bigmacbear (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bigmacbear) wrote2005-02-20 09:35 pm
bigmacbear) wrote2005-02-20 09:35 pm
Throwaway children
I followed this link the other day from soc.motss:
Alan Keyes casts out his daughter
then followed another link from this article to read a pertinent entry in Maya Marcel-Keyes' own blog about being effectively fired and evicted by her father all at once. In order to see how she was coping I went to the home page of her blog, and was shocked to find more recent entries which detail the last days of another throwaway child, a boy who was hustling on the street and appears to have died of self-induced starvation as the result of an eating disorder.
Not that Maya herself is in any danger of ending up starving on the streets -- after all, she is 19 and admits that she is well able to fend for herself -- but it makes me wonder just how many throwaway kids are actually out there. I've heard the stories, and I've known one person who was in fact thrown out by his parents but (thankfully) was soon taken in by family friends and did not end up having to go begging or turning tricks to survive.
I also find some of the responses to the news -- including some responses on soc.motss, on the Daily Kos, and on Maya's own blog -- to be incredibly insensitive and unhelpful. Fortunately, Maya seems to be keeping her head while all about her are losing theirs, and is concerned more with the plight of her friends than her own, as understandable as that may be at the moment.
This led me back to think of a piece of my own writing, which I will have to dredge back from the depths of Lotus Word Pro and revisit, in which one of the central characters is an underaged kid living over a newsstand with his helper/protector/lover. The story was a murder mystery in which the first-person narrator is a gay city cop, and the newsstand owner, Guido, literally spat out the opinion that he would never do such a thing to a child of his.
I wonder what good can be done for all the throwaway children in our own little necks of the woods?
Alan Keyes casts out his daughter
then followed another link from this article to read a pertinent entry in Maya Marcel-Keyes' own blog about being effectively fired and evicted by her father all at once. In order to see how she was coping I went to the home page of her blog, and was shocked to find more recent entries which detail the last days of another throwaway child, a boy who was hustling on the street and appears to have died of self-induced starvation as the result of an eating disorder.
Not that Maya herself is in any danger of ending up starving on the streets -- after all, she is 19 and admits that she is well able to fend for herself -- but it makes me wonder just how many throwaway kids are actually out there. I've heard the stories, and I've known one person who was in fact thrown out by his parents but (thankfully) was soon taken in by family friends and did not end up having to go begging or turning tricks to survive.
I also find some of the responses to the news -- including some responses on soc.motss, on the Daily Kos, and on Maya's own blog -- to be incredibly insensitive and unhelpful. Fortunately, Maya seems to be keeping her head while all about her are losing theirs, and is concerned more with the plight of her friends than her own, as understandable as that may be at the moment.
This led me back to think of a piece of my own writing, which I will have to dredge back from the depths of Lotus Word Pro and revisit, in which one of the central characters is an underaged kid living over a newsstand with his helper/protector/lover. The story was a murder mystery in which the first-person narrator is a gay city cop, and the newsstand owner, Guido, literally spat out the opinion that he would never do such a thing to a child of his.
I wonder what good can be done for all the throwaway children in our own little necks of the woods?
Itr's sad really!!!