Day 263

Delightful little girl on the shuttle bus in front of me last Saturday.

She was so dear, but I was not impressed with her father, who bit her pigtails and pulled them with his teeth until she cried out, which he repeated several times while we were waiting in the queue for the bus.   He had a pinched face and a scrawny body, and I took an instant dislike to him.  His other daughter was in the arms of her grandfather, his wife's father, and she looked so sad and solemn that her expression led me to think badly of her father.  Perhaps this little thing has enough spirit to survive this man.  I really hope I am wrong about him.

I heard an horrific report on the radio today about sex trafficking in America, and about the big campaign to shut down the adult services department on craigslist.org, which has actually achieved that demand, it has been shut down. Children as young as 11 and 12 (and many others of course) were being bought and sold each day on this site (and I suppose other sites now too).

Apparently the internet has changed the way prostitution works, so that now it is not just women walking the streets, but a client can order someone to be brought to him, just as you would order a book or an item of clothing from an online store.  Which makes it much harder to police, even though it seems as though it has never really been policed properly, mostly a blind eye is turned, on this, the "oldest profession in the world".

A while back Tim and I watched a shattering British movie called London to Brighton, about just such a situation, where an older prostitute (about 24) is ordered by her pimp to take a young runaway girl to an old man and how what ensues thereafter leads to them running for their lives, jumping on a train to Brighton.  Absolutely brilliant and mindbogglingly shocking.

We can thank our lucky stars to have had good parents, to have lived the lives we have lived, because that is all it is, luck.  To be born above or below the railway tracks, is it karma, or just fate?

But even though all these terrible and terrifying things are happening, we still have to get up each morning, we have to live our everyday lives with some measure of happiness, we have to keep the light above and the dark below, ignoring neither.

So here is my symbol for all those girls and women,  finding the door unbolted, the pimps horribly dead, swimming away from the cruelty, away from the suffering, coasting through the blue blue water...
Light and dark, up and down, orange and blue, who are you? 

I ran 2.12 miles (3.41km) in 28 minutes today, hard going, last km easier. (8.12 minutes per km, which is lousy!)