Street Children

Street Children

One of my earliest encounters with poverty took place in Mexico, where I was born. I can clearly recall a young boy, about 7 or 8 years old, who was doing his best to stop passing cars so that he could wash their windshields for money. He was struggling to carry a large spray bottle of cleaner and a blue rag in his hand. One look at his face immediately led you to believe that he hadn’t had a good dinner in days. I observed him as he would jump in front of cars and start washing their windshields. A lot of drivers would curse at him and tell him to get lost. But what startled me the most was the fact that his mother was nowhere in sight. I can recall asking my grandmother why he was cleaning windshields. Wasn’t he supposed to be with his mom? It was then that my grandmother told me that the unfortunate young boy was what people called “nino de la calle” (Spanish for “boy of the street”). These boys were abandoned by their parents and left to fend for themselves. But how could a mother be so cruel as to desert her own child? This boy couldn’t possibly be any older than 8 yrs old, yet he had the responsibilities of an adult! I found it shocking that anybody could be as cold-hearted as to deprive this young boy of his youth and innocence. This boy was no longer just a boy, he was a man. He had to grow up quickly and acquire all the street skills required to survive in the streets.

I only lived in Mexico for about 5 years, before my parents and I migrated to the United States. In America however, things weren’t much different. I would always see little boys playing outside of my house till about 2 in the morning, while their parents would be busy getting high in their homes or drinking beer. They reminded so much of that boy in Mexico because these kids had been abandoned by their parents. They had to learn how to distinguish right from wrong without any parental guidance. The results? Many of these boys became involved with gangs and sooner or later, I’d get word that one of them had died from either a drug overdose or a shooting. One of my friends confessed to me that he didn’t want to be a part of a gang anymore but he had no choice because once your in, there‘s no way out except through death. He was sick of always being on the run for his life. But what he most regretted was having the parents he had, who were both gang members. He felt that if he had had some significant parental figure in his life, he’d have turned out better.

Poverty is one of the worst things in the world, because it hurts our children the most. Kids are forced to relinquish their youth in order to provide for themselves and their families. This only leads to kids losing sight of what’s really important which is education. Education is critical for success. Without it, you’ll only end up in the same vicious cycle that you started in, never getting a glimpse of what the world has in store for you outside of that poverty. Poverty is brutal because it clings to you like a heavy burden, making it difficult to overcome.

As a direct response to poverty, many kids are turning to the drug trade as a lifeboat. What’s more luring than flashy cars and loads of money in your pockets? To these young kids, this is the grand opportunity that they’ve been waiting for. They don’t realize that by selling drugs, they are contributing to the poverty around them. A person on drugs will do whatever it takes to keep his habit. This leads to a dramatic increase in crime. Taking a look at history will clearly show that when drugs became popular in the 1980s, a huge increase in crime was evident. So what is the government doing to resolve this problem? Nothing much that works. The government’s drug policy is to imprison anyone that is in affiliation with illegal drugs, but the only thing that this is accomplishing is overpopulating America’s prisons and wasting millions of dollars. What’s ironic is that the two main sponsors of this policy are the tobacco and alcohol industries. Why would they, of all people, sponsor a drug free America? Because they want to eliminate all competition. Imagine what would happen to the tobacco industry if marijuana were legalized. It’d go out of business! A reason why this drug policy doesn’t work is because if you imprison one drug dealer, there’s another one waiting to take that spot. In other words, you’re opening job opportunities in the drug trade. So why is the government fooling itself by saying that it’s drug policy is working? It’s not! All one needs to do to prove this, is to take a look at our neighborhoods. How easy is it to get a bag of marijuana? Pretty easy. According to the Bureau of Justice, in the year 2004, 19.9% of high school students within 30 days and 34.3% within 1 year’s time prior to the survey, had smoked marijuana.

What America needs is to adopt a different drug policy. In Switzerland, the government opened up medical clinics to help drug addicts. These clinics would supply drug addicts with limited amounts of narcotics if you met the requirements. One of these requirements was that you had to stay out of jail while undergoing the treatment. It might be shocking at first to consider the government supplying people with drugs, but once you think about it, it’s very logical! It’s much healthier, because you don’t have to worry about drug overdoses or injuries from puncturing the wrong veins if a medical professional is doing it for you. There’s a dramatic decrease in crime because if you are jailed, you are immediately taken off the free treatment and you have to hustle for drugs. Employment increases because these clinics also offer help in finding jobs. But most importantly, you decrease drug users, because you put drug dealers out of business (since the treatment is free) and the patients often want to take the next step to rehabilitation. This drug policy is much cheaper than the drug policy that the United States has adopted and it has great results. Switzerland has one of the lowest crime rates in the world and drugs aren’t a problem. By changing our drug policy, we would be talking a stand against not only crime, but against poverty. We need to shape a better future not for ourselves, but for our children, who are the ones that suffer most.