'But ask yourself this, friends: who sacrificed *your* children?'

[dolorosa_12]

I am not generally someone who finds flashy public displays of individual charity (or charity by a business) to be laudable — my opinion is that if charity is necessary, it's a sign that a government has failed in its responsibility. Failing to prevent children from going hungry to me demonstrates that a government in a comparably wealthy country has utterly failed in its most basic responsibilities.

It is not the job of a young footballer to essentially shame businesses and local councils into stepping in and providing the free meals for children that this shameless government refuses to provide — I find Marcus Rashford's campaign extremely admirable, but the fact that he needs to do such a thing is a sign of the government's moral failure, rather than being uplifting or inspiring.

That being said, Rashford's Twitter feed (MarcusRashford) is making my heart overflow with emotion today.

(Title quote comes from a moment which is probably in my top ten favourite fictional scenes ever, in Philip Pullman's The Tiger in the Well, when my favourite fictional socialist revolutionary Dan Goldberg manages to talk down a violent mob by appealling to their sense of logic and justice. Leaving aside whether such acts of persuasion are anything other than wishful thinking, I most certainly agree with the sentiment that children should never be acceptable collateral damage of decisions made by the privileged and powerful.)

Comments

[lirazel]

now that Rashford has inspired/shamed struggling pubs, restaurants and local councils to foot the bill, the government has wriggled out of needing to do a thing to alleviate child poverty without suffering any more than an angry telling off on Twitter.

That is truly terrible. But it does seem impossible to shame y'all's government or ours right now, doesn't it?