23 January 2008: Reflecting on a blanket...

23 January 2008: Reflecting on a blanket…

As she tried to sell me a hand-woven blanket, I couldn’t help but stare into her eyes. They were inspiring, filled with personal dreams, ambitions, and – above all – hope. I knew immediately that no one could ever sew a fabric as beautiful as her potential and it crushed me to know that despite it all, she would have to live with all her dreams deferred. Her name was Jimena and she couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old. Jimena is just one of many impoverished Mayan children forced to sell handicrafts on the street in an attempt to help her family make a living.

Although most people feel much sympathy for such families, I was shocked to hear one person remark that she felt none. In fact, after listening to her, you would have guessed that she felt the exact opposite. She insisted that these families were attempting to make a living through manipulation, claiming that the parents of children like Jimena exploit their children to increase their earnings.

Needless to say, she was blatantly wrong, but I choose to mention her comments because, in an extremely crude sense, they evoke the same false logic that many others do when discussing the poor. More specifically, such arguments are based on the rhetoric of individuality, meaning that they narrowly attribute a person’s circumstances to his or her behavior. What such arguments fail to acknowledge is the kind of deplorable circumstances parents must be in to feel forced to exchange their child’s dreams for meager sustenance. No family takes pleasure in forcing a girl like Jimena to live the way she does. But in the end, we must realize that the fact that Jimena is reduced to selling us blankets will always say much more about us than it ever will about her.