Two Children, Two Different Lives

Picture: Princess Mary of Denmark and daughter. (Source: Jan Sommer, "Ekstra Bladet".)

The major news in Denmark for the past few days has been the birth of Crown Prince Frederick and Princess Mary's second child, a little girl.

Don't bother trying to switch TV or radio channels or buying a newspaper as that's basically all they seem to cover. To make matters doubly worse, Mary is a "commoner" from Australia, so we've had to listen to how the Aussie media have reported this. Danish TV has also been busy bothering ex-pat Australians for their sage comments. (Australians are enamoured with their Danish Princess).

Normally I wouldn't bother commenatating on such mind numbingly unimportant news. Men and women make babies all the time after all, a fact that even the Danish tabloid press must have picked up at some time.

There was a comment on a news programme that really irritated me. The reporter remarked, without any pause or embarrassment, that the Royals' new born will live a vastly different life to that of the other children born on the same day, at that same hospital.

This is in fact true. Those other children - I believe the figure was 12 - will not live lives of luxury, where every care and whim will be satiated. Their future will be badly underfunded schools that exist to churn out compliant wage slaves to meet the demands of business. Their futures will be stressing over mortgages or the electricity bill; of finding the money to make the household budget go around, perhaps even being in the harsh situation of standing in an unemployment line. Their future will be uncertain if they get ill with the health cuts and waiting lists and with the deterioating pensions.

But why stop at those 12, that day, in a nook of Denmark. On that day, other children were born, in say Africa. We shall never hear of these children. There will be no mass media presence at their birth. One of those children I shall call +1.

+1 doesn't have access to clean drinking water. +1 was lucky to be born at all given the high mortality rate there due to lack of proper midwife care. +1 will not live to be 5. Starvation or sickness caused by malnutrition will kill +1.

We shall only know +1 as another individual added to the statistics over needless deaths which our world could avoid were production geared solely to meet human need rather than production for the market with a view to making profit for all the parasites of the world: the capitalists and princes and ponces.
Congratulations to Frederick and Mary for sure; it is thrilling to be a parent. It is sickening though that one life is deemed more worthy of celebration than others.

Gray