not something of our dark past? Well you're probably right and wrong. Right because they are, and wrong because that's not all they are.
I'll tell you why: the choclate bar you're having today is feeding the People Trafick industry. That's why. Because we've come to depend so much on our little comforts. Thant's why.
Oh we love being spoiled silly by those fashionable brand names. The glamorous faces of multi national corporations, banks, imperialist scum. They tell you they're doing their bit, buying fare trade coffee, funding micro finance projects in Bangladesh. I'll tell you another thing, they're lying to you. The only chocolate made from cocoa beans not grown and harvested by child slaves are the ones that say on their wrappers. They're probably more expensive than your Mars bar because get this, reality check, the only way you enjoy your chocolate without other people sufferring is if you pay up. fare and square. As for coffee shops, don't get me started on murder-funding StarBucks. And Banks with their charitable work? Investing in Micro Finance means Anjola Begum working like a slave at her new handloom or selling one of her kids to pay off the high interrest rate for her loan, so that your bank gets it's money back two-fold...or make that five-fold. And where does that go? God knows, except the 'interrest', yes that miracle money that just miraculously turns up in your account each year doesn't look too innocent, does it? No of course that' not the only way it works, there are all kinds of creative ways in which our comfort has been built on the backs of the poor in a strategic fashion which allows for us to be blind and deaf to it all.
Let's try this for a sexy advertising slogan: 'Do you wish to inspire or be inspired?' (Colgate grin) Then stop drinking Coke. Stop eatig McDonalds. And buy expensive chocolate. Boycot StarBucks, stop recieving interrest, and if it can't be helped make sure you give that money back to charity each year.
And don't listen to me! Go out there, find out what you're really eating and buying. No we can't change the world by ourselves, but we can be aware and accountable for our own actions. We can stop supporting this, one person at a time.
