Weight

These are the things that make it hard to get out of bed in the morning, that weigh down on you like a craggy boulder crushing you with sharp edges.

We used to live in a poor neighborhood of a big city. Not poor as in working-class or blue-collar, but poor as in food stamps, prostitution, drugs, and drive-bys. People were killed in the gas station two blocks from our apartment. A bullet from the street came in through a wall and hit our downstairs neighbor in the hip. On the corner of our block, a girl was killed when she stumbled into crossfire between two drug dealers.

In this neighborhood, there was a fortress of an apartment building. In this apartment building (not ours) lived people who were only in the neighborhood temporarily, usually students or professors, and who were all white. A big fence surrounded the yard behind the apartment building, but it was a fence made of wrought iron and you could see through the pillars to what was inside. In the yard was a big playground structure. Nobody from the apartment building used it. Probably too afraid to let their children outside. I was walking past it one day, and saw two little neighborhood boys standing on the outside of the fence, staring in at the playground. They were probably five or six years old. Just stood there staring. I watched them for awhile, heart breaking, and then I kept walking, knowing there was nothing I could do. When I turned around farther down the street and looked back at them, they were still there, still staring.

There were no other playgrounds in this neighborhood that I ever saw. Driving by an abandoned lot one day, bordered on one side by an abandoned brick building and on the other by a gas station frequented by toughs driving old American cars, falling apart but still equipped with rims, I saw children bouncing a ball off the old brick wall. This was where they played and how they played, bouncing a fifty-cent rubber ball off a wall adorned with a huge Miller Lite ad.

But they were playing, not running with gangs, not dealing drugs. You take hope where you can get it. What gets me down is the helplessness I feel - even if I had Bill Gates' money, could I ever begin to make a dent in even just my little city, much less all the cities in all the countries in the world where children suffer?