So much changes, so much stays the same.

Teen pregnancy breaks my heart. Yesterday, I saw a pretty extreme case of teen pregnancy which just screamed WRONG in every angle that you looked at it [don't ask me for more details... pt confidentiality and all...]. What bothred me the most, though, was that the girl was someone for whom mountains had already been moved to ensure that her life would be brilliant. She was a poor girl from the ghetto who, thru pure luck and circumstance, met a very kind, very priveledged, future Yale Medical Student when she was six years old [the girl, not YMS]. YMS had, at that time, taken Girl under her wings and mentored her to the extreme for the following TEN years -- single handedly made a national champion track and field athlete out of this girl. Girl went on to meet lots of famous people and was exposed to the elitist world of academia which the poor in this town are generally excluded from. Girl's mom got weirded out by YMS, kicked YMS out of Girl's life and, lo!, two years later, Girl gets impregnated by a kid in middle school.

I mean...... seriously. There are several issues here:

[1] What business do people of priveledge have in helping the underpriveldged out of dire straits? Intuitively, I've always sensed a moral imperative that justifies such actions and, in fact, one that deems such actions as absolutely neccessary. In whatever way or form you can, it is important to help the poor help themselves. .... but are their limits?

[2] Failure. Is this girl a failure? At first, glance, I thought YES. Now her mother has another mouth to feed. Now she will have a harder time fulfilling her school requirements. Now she will have to start looking for a job or some sort of immediate source of income. So, basically, now, she's f***ked. But that's an erroneous way of looking at it. Yes, she's a failure by the standards that I set for myself --- but it is unfair of me to impose those same standards to form judgements. In her community, in her small part of the world, having a baby is the thing to do. You're a teeneager, you have a baby. And the cycle [of poverty] continues.