When I was a little girl, my Mother had compiled VHS tapes of many different Christmas shows. One of them was the cartoon "The Matchstick Girl." If ever a show changed the way I viewed the world, it was this show.
For those of you who do not know this cartoon, it is about a little girl whose parents live in a subway. Every day they send her out into the street to sell matchsticks from her little chipped coffee mug. One night it is very cold, and she has yet to sell any matchsticks. She stays out late and goes on a wonderful adventure where she is warm and is given much food. In the end, it turns out it was a dream for her body is the last scene of the show. It is the morning, and she is surrounded by people looking at her. She is laying spread eagle in the snow, her young body never to take breath again. The same people who passed by her in a rush just the last day now look upon her little body in horror and self-contempt.
I remember when I was so young I wanted to go into that show and buy all of the little girl's matchsticks. It was the beginning of my disillusionment of the way the world is. It continued a few years later when I read "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." It continues today as I see it in the streets. How the comfortable ignore these wretched persons, how they feel revolted by them. They are not given a second thought.
I watched a thin lady in Newark New Jersey desperatly try to sell bouquets of flowers in the chilly night on neferious streets. She did not have a stand nor storefront. Just a rugged bucket and a gnarled hand to display the flowers. I would have bought them. I would have bought the lot. It was late at night, and the traffic was dying down, yet still she almost frantically pushed the bouquets up to every passing car window. Her bucket was too full.
The dirty man in Mexico with the stereo round his neck sang. He was so off-key. A scratched pink cup, like the old tupperware kind one could find in an attic, was placed on the ground. No one threw anything into it. I joked with my friends that he might make more if he stopped singing. It wasn't funny, but we laughed our uncomfortableness away.
You hear stories of our own older generation of Americans, old women and men who have seen and heard the stories of the decades, you hear of their suffering. Splitting medicine pills in ha;ves or quarters in order to last longer, eating catfood because other foodstuffs are too expesive. They wait in earnest for their social security check, and huddle in their blankets against the cold nights that cannot be chased away by the lowered thermostat. How could our grandmothers, mothers, aunts and neighbors be these women? These once proud belles of the land, tossing their glossy ringlets in flirtatious dances, casting sons and husbands to their deaths in wars we only vaguely honor, how can they have become these women? They have, as we will one day.
A child mocked in school because his clothers are poor. He is scrawny and not cool. Though they might have the whole kingdom of God to play in, they are poor. Though the very mountains are their playground they are named poor. Every lake their private swimming pool, every tree a special treehouse. They are free of the bounds of Nike and Reebok, yet it is not respected.
There is no more breathing free for these huddled masses. Though they may yearn, the tired and the poor are no longer welcome. Bring them and they will be cast aside. They will be shunned, these untouchables. Called irresponsible or worse. What a world we live in.
There are many matchstick girls out in the world, even here in our America. They become matchstick women, then the matchstick old. Whether they sell matchsticks, flowers, or their own bodies I will say that there is more honor in THAT, than in selling your soul.
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