Walmart, midnight. The weather outside doesn’t really matter since, as we all know Walmart's internal temperatures of any given Walmart Is always perfect. People should go on vacations to Walmart instead of Florida: less Zika, more jumbo sized Pop-Tarts. Anyway, Walmart, checking out, came to get a few bags of something, candy or whatever, unimportant. Head over to the restroom to get a drink of water from the water fountains. Look up, notice a wall of missing children, ages and ethnicities vary but all of them are on a wall by the restrooms, somewhat in view but not very noticeable if you didn’t go over there to look at it. Then it hits me, why here? Why in this corner of the store? Why not, everywhere?
In 2013, ABC news reported that, around eight hundred thousand children go missing each year. That’s two thousand per day. Can you imagine two thousand children? Many public high schools have somewhere around that number of children in enrollment. Could you imagine if an entire public High school worth of children up and disappeared? Could you imagine the devastation that would cause to the family and friends of just one of those children? Now imagine two thousand of them!
You would think that the yearly total of missing children would at least warrant some sort of coverage on the nightly news, a reminder of some sort that there are near 1 million children missing in any given year. Rather than on the bathroom wall of one Walmart and maybe on a billboard every now and then, not to say that Walmart doesn’t help, but rather that every shopping center should be plastered with the names and faces of children who are missing.
For what does that say about us as a Free, Democratic, and Western society? That we allow this number of children to go missing a year? And that we would rather not have a populace of people who are actively looking to change this statistic. The implications surrounding the lack of publication of missing children literature is very serious and very telling. On an evolutionary level, animals that do not shelter their young from predators don’t have a very good chance of continuing along the lines of their species.
Politicians like to talk a lot about what they’re ‘doing for the children’. But, if the numbers remain the same than it is clear that all the elected officials who flaunt their policies as bettering the lives of children are really no better than the ones who came before. The constituency for which such politicians seek to garner votes from would do well to investigate the number of missing children and weigh that against the politicians claim for making things better for the lives of children.
The number of missing children in the United States is almost unfathomable for a society that prides itself on its strong morals. What’s more than that, the visage of a few names on the wall of a bathroom in a super center does not count as enough press for these children. To consider ourselves a more moral, more western society, we should address the issues of our lost children. If there were more coverage, if there were more reminders, than there is sure to be more action. The issue appeared nowhere on my spectrum of importance until I encountered it that one midnight. Now imagine if every day there were coverage, and every day we were reminded, how many more children would be found? How much less heartache would their be? How would we as a society, as Americans, find ourselves?
