Does the child in the cage wish for darkness or the light?
Does the child in the cage wish for darkness or the light?
I ask you to ponder this question not because I wish to learn your answer, but for something more important. For that reason, let me expand upon this hypothetical, so we are both on the same page.
One day, this child had what you may consider to be a normal life. Neither happy nor sad, neither privileged nor impoverished. It could almost be considered plain to many onlookers. The template for which the world was invented, perhaps, or the sign of its greatest ills.
You need not learn of their home life, but I won’t deprive you of speculation. Use your imagination for this part. Maybe, in the years before the cage, they had two loving parents who doted on them every moment. They may have had a happy home life, with joyful birthday celebrations, a cute pet whose boundless joy was greater than the largest mountains, neither rich nor poor but never left wanting for life’s great necessities.
On the day they turned 9, they received a bike, but did not learn how to ride. On their first attempt they fell and grazed their knee, consigning the family to an evening of tears and the bike to a lifetime of dust collecting and rust in the garden shed. Silly memories they would laugh about in years to come, forever tinted by rose-colored glasses.
Alternatively, it may have been a painful home life. Perhaps they were neglected, causing them to thrash at the world around them. If they hit something, someone, their cries for help could be heard, they thought. There was one teacher who believed their stories. Maybe. Perhaps it was just pity, but it got them through the worst of it.
Like I said, use your imagination. It was a normal childhood! It’s up to you to consider what such a thing would be. Why would you believe me, anyway? Because I’m the narrator of this macabre experiment?
If you met this child, dear reader, how would you greet them? How would you-
“Who is it?”
Oh, I thought they were asleep. Give me a moment, I’ll be right back.
“Who goes there?”
Huh. I didn’t think they’d be awake. “Hello, young one.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in the cage.”
“Can you let me out?”
“Would you like that?”
“Did you put me here?”
“Will knowing the answer allow you to escape?”
“…”
The silence is enough of an answer for me. How about we continue where we left off then shall-
“How long have I been here?”
More questions. “Long enough. Days, weeks, months. Years, even. I’m not keeping count, and you have slept through it all. You claim to want freedom, but you can’t even remember why you were brought here, or when.”
“That’s not fair!”
“Whoever said it was? Now can you please be quiet?”
If we are to come to some sort of understanding I can’t have her constantly interrupting our conversations, can I? Would you mind following me? It’s pointless to ask, really, you have no choice but to follow my lead. Well, I guess you could just stop reading. But that would surely consign the child to an eternity of suffering — and we know you wouldn’t want that, right?
Let me take you out into the streets. As should soon become apparent, our best days are long behind us. There’s a grandeur to the orange brick of buildings old, only let down by the crumbling facade and bordered-up windows that dampen their once-rustic charm. Roads once clean and functional are as cracked and bruised as the desire and hope of the people who wander them. You see some that remain unaffected by this declining reality, but that only makes the contrast and decay more stark.
Nobody really inquired as to when this first occurred. It wasn’t an intentional descent into obsolescence, at least at first, but attempts to radically alter this once the process had begun soon failed. The people who lived here lacked power, and the people who had power lived elsewhere. Before long, it had been forgotten, with once-grand accumulations of power stood like relics of another era. Memorials of tragedies and triumphs now exist less for the purpose of remembering the past but as a reminder of the final moments many who remain in these parts felt any such sense of purpose or pride.
Even then, in the hardships these monuments remembered or the tragedies they stood to mark, people came together. Would that happen now?
Did you notice this decline as it happened? Or when it was all too late, with the things that were now merely a memory?
Where did the time go? The time when benches once a respite became decorative lest we attract the homeless, the sick, the injured, the poor. Time has turned public space into repellants for rest, in our rush we avoid the sight of those in need, forcing them along and out of sight on the endless road to nowhere. By doing so, suddenly, our problems are gone. The crisis must be over if they’re nowhere to be seen, correct? Money well spent clearing them away, but now the pockets are dry, and the needy are standing at the door, waiting.
How entitled. The help was given to them, we saw it for ourselves, and they squandered it. There’s nothing left, and now they want more? Words like ‘help’ can manipulate the truth so easily. Does ‘help’ come in the form of a blaze of neglect, a sinking of a second chance, a poster on the wall that blasts you as the ultimate culprit? Excuses, really. Or is ‘help’ being locked away, thrown away, rejected, deported, forced into a boat, into the cage?
When does pride in the past become a refusal to change, lest we step further from a forgotten glory that will never return? As that glory fades, only myth perseveres in our collective memory. It’s a struggle, attempting to survive on past successes while seeking the simple way out. Maybe if they weren’t here, it would all go away. Maybe if they just stayed quiet, stop asking questions, let it happen in silence, you wouldn’t have to question if that past you held in such reverence was actually as rose-tinted as you remember.
Am I asking too many questions? And what does this all have to do with that child, you may wonder? Did that child rise from the cracks in the pavement like a clown in the sewers, or fall from the sky like a waterfall of tears? These streets know nothing of this child’s name, their age, their race. Nor should they need to. Surely any child needs to be saved.
If you remember correctly, that was never the question posed to you from the start. Nor would simply proclaiming this desire to be the hero affirm that it shall be done. What is your plan once the child has been, as you say, ‘saved’ from their predicament? Will lifting them from their current circumstances and these trials and tribulations actually improve their situation, without understanding their journey that brought them to this point?
In the darkness comes ignorance. There is bliss in such shadows. If you never learn, nothing need change. Without the child, would that disdain for the world lead to actions that could change it?
We can build a time capsule around our memory and preserve it for a lifetime. In the light comes hindsight and clarity, and a need to act. One can’t stand and do nothing and take the path of ignorance with such surroundings. Were a person silent while standing in the light, aware and alert to the child’s plight as they were felled in pursuit of power and continuity, trapped in the cage. Could you say nothing?
You see where we stand, don’t you? This child is not in the cage for my own whims. I have far better things to do with my time than entertain such folly for mere self entertainment. Indeed, this child, from their average childhood to their comatose life in the cage, is a canvas for knowledge and a map to the future. They are unsullied by the biases of the adults in their life, sheltered from power, privilege and perspective. All that exists for the child is an ability to understand. The human condition is whatever they discover from the person who determines their fate as the people watch on.
They may be a mere child, but they are also so much more.
A collective struggle is one which brings people together for a common cause. Everyone is poorer, angrier, and less sure of the future than ever, while the past is both figuratively and literally falling apart around them. From all sides, blame is pointed, forgetting the humanity that actually stands on the other end of those pointed fingers and inside the stories of deprivation and pain.
So I ask you again. Does the child in the cage wish for darkness or the light? Within which cage should she remain? How would you fight back, or would you stand aside?
Have you made your decision?
