The Sheltering Sty
by Jim Washburn
Remember the Catacombs, where early Christians lived underground in Rome to avoid persecution? If so, you're pretty damn old. Now, Roman police have discovered more than 100 children, aged 10 to 15, living in the city's ancient sewers. Most are immigrants with no knowledge of Italian; many are Muslim, with 24 of them from Afghanistan.
The latter is an increasingly popular place to get the hell away from. This past week, an abandoned metal shipping container was found along a roadside in Pakistan, with over 200 Afghan immigrants in it, scores of them dead from lack of oxygen and dehydration. The surge is working! (Sorry to be so glib, but it bears frequent reminding when "experts" say the surge worked in Iraq that it didn't so much work as it did coincide with other transformative events, such as the Awakening movement and some 2 million persons hauling ass out of the country.)
The children in Rome are thought to have mainly arrived by truck. Authorities discovered them after receiving reports of filthy children hanging out around the cities main train stations.
Though American conservatives still like to rail against "socialist" Europe's cradle-to-grave coddling of its citizens, their vaunted social systems have been strained in recent years by economic downturns and an influx of immigrants from some of the world's poorest places. Italy in particular has seen things slide under right-wing autocrat Silvio Berlusconi, who seems intent on expediting the time between cradle and grave for his citizens. Italy has also become an increasingly xenophobic society, where some ramshackle immigrant communities have been torched by "real Italians."
Rome is practically where modern sanitation began, some 800 years BC. I wonder what the civic planners of that time would think if they heard that, nearly 3,000 years of human history later, civilization has gone so askew that children are now living in sewers.
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