Orphans

You have the Welfare State.
In my day we looked after each other. We had the village and the family.
Sometimes we would go to see the monks or the nuns who lived a few miles away down in the valley, but, for the most part, we simply helped each other.
It is a very strange idea,  this one that you have, that the robber barons and their servants should arrange for your welfare.
But they have left you with no land to live on, so what choice do they have?
They have not left you with the means to look after yourself.
The whole world is a pauper.
If you are on hard times you don’t turn to your family, but to the bureaucrat.
He will give you the money.
All day long your children are taken from you, to be ‘educated’ by bureaucrats. They are not allowed to stay with their parents, to learn the jobs that need to be learnt.
They are cooped up in day prisons, and hardly ever go ‘out’ to play.
When do you see children roaming the fields and dreaming in the woods?
If you are ill you go to see a medical bureaucrat. Nobody knows how to use the herbs anymore.
There are few herbs in the fields and the woods these days.
If you cannot cure each other or educate your young, what is the point of a family or a village?
Your neighbours are strangers who sleep and watch in the same street.
What can you say to people whose lives have nothing to do with your own?
Who is there to serve?
Who is there to receive from?
What does being human consist of for the orphans of the twenty-first century?
The search for individual happiness? A selection of tastes, a variety of consumer prejudices?