Social Justice Stories

This won't be a long post- I just wanted to draw attention to a few recent social justice stories covered by NPR News that I found interesting.

The first is "L.A. Works to Get Mental Help for Young Offenders."  Do you know any 11-year-old kids? What do they do for fun- play video games? Sports? Go to movies with family? Attend summer camps? Do crystal meth and cut themselves? This news article includes the story of a young woman who is 21 years old, and has been in L.A.'s juvenile justice system for half her life, since crystal meth got her into a juvenile hall at age 11. She was suicidal, cutting on herself, "because it came to me that nobody wants me and that's just how it is." Every year L.A. has about 20,000 juvenile offenders, about half of whom suffer from some form of mental illness.

The second story is more encouraging: "Phnom Penh's Feat: Getting Clean Tap Water Flowing." Phnom Penh is the capital city of Cambodia (a neighbor of Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos, if your geography is suffering like mine). And now this city of 1.7 million people has clean tap water running to 92% of its households. The utilities are working! Why is this interesting? "in 1993 — after four years of rule by the Khmer Rouge and 10 years of occupation by the Vietnamese — only 25 percent of the city had running water." Imagine that only 1 out of every 4 families in your church had running water. The consequences of a lack of clean water for health are staggering: "Clean water charities say thousands of people die every day of preventable diseases as a result of not having clean drinking water, and 90 percent of those who die are younger than 5."

I don't have a particularly strong running theme here, but what these stories do for me is to point out how far my childhood experience was from that of people whose most basic needs go unmet, people like the other 12.3 million Cambodians outside of the capitol city. It might be natural to assume other people's lives are much like your own- that of course they had the same natural gifts or opportunities, and just made bad choices- but that's an excellent foundation for injustice.