Human Rights
The words of a child.
Charlotte Aldebron is a sixth grader from Presque Isle, Maine. Bean at Alas, a blog writes about her in his article Listen to the Children. Charlotte wrote an essay, "What the American Flag Stands For" for her English class. In it, she damns with a few simple words those who hold a piece of cloth to have more value than a human being.
Not content with that essay, though, last October she gave a peace rally speech in Augusta, Maine. Read her speech. From an adult it would be moving. From a twelve-year-old, it gives me goosebumps.
I guess my own voice is too small to make a difference. So this time, I'll add the voices of other children, and maybe together we’ll be loud enough. Children like Ali, who was three when we killed his father in the Gulf War. Ali scraped at the dirt covering his father’s grave every day for three years calling out to him, "It’s all right Daddy, you can come out now, the men who put you here have gone away." And Luay who was 11 at the time and was glad he didn’t have to go to school or do homework. He went to bed and got up whenever he felt like it. But today he has no education and still hears the explosions in his head.
She adds the children in Iraq, who at the time were suffering and who now are suffering even more. She continues,
Can you hear our voices yet? I'll add 10-year-old Mohibollah in Afghanistan, who was out collecting firewood for his family when he found one of those bright yellow soda-can-sized cluster bomblets with parachutes. What child could resist? He ended up with mangled flesh where his left hand used to be.
President Bush asked each American child to give a dollar to help Afghani children. Here is my dollar's worth: it is the voice of 6-year-old Paliko who was carried to the hospital still wearing her party dress from the wedding that we bombed for two hours, killing her whole family — by mistake. And 2-year-old Alia, who was dug out of the rubble where her family was crushed when we blew up their village — again, by mistake. Afterward, our soldiers said they were sorry. Among themselves, they called the Afghans "rag heads." Like I said in my flag essay, we are better at caring about symbols than real people.
And more and more. She concludes,
How many more children must suffer or die before you hear us? No offense, but I really don’t want to have to make another peace speech ever again!
I'm afraid that her speeches have only just begun. Maybe one day the adults in her world will begin to hear her.
I doubt it, though. The sick feeling I have is that no one who really matters cares, and that somehow the Bush junta will continue to cling to power, using its usual lies and distortion, while the American people go back to sleep.
WAKE UP!
Posted by Frank at May 11, 2003 3:22 PM
