Thank you, President Bush
an open letter by Paulo Coelho
Translated from Portuguese

Thank you, great leader George W. Bush.

Thank you for showing everyone what a danger Saddam Hussein represents. Many of us might otherwise have forgotten that he used chemical weapons against his own people, against the Kurds and against the Iranians. Hussein is a bloodthirsty dictator and one of the clearest expressions of evil in today’s world.

But this is not my only reason for thanking you. During the first two months of 2003, you have shown the world a great many other important things and, therefore, deserve my gratitude.

So, remembering a poem I learned as a child, I want to say thank you.

Thank you for showing everyone that the Turkish people and their parliament are not for sale, not even for 26 billion dollars.

Thank you for revealing to the world the gulf that exists between the decisions made by those in power and the wishes of the people. Thank you for making it clear that neither José María Aznar nor Tony Blair give the slightest weight to or show the slightest respect for the votes they received. Aznar is perfectly capable of ignoring the fact that 90% of Spaniards are against the war, and Blair is unmoved by the largest public demonstration to take place in England in the last thirty years.

Thank you for making it necessary for Tony Blair to go to the British parliament with a fabricated dossier written by a student ten years ago, and present this as ‘damning evidence collected by the British Secret Service’.

Thank you for allowing Colin Powell to make a complete fool of himself by showing the UN Security Council photos which, one week later, were publicly challenged by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq.

Thank you for adopting your current position and thus ensuring that, at the plenary session, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin’s anti-war speech was greeted with applause – something, as far as I know, that has only happened once before in the history of the UN, following a speech by Nelson Mandela.

Thank you too, because, after all your efforts to promote war, the normally divided Arab nations were, for the first time, at their meeting in Cairo during the last week in February, unanimous in their condemnation of any invasion.

Thank you for your rhetoric stating that ‘the UN now has a chance to demonstrate its relevance’, a statement which made even the most reluctant countries take up a position opposing any attack on Iraq.

Thank you for your foreign policy which provoked the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, into declaring that in the 21st century, ‘a war can have a moral justification’, thus causing him to lose all credibility.

Thank you for trying to divide a Europe that is currently struggling for unification; this was a warning that will not go unheeded.

Thank you for having achieved something that very few have so far managed to do in this century: the bringing together of millions of people on all continents to fight for the same idea, even though that idea is opposed to yours.

Thank you for making us feel once more that though our words may not be heard, they are at least spoken – this will make us stronger in the future.

Thank you for ignoring us, for marginalising all those who oppose your decision, because the future of the Earth belongs to the excluded.

Thank you, because, without you, we would not have realised our own ability to mobilise. It may serve no purpose this time, but it will doubtless be useful later on.

Now that there seems no way of silencing the drums of war, I would like to say, as an ancient European king said to an invader: ‘May your morning be a beautiful one, may the sun shine on your soldiers’ armour, for in the afternoon, I will defeat you.’

Thank you for allowing us – an army of anonymous people filling the streets in an attempt to stop a process that is already underway – to know what it feels like to be powerless and to learn to grapple with that feeling and transform it.

So, enjoy your morning and whatever glory it may yet bring you.

Thank you for not listening to us and not taking us seriously, but know that we are listening to you and that we will not forget your words.

Thank you, great leader George W. Bush.

Thank you very much.

Child labor is a serious problem with over 250 million children working around the world.

·         Poverty is an immediate reason why families send their child to work, but putting children to work in lieu of education condemns them to a life of poverty.

·         Legislation introduced by Senator Harkin to ban products made with child labor from import to the U.S., while never enacted, provided the stimulus for model programs like RUGMARK.

Advocacy by human rights groups, repeated media exposure, and reaction to legislative proposals advanced to ban products made by child labor have led to widespread acknowledgment that child labor is a serious problem in the world. It is a problem that has its roots in poverty and the lack of educational facilities for children of the poor. Around the world, but particularly in the South, these circumstances force children into the work force-pushing children into the streets to beg, into the fields to labor as farm hands, and into factories. The International Labor Organization (ILO), the tripartite body representing governments, labor and employers, estimates that more than 250 million children are at work in the global economy. Many products, ranging from hand-knotted carpets sold in the most exclusive stores, to soccer balls and T-shirts sold in malls, are made with child labor.

Problems with Current U.S. Policy

·         The U.S. lacks any clear policy direction on a comprehensive program to combat the use of child labor in the global economy. President Clinton's call for "voluntary" codes of conduct to get companies to stop exploitative practices is either naive or cynical.

·         The Clinton administration espouses trade agreements that regard boycotts and labeling programs as unduly restricting international trade.

·         A fundamental aspect of any forward-looking policy is that child workers need quality education programs that provide them with skills for the future.

Toward a New Foreign Policy

·         To assume a global leadership role on child labor issues, the U.S. must ratify ILO Convention 138 and initiate a process to create an enforcement mechanism for that universal standard.

·         Any new trade agreements with the U.S. should include a provision to prohibit both the use of child labor in manufacturing and the trafficking of products made with child labor.

·         Through its AID programs and its membership in UNICEF and the World Bank, the U.S. must make education and rehabilitation programs for child workers a development priority.

The policy void on social issues in the global economy is at least partly due to a failure to prioritize. There are many new problems attributable to the rapid spread of global capital, ranging from inhumane conditions for workers in developing countries desperate for employment to the destruction of natural resources and environmental degradation. All these problems arise from the same basic condition: Global trading rules have created a safe atmosphere for the expansion of capital and the protection of property, but the resulting social problems have been dumped on national governments, which are themselves restricted by trade agreements like GATT.

The only provision for social issues is the discredited assumption that more trade will lead to employment and prosperity for all. The gaunt faces of Pakistani children making soccer balls for Nike and Adidas, the thousands of Burmese villagers working at gunpoint to build a gas pipeline for Unocal, and the brave political prisoners in China making soft fuzzy animals for sale in leading U.S. department stores should constitute conclusive evidence that the promised development nirvana will not evolve on its own. Fully developed and highly profitable multinational firms are benefiting from extreme cases of exploitation and will continue to do so until some form of global regulation is in place to make them stop.

As a second step, the U.S. should rigorously enforce the new legislation banning products made by forced or indentured child labor and begin the process of linking trade to a policy of eradicating child labor. Washington should insist that new trade agreements include enforceable provisions that prohibit the production and export of goods made with child labor. Washington should also take other unilateral steps to reinforce its policy commitment, including adopting a child-labor-free procurement policy.

"George Trevino clasps his hands behind his back as if they are bound by invisible handcuffs--the required posture for detainees in Juvenile Court--and trudges ahead of the bailiff, walking from the stuffy, crowded holding cell he knew too well to the courtroom he had seen far too many times.  In that moment, he would give just about anything to trade places with someone like John Sloan, to have had the same opportunities, the home, the family.  Most of all his family.

George spends much of his downtime--there is a lot of it in Juvenile Hall--trying to imagine what that would be like, having a mom and dad and his own bed that could never be taken away.  Even as he walks that dismal hallway with its lumpy linoleum and odor of sweat and disinfectant--surroundings so familiar to him he had come to notice their absence more than their presence--he turns his thoughts once more to the sanctuary of What if?

What if he had never been a 300 kid?  George used to ask God why he had to live with that unlucky designation, praying for deliverance, but that had been a long time ago.  As the years passed, he tells me, huge blocks of his early childhood had melted from his memory.  He could now no longer remember being small or playing with toys, or even if he ever had any toys to play with.  his mother's face, his brother and sister--all had slipped into some black hole in his head.  Thinking about that is too painful.  The idea that your family could disappear, not just in reality, but inside you, too, was paralyzing.  If he let it consume him, he would just sit and weep for hours.  So he fills the vacuum with daydreams instead, about having a home with a mother and father in it, people who made sure he was dressed and fed, who praised him when he did something well, yelled at him when he was bad.  As he emerges from the holding tank door to stand blinking in the courtroom, George wonders what it would be like to have a mom or dad who cared enough about him to yell.  Strange, George thinks, that he would crave such a thing, but he did.  Most kids didn't know the riches they had.  George knew.

At age six, when a policeman found him abandoned in the filthy Dodge van that was his only home, his mother a fugitive later imprisoned for manslaughter, George Trevino became a "300 kid."  That's what they called him, right there in court, one of those unintentionally dehumanizing verbal shorthands so common in the juvenile system.  As he walked into court today, he heard the judge and the probation officer discussing his case in hushed voices.  "Oh, he was in the 300 system before this happened," the judge said with a knowing, sad sort of finality, and everyone kind of nodded as if to say, Oh, that explains it.

The 300 kid is a synonym for foster child, dependent child, a beaten, battered, and abused child.  The term is drawn from the California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 300, which empowers the Juvenile Court to protect abused and neglected children, to take them from their homes and put them in foster care as dependents of the court--with the court becoming, in essence the child's new parent.  Some families are eventually reunited.  Some, like George's are never made whole again.  George was raised by the state. 

And the state made George what he is today:  While under the Juvenile Court's guidance and protection--as a victim, not a victimizer--a bright, law-abiding A student with a penchant for writing poetry was destroyed.  For ten years, he was shunted from one temporary home to another.  He was separated from his older brother and younger sister.  He was entrusted to neglectful, drug-addicted guardians.  He was allowed to roam the streets, to experiment with drugs, to drop out of school--all the while in the care and custody of the state.  With each move, his pitifully meager possessions were packed into a disposable green Hefty trash bag, the foster child's luggage, which George was bright enough to see as a metaphor for his entire life.  He considered himself a prisoner. 

"I always wondrered what it was that I had done wrong," George says, "but no one would ever tell me.  I just figured they thought I would turn out like my mother, and they were just getting a head start."

And when the inevitable finally came to pass, when this icnreasingly angry, rootless kid took solace in the streets and got involved in crime, the system geared up with all its power and programs to do what it always does in such cases:

It is preparing to abandon him."

~ No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court, Edward Humes, 1996

this is a true story...
and this is true America. 
when we fail it once, it will abandon us. 

live with it.