I havent felt the need to chime in on the death of 7 year old NIXZMARY BROWN mainly because I couldn’t spell or pronounce her Mexicana name. For that reason and the fact that there are a grip of dead babies worldwide on a daily basis due to war, flood, famine, AIDS and our insatiable need for buying cheap shit. What’s one more kid added to the global death toll?
It turns out that lucky NIXZMARY was selected to be the princess of the New York Times Colored Peoples Pity Poll. This means that we will have to hear incessant prattling about the angelic nature of this child. When you let the NYTimes tell it, NIXZMARY was going to discover the cure for polio if she had been allowed to grow into adulthood. Despite the fact that she was being raised in abject poverty as a middle child out of six siblings. The trends for those children usually point to a life of crime and drug abuse. If you read any of the daily papers circulating the city you might think that NIXZMARY was somehow different. The truth is that NIXZMARY wasn’t special at all, because she wasn’t alone.
There are tens of thousands of children that live in New York City in squalid poverty. They are spread around throughout the shelter system and various different levels of supervision – governmental and private sector. There isn’t any way in hell that the city can manage to keep track of all of these kids without the proper resources. This means more staffers at the city agencies that monitor children as well as a real intra-governmental synergy that allows the supervisors to take control when shit gets dicey. I am not advocating an intrusive-minded agency just one that has the staff and resources so that they aren’t overtaxed by their caseloads.
It is a grandstanding and knee jerk reaction to propose legislation that punishes people for hurting kids after the fact. Where is the legislation that is needed to help families earn a real living wage? Where are the laws that target the abusive land developers that push all the poor people into one single development, one disenfranchised community? Don’t tell me that the only tangible result will be another preacher standing at the streetcorner pulpit yelling loudly at no one in general.
Excuse the soapbox politics on this post, I promise to get back to business real soon, its just that I get frustrated to see this outpouring of manufactured attention for one person while in our periphery thousands upon thousands still suffer.
It wasn’t just NIXZMARY BROWN’s parents that killed this little girl, but the perpetual politics and policies on poverty.
