Whoever Owns a Yacht

A little two-year-old boy was crying this morning in a waiting room where I also happened to be. His father, who was “taking care of him” while his mother was in seeing the doctor, kept yelling at the child to “Stop crying!” The child's only word through his tears was an occasional “Mommy.” This went on for a half-hour, until the father took the child outside into the rain, muttering threats.

The father was hostile from the moment this little family came in the waiting room. Both parents were under twenty-five years of age. The mother was pregnant. The little boy was surprizingly sociable with two little girls who happened to be there waiting.

I found the scene just unbearable. Excruciating. There are several such incidents that have been burned into my memory over the course of my lifetime, particularly from the years when I lived in the UK. The UK scenes were so frequent that I sometimes wondered if there might not be something in the British culture that is particularly conducive to cruelty to children. It seemed to be some kind of joke there, to say with a smile, that Brits valued their cats more than their children, Ha. Ha. Ha. “We had a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals before we had a society for the prevention of cruelty to children.” More knowing smiles. But I have seen enough of it here in the USA and even in Canada. And I realize that I have only had the slightest glimpse. I have no knowledge of the statistics in “anglo” countries for cruelty to children, nor in non-anglo countries either, although I have no doubt that the statistics everywhere minimize its extent. The effects on children of the USA's “wars of choice” are particularly annihilating.

It's impossible to grasp the sorrow of children I've seen since I was born in 1941, but it has been enough to cause this thought often to go through my mind during that time: “Whoever owns a yacht or similar luxury in a society in which there is even one child suffering from lack of dental care, is wrong.”