- ATD Fourth World

"Our lands will soon lie totally beneath the water," cry the people in Asia who have never had a choice but to live where they are at the greatest risk from the raging floods.

Here, typhoons and earthquakes obliterate homes leaving millions of children and adults at the mercy of the elements. And when the waters ebb, after villages are buried underneath the mud, the media looks elsewhere, leaving the mourners voiceless, leaving the mourning to ferment into violence, violence born of overflowing sorrow and injustice.

"Why is it always our homes that get destroyed?" while others keep the safer areas for themselves? "When I’m older, I’m going to smash up their homes." And the mothers plead: "Let our children’s hearts and minds be filled something other than anger." In these times shaken by so many crises— ecological, for access to food and to energy, economic, financial, social— can we hear these children and their parents?

In these times when the arrogance of some banishes others and dismisses their basic rights, via sweeping laws and tightly protected borders, we want, together with everyone else who defends the inalienable dignity of each and every person, to forge a new future, one that can be shared by generations, communities and nations, a future where respect among people and respect for the Earth will finally be sustainable and harmonious.

On this 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it is children who are showing us the way towards a world where trust can truly abide. We see children perform innumerable acts of kindness, compassion and tolerance, children who join with the youths and adults around them in seeking new ways to create and express solidarity. This solidarity is about far more than fending off the ocean so that some gain a few more acres of security; it is about making sure there is room for everyone on the higher ground, it is about trying different ways of living together so that no one is left out.

Obscuring the atrocies endured by adults through amnesia or an imposed silence will not liberate children from anger they feel, nor fulfill the promise of a future that belongs to them. The pride of inheriting from their elders the courage to cope when faced with humiliation and a lack of everything, this is the pride that is growing on the higher ground that every child deserves.

In the field of all generations let us work together to grow these new ways of living together where restored memory and honor can save family and community ties from fracturing.

Let us work together to tend these these new ways of living together that can protect from the gangrene of guilt and loneliness.

On this new higher ground for the future of all children, let us work together to to tend the fields where all people can recognize themselves as full-fledged members of a humanity free of the fear of putting an end to injustice.

Eugen Brand, Director General