I'll Tell You What's Not Fair

Jack is at the age where he's noticing the lop-sidedness of things -- mainly that his parents get to make more decisions than he does at this point in his life. When we tell him to do something he doesn't want to do (ie., brush teeth, eat veggies, tidy up toys), his latest response is, "It's not fair!"

Poor kid. We haven't consoled him a bit. Matt has seen more of the world than I have, up-close in all its genuine un-fair-ness, but I can't stand to hear my child complain about such piddly things. My unsympathetic response usually goes something like this: "I'll tell you what's not fair: That millions of children around the world don't have access to clean water, and we have as much as we want, every day. We don't have to go anywhere to get it, either -- it's piped right into our house. Now brush your teeth."

I know. It may be a little harsh for a five year-old. But hey, what about all the under 5's out there for whom dirty, disease-infested water (and worse) is a daily reality? Talk about harsh.

As I said, Matt has seen a lot of this kind of thing in his travels. When he gets back from an assignment, one of the things he does is filter through the thousands of images he's taken and identify the best 200. Then he goes through those to find the very best ten or twenty. That's called the top edit -- it's all that most people will ever see.

This morning I was brought to tears by this heart-rending photo essay on Time.com: The Perils of Childbirth in Afghanistan.

I was left wondering about the many pictures that didn't make the edit, about the vast numbers of other Afghan women whose stories haven't been told.

Talk about not fair.