What world shall you leave for me, said the face to the stranger.
Well, Fahim,
This picture is a fine challenge to us. We need being reminded of our heavy feet!
She may be far better off than one might think. This girl is already cared for by people that value her life now and her future. I have a sense that they know how to make things from nature and their people have not been distanced from animals and plants on which they depend. Likely as not, she does not need our inheritance and largesse for her future. Rather she must not have her world destroyed by invasions, wars and kidnapping. I have far more hope for her than many other children growing up in the inner city of Los Angeles or the slums of Mexico or Cairo.
The title really expresses your own concern and conscience. After all, you, a few others here and I have likely seen far greater a spread of privilege and hardship than most. So we are ourselves burdened by the very fact of our own success and cannot help feeling discomfort at the sight of children with no obvious path out of poverty.
Still, looking around, I do not believe that children here in our "advanced societies" are really better off than village kids in rural Nigeria, where tribal values and kinship are respected and important. Of course our offspring will end up, likely as not, driving fine cars and consuming more fuel and buying more goods from Asia. But what inheritance is that?
Ultimately, the inheritance kids
need is respect, nurturing by strangers, love, a future job, self-worth and security, not material things. Putting aside, for the moment smog and polluted rivers, China has done miracles in the economic sphere but at a cost of carving the compassion out of city folks. 20 people pass a child run over twice by vehicles and do not lift a finger to help her! That is the greatest damning finger against her so called "progress" or "Great Leap forward". No child would be left for a moment in a road in Tel Aviv, Riyadh, Athens or Rome. Why? Because the values of compassion are still part of the essential fabric of these disparate societies. When communism excises that, as in the Cultural Revolution in China or the Khmir Rouge in Cambodia, we become worse than barbaric apes.
So, it turns out, that the greatest inheritance for this child are the values, skills, resources and traditions of her community, not our own! We have to be very careful before we try to "help", educate or convert others, when we ourselves are walking in bubbles of delusion, arrogance and narcissism.
As I think you imply, Fahim, we, the great consumers, so educated and knowledgable, are also culpable in potentially poisoning the waters of the planet by our consumerism high maintenance lifestyles so disconnected the fragility of animal and plant life that we impact.
Asher