Auntie Charo's Soapbox

The story begins with a young family living on a neighboring island to the east of us. Their dream was to move where life was better, it was their dream after all. There are streets here, cars, some sidewalks, many t.v. channels, a lot of stores, jobs galore, public health hand outs, subsidized housing, easy-to-get food stamps, concrete housing, lots of family moving here, movies and everything imaginable. It was the dream of dreams....and it didn't cost all that much to get here, heck with enough relatives donating the cost of a ticket, one could easily get here in no time. And perhaps this family did just that and thus began their dream which led them to move to Hemlani's not so dreamy apartment complex in Harmon.
The family may have(or not) had a job or food stamps, but surely, they had cousins and friends and kids to play with. The man and his wife had a four year old that probably had cousins to play with. Hopefully, he had a few Christmas toys to open to fill his heart with joy on Christmas day, the last he would have on this earth.
For what ever reason, this boy's family would move from this not-so-dream-like apartment building and thoughts would turn more to the process of moving than to the whereabouts of this four-yr-old whose only needs in this world was to love and be loved and be cared for but that was not to be as we now know.
The parents, the ones with the dream called the police who called the media who called the community to look out for the lost boy. This happens so often these days there's actually a name for such a thing, it's called the Amber Alert. Sadly, the little boy was supposedly killed and found not far from the area where he usually played, not far from where his parents realized their dream home, but where were they as his body was being silenced? What was their dream then? What are their dreams now? What are yours, those of you who have children?
There's not much more to say about this dream except that it's turned into a nightmare and that we can only pray that the parents can find solace in that their little boy is safely in God's loving care and that hopefully justice is brought to the person who harmed the child.
There's also a lesson to be learned here. The world as we used to know it has changed, it's no longer safe for our children. We can no longer trust that they are safe to run about in their own back yards without us being there to watch them play. Let that be your first lesson this first day in 2006.