There is an injustice woven into human life that should make us think—and do more than think. It should trouble us continuously. It should remind us, every single day, how many are condemned from birth to live as misfits, with rare exceptions. Yet we forget.
I'm speaking of all those children—later adolescents, later adults—born into families and circumstances stripped of everything: money, housing, food, education, culture, affection.
I remember the anger I felt years ago at a parent-teacher conference for my son in seventh grade. It was November, two months into the school year. The entire faculty announced that three students were already condemned to fail the year. Drawing on my experience as a teacher, I was outraged by such a verdict. "But there's the whole year ahead! Can't they change?" The teachers were equally indignant: "Madam, one comes from the Magliana neighborhood, one is a repeater, the other's mother is a cleaning woman. What do you expect will change?"
Here is a stark example of how children deprived from birth of the most basic necessities for growth become objects of discrimination and neglect by those who should, at minimum, help fill the gaps.
Outrage is easy and costs nothing. What matters, it seems to me, is to refuse—every day—the indifference into which we "privileged" ones, we "those blessed with every advantage," have settled alongside so many others.
That indifference blinds us so thoroughly that we forget: our contempt for "so many delinquents" (of every age and type) is shallow, even if justified. In our own small way, each of us would do better to push back against certain assumptions—("there's nothing to be done, he comes from that background, he's the son of..., his father drinks," and so on). We should remind those around us of the privileges we enjoy from birth; we should ask ourselves what we would have become if we'd been born into their conditions.
And perhaps take one step further: ask those who can write to speak in the newspapers about these victims of degradation—not in terms of pity, as happens now, only after some crisis occurs. But urgently, pressingly, about how it is our duty here in our wealthy Western countries, overflowing with comfort yet starved of humanity and justice, to care concretely for all these brothers and sisters. From nursery school onward, through schools and organizations, in parishes. Some of this is happening, and many people are dedicated to it. But it is not enough. To be satisfied with outrage, with fear, with defense and indifference toward them—as adults typically are—is a convenient way to avoid the problem.
This same thing happened—long ago—to people with disabilities, to the "handicapped." Those of us who have walked alongside them and their families for years have learned how wrong that attitude was, and how they themselves have taught us a "healing" way of seeing, full of surprises for them and for us.
Must we not then undertake a path of closeness, a new way of looking, a constructive commitment—to draw students, parents, teachers, friends into relationship with those who live beside us, who, unable to voice their suffering, accept in silence their unjust, sorrowful fate?
Mariangela Bertolini, 2008