Has there ever been a golden era where children were protected and valued over the greed and self-indulgence of those in power?

Certainly, there are cultures within whose members value the child and will protect them at all costs, even if these societies are few and far between. Still, however well-intentioned, they cannot defend against the moral depravity of those who war and pillage the helpless and vulnerable for this is the rot that has been elected to office in most countries today – those who do not lead principled lives.

Children: Chattel, House Rat. by Amber Poole

This is a war on women, mothers, and children who do not rank the same rights as those women, mothers and children whose birthright is one of privilege. This exemption reaches beyond a world of women who have long been forgotten. The players who dominate this gated empire are interested in protecting their own children, maintaining their own status, and guarding their own wealth, without regard to decency or integrity.

We live in a world where other mothers, especially mothers of entitlement, don’t care about those mothers who suffer from the devastation of poverty, war, displacement or, as in the case of Gaza, ethnic cleansing.

Therefore, we are capable, as mothers, of rationalizing and justifying a bullet to the brain of an infant, a toddler, a mother and her child. We don’t consider this a moral aberration. We think of this as necessary to purify the society in which we wish to raise our own children. This effort can only be realized when we frame the "other" child as cockroach, house rat or vermin. We must first identify them as a threat, then we can easily justify their slaughter.

Within this carefully ordered, selective society of elite women and mothers, there is a code of superiority, which means that murder and exploitation are fair game.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there were the orphaned chimney sweepers in London.

These children were exploited by a rising demand of the Industrial Revolution whose systems were built on the accelerated pace of production, a seedbed for exploitation. It wasn’t necessary to think of the child as no more than a house rat during this time as they were useful to the privileged classes, although no kind of protection was extended to them leading to guaranteed ill health and early death.

From William Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper:

When my mother died, I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “weep! weep! weep!
weep!”
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I
sleep.

When Edwin Chadwick’s, Inquiry into the Conditions of the Poor was published in 1842, it did ultimately lead to a change in public health policies that protected the lower classes but not for another seven years. Probably because, while the cholera outbreak was partly what precipitated the report, it wasn’t until the upper classes were also dying from the disease (in greater number) that changes were made to the general public.

Shocking as it is to believe, the recent past of the exploitation of children has strengthened into a tsunami of human trafficking and now, the shots fired into the infant brain of the Palestinian babe fighting for its life inside a defective incubator is not only normal but justifiable. (In some even more shocking instances, there are those who deny that it is happening, the murder of these children. They deny it. They say that the Palestinians have invented these narratives.) And where have we heard that before?

This is the world we live in. What do we do?

You must not capitulate, nor give way to the lies. No infant deserves a bullet in the head. No child deserves to be imprisoned and tortured. No child deserves to be vilified.

To all mothers, it is our world, not just a selection of mothers with wealth, but all mothers. If you ignore the sacred bond between mother and child, then we are all diseased and we will all perish under such an attack.

If one can, be the strong, fierce mother for all
the mothers who can’t because of war,
displacement and poverty…be the mother that
fights for her children too, not just your own.

The Orphaned Mother by Amber Poole

Had I the chance to have wrapped you up in a
warm blanket and dried your tears when you
cried…

I would have.

Had I the chance to have walked along the
beach, hand in hand, to build a sandcastle and
splash in the waves with you all the day long...

I would have.

Had I the chance to have made for you hot
cocoa with extra chocolate and whipped
cream...

I would have.

Or rested beside you under the summer sun,
beneath the fruit trees bursting with the juice of
life, making all things sweet for us, I would not
have moved from the spot.

But I am gone and you are alone, orphaned,
without a blanket, without a toy, without a cup of
hot cocoa.

So I linger.

I keep close to the horizon of your life, until your life is done and you can rejoin my soul, my body, my spirit, I rest close to the horizon where I pray other women, other mothers, grandmothers and aunties will cover you, feed you, love you, splash in the waves with you all the day long, until such time we are together again.

I love you my daughter, my son, my everything.
Mama