Dear Oscar,

You may prefer not to receive this letter – maybe none of my letters are actually welcome, but there does seem to be some sort of impetus behind my continuing to write them, so I shall not as yet desist.

I think you had ‘urchins’ in your day, or ‘street-arabs’, or ‘ragamuffins’ – the poor, very poor children out on the streets with nowhere safe to go, who had empty bellies and who were ripe for the worst imaginable forms of exploitation. I get the impression that they were commonplace in your society, that the chattering classes both noticed and did not notice their existence. You did refer to them, often in the context of available youths, who could be bought and sold for the price of a meal.

In our modern era we look back upon that time as if it is very distant from us, almost through ‘rose-tinted spectacles’, with the likes of Charles Dickens fleshing out for us the plight of the poor, in melodramatic terms, terms that evoke an emotional rather than any form of practical response. It is almost as if they have to be there in order to make the picture complete – of an unjust society, one where people suffered just because of where they were born, at what level in society – and we congratulate ourselves upon our own democratic movements that more equally divide the spoils of economic growth.

And yet there is still child poverty.

It sort of amazes me that this is true, and that across the globe there are children who are not given enough to eat, because conflicts rage around them, because political movements suppress and oppress them, because there simply is not enough in certain areas. It seems crazy that this is the case. That there is anywhere where there is not enough food. Somebody once told me that if all the wealth of the world was distributed equally amongst the world’s population, then everyone would be poor, but then I wonder what ‘poor’ actually means, how you measure it and rationalise it, and why it is that some have so much more than enough, while others do not have food. Surely as humankind we would think that food was an absolute priority for all the peoples of the world, just as a starting point, as something we could build from, as a human race. But it is not the case, and is very difficult to understand, that we who have food on our plates (and cars, and holidays, and clothes, and pets, and homes, and jewellery, and laptops, and mobile phones) can tolerate the fact that somewhere else there are children who are hungry.

Now, of course Oscar, I acknowledge that it is not ‘our’ fault, that the race as a whole may think one thing, but that those who hold and wield power may require something entirely different; even that a sense of superiority cannot exist unless someone else is being oppressed and held underfoot; that incorporating everyone seems like a ‘pipedream’.

But, if only …..

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.