Working with some of the most disadvantaged children in Johannesburg some years ago how often I was surprised to find in them such clarity and conviction regarding matters of right and wrong. How naive and prejudiced that attitude seems to me now. This uninformed expectation at the outset was based on the assumption that children who had been neglected, abandoned or abused, (many of them had grown up in child-headed households, household located in the midst of crime and gang violence with too many to count among them having themselves been the recipients of abuse and violence) would be unable to discern right from wrong. I presumed that their mindsets would correlate with the kind of exposure each of them had had to the world around them.
Such clarity of vision, moral conviction and certainty was most crystallized in children of around 11 and 12, just at the outset of puberty. In this liminal space between childhood and "the other side", here, before hormones and other drives took over the trajectory of the mind and body, a clear-eyed, resolute vision was apparent.
My encounter with these children was with a lived and felt sense of what goodness was, an embodied and holistic awareness of what it felt like to be in the world, a felt appreciation for the overarching rightness of things and the wrongness of things.
The knowledge I encountered was an unmediated, simple, lived, embodied and articulated reality. It was one offered without doubt. It knew, for example, walking home along dark streets owned by particular gangs was not a good, that a father disappearing off with girlfriend leaving a child hungry behind was not a good, that the food provided for free at school in the mornings was a good, that the sickness and TB that had killed so many around them was not a good, that a traditional healer who threatened and manipulated the family to pay up for "cures" was not a good ... and so on.
These children were direct, articulate and doubtless in their knowledge they did not want to participate in the life of not-goodness, did not want to perpetuate what they had suffered and each of them in one way or another had resolved that they wished to follow and seek the places of goodness. They clearly knew in themselves the will not to drink, not to steal, not to cheat, not to become part of gangs, not participate in sexual violence and so on ...
Of these things and many others they were clear and certain and yet as I sat beside them it was also clear and certain that there was no clear way forward, no clear way they could obtain a meal that evening, or guaranteed safe passage home, nor was there certainty that they would sleep safely that night nor clear knowledge of their loved ones coming home.
There simply was no clear way to secure the good and meanwhile the pressures to participate in these other not-good paths pressed in on them daily, until - it seemed to me - it would become inevitable that their clarity would be lost and "life" would happen to them too.
The crisis of this liminal place; the where-to- next that this point in their lives confronted, was the knowledge I held that for most of them that the next step was not likely into a place that would reward the choices they wished to make and that most often the choices they made internally were not capable of being supported by the environments in which they found themselves and even more than this, that despite their very best will, almost all of them would fail.
One by one they would fail and one by one each would be forced to seek out the not-goodness as the next best thing to death.
It was crisis, a painful crisis of witnessing in which I was privy to an extraordinary reservoir of goodness and possibility. At the same time, I had to face my own lack of capacity to fully honour what I had encountered.
To see, to feel, to know at an authentic level the reality of this intrinsic goodness and to know that for the most part it is unlikely to be realized is not easy. To mitigate against the effects of this knowledge I guess you might say I sublimated, (I used a psychological defense to cover myself from the pain), I wrote a book that addressed this crisis. It asked the question: how could one child, even one child find his way through this valley of hopelessness towards an outcome where basic goodness might be realized and supported. The hero of this story was a composite of hundreds of those eager, clear-eyed and certain children I worked with.
In my heart I hold a place for the knowledge of the untapped potential of these children. These and tens of thousands like them are not to be pitied. Compassion is due yes, but pity is not a service to that spirit of resolute conviction. The pity that was due then and now, is to what is missed, to what remains after these spirits are snuffed out, finally abandoned to the only way left to stay alive. The pity is for our nation in the myriad instances in which it has and continues, in blindness, or even with both inept or impotent good intentions, to squander its own gold.
Such clarity of vision, moral conviction and certainty was most crystallized in children of around 11 and 12, just at the outset of puberty. In this liminal space between childhood and "the other side", here, before hormones and other drives took over the trajectory of the mind and body, a clear-eyed, resolute vision was apparent.
My encounter with these children was with a lived and felt sense of what goodness was, an embodied and holistic awareness of what it felt like to be in the world, a felt appreciation for the overarching rightness of things and the wrongness of things.
The knowledge I encountered was an unmediated, simple, lived, embodied and articulated reality. It was one offered without doubt. It knew, for example, walking home along dark streets owned by particular gangs was not a good, that a father disappearing off with girlfriend leaving a child hungry behind was not a good, that the food provided for free at school in the mornings was a good, that the sickness and TB that had killed so many around them was not a good, that a traditional healer who threatened and manipulated the family to pay up for "cures" was not a good ... and so on.
These children were direct, articulate and doubtless in their knowledge they did not want to participate in the life of not-goodness, did not want to perpetuate what they had suffered and each of them in one way or another had resolved that they wished to follow and seek the places of goodness. They clearly knew in themselves the will not to drink, not to steal, not to cheat, not to become part of gangs, not participate in sexual violence and so on ...
Of these things and many others they were clear and certain and yet as I sat beside them it was also clear and certain that there was no clear way forward, no clear way they could obtain a meal that evening, or guaranteed safe passage home, nor was there certainty that they would sleep safely that night nor clear knowledge of their loved ones coming home.
There simply was no clear way to secure the good and meanwhile the pressures to participate in these other not-good paths pressed in on them daily, until - it seemed to me - it would become inevitable that their clarity would be lost and "life" would happen to them too.
The crisis of this liminal place; the where-to- next that this point in their lives confronted, was the knowledge I held that for most of them that the next step was not likely into a place that would reward the choices they wished to make and that most often the choices they made internally were not capable of being supported by the environments in which they found themselves and even more than this, that despite their very best will, almost all of them would fail.
One by one they would fail and one by one each would be forced to seek out the not-goodness as the next best thing to death.
It was crisis, a painful crisis of witnessing in which I was privy to an extraordinary reservoir of goodness and possibility. At the same time, I had to face my own lack of capacity to fully honour what I had encountered.
To see, to feel, to know at an authentic level the reality of this intrinsic goodness and to know that for the most part it is unlikely to be realized is not easy. To mitigate against the effects of this knowledge I guess you might say I sublimated, (I used a psychological defense to cover myself from the pain), I wrote a book that addressed this crisis. It asked the question: how could one child, even one child find his way through this valley of hopelessness towards an outcome where basic goodness might be realized and supported. The hero of this story was a composite of hundreds of those eager, clear-eyed and certain children I worked with.
In my heart I hold a place for the knowledge of the untapped potential of these children. These and tens of thousands like them are not to be pitied. Compassion is due yes, but pity is not a service to that spirit of resolute conviction. The pity that was due then and now, is to what is missed, to what remains after these spirits are snuffed out, finally abandoned to the only way left to stay alive. The pity is for our nation in the myriad instances in which it has and continues, in blindness, or even with both inept or impotent good intentions, to squander its own gold.
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