Society’s failure to prioritise the rights of our children
reading error, maybe a precocious understanding of the lived experience of a great many children, and maybe just a passing glimpse of the future, but I responded in defence of my interpretation of the text.
I asked the question: “Why, then, does God allow children to suffer if that isn’t what He meant?”
I got off light given that teachers did not generally suffer unsolicited responses. I recall the consequence involved a reminder of Adam and Eve being to blame and a pause to pray for God’s help in accepting ‘His Will’, even if we didn’t understand it.
God has a lot to answer for!
You would be entitled to think that in the totality of these islands, to use John Hume’s phrase, where Christianity has dominated for centuries that children would be suffered to come first in all matters of nurturing, cherishing protecting and developing the spirit, the body and the mind. You could be forgiven for believing that a culture based on Faith, Hope and Love and cherishing children might ensure that children were safe, protected, well-nourished, loved and that they knew it.
That every child felt they belonged, they mattered, and knew that the love and care of the adults around them could be relied on to keep them safe should be every child’s reality in such a society.
Add to that underpinning culture the values of society as a collective concept, of democracy as a political process and the accumulative monetary value of the wealth of the total population, then ask the basic question any 10 or 11-year-old child might ask?
Why are so many children in our society suffering? Why is ensuring their physical, mental and emotional wellbeing not the first priority of Westminster, Stormont, and the Oireachteas?
The stock answer is that there is shortage of resources. There is no objective shortage.
The truth is that those adults who can afford to contribute more than they do to the public purse, with little or no material disadvantage to their own wellbeing, in order to meet the needs of all children are not minded to do so, and are not compelled to do so.
The children of parents in the lower half of the economic table suffer as a result.
They not only suffer as children today but many, like their own parents, will continue to suffer the consequences of their deprivation as adults affecting their opportunities and challenges and in turn the opportunities and well-being of their own children.
Every politician, economist, physician, social scientist, social worker, mental health worker, counsellor, police officer, judge, prison officer, priest, pastor and undertaker already knows this.
The attitude of the ‘professional classes’ to the impoverished working and non-working ‘poor’ might be a good place to start.
In a democratic society based on collective responsibility, people live in relative and absolute poverty as a direct consequence of the wealth and privilege enjoyed by others in that society with more than they need.
Yet the ‘professionals’ dealing with the consequences, barely disguising their own sense of superiority, while being three pay packets away from joining them are still largely of the view they brought misfortune on themselves and that it is the victims of the system and not the system that needs radical and holistic change.
How can it be beyond all of society to take the necessary steps to change this pattern?
The answer has to be that not enough of those people want the change enough to make it happen if it involves them having to change as well.
Something has to give!