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This is so sad!
The country I live in has always prided itself on having humane ethics, a liberal immigration policy and taking care of its weak.
It was something we all grew up hearing all the time, it stuck to us and we came to think of it almost as a fundamental truth; "water is wet", "up is up, down is down", etc...
It isn't true.
Or it might have been, once. I don't know how long ago. We've also been hearing the words "cutbacks", "downsizing" and all those things for something like two decades now. Stricting up the immigration policies in order to save money, reducing the social services net that since the end of the second world war has sought to catch anyone falling. Again to save money.
With no thoughts of the consequences WHATSOEVER.
Yesterday, I heard on the news of an immigrant boy who had tried to Hang Himself at the center he was placed at. Fortunately, the telly said, staff was there to save him in time. Unfortunately, he was one of EIGHT children trying to kill themselves at that place over a period of just six months!
Unfortunately, that was not completely true either. It was not staff that saved that 17-year-old says the internet version of our largest evening paper, it was a couple of other children also placed there! And it was the third time he had tried to commit suicide, all because he has an extremely painful birth defect that makes one leg much shorter than the other, and if he doesn't get an operation before he stops growing, he will be crippled for life and has to spend the rest of his days in a wheelchair.
"Of course", he cannot get an operation before he recieves the equivalent of a social security number, and that cannot happen until he's been given permanent resident status. And that cannot happen until his case has been processed and granted!
The kid is determined. He will NOT end up in a wheelchair, he'd rather die to avoid it!
I can't even believe it myself, is there nobody with some compassion left in a position of power? I get so horribly, horribly upset when I read about what is happening there. Not only have there been several suicide attempts, strong suspicions point towards several boys more or less regularly being taken away from the center and (ab)used in child prostitution!
There is no hope in these young kids' life, they came to our country, their minds already badly bruised some of them, wishing for a better future. But they have been so badly let down by those people in power, and by all of us that sincerely believed this place was a good place to live!
We were SO WRONG.
Why aren't human lives worth diddly squat any longer? Why is it only money that matters? WHY DON'T WE CARE ANYMORE?
-Lenny
"But he that hath the steerage of my course,
direct my sail."
-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act One, Scene IV
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