Children and non-children

The other day, at the entrance of Felicizia, I heard a very sweet little girl say to her friends: “Don’t talk to her.” She was speaking about another very kind little girl who had done her no harm at all: perhaps we are all, in some way, naturally envious of other people’s happiness, ready to pull out our thorns to attack, thinking that we are only defending ourselves. And we may even have a thousand reasons to feel this way: the pain that runs through our lives without any fault of our own, the scarcity in which we find ourselves living compared with the abundance we see around us, the complete mismatch between who we feel we are and the light we wish to shine with, the alliance with someone we feel we must protect.

The Greek philosopher Eubulides of Miletus played with grains of sand, wondering when a heap would cease to be a heap, imagining removing grain after grain from the pile before him. We might ask ourselves in the same way: when does another person’s life concern mine? On what basis does someone earn the right to become a person worthy of my concern and my help when they are living in loneliness and deprivation? Sand points toward infinity, while our lives are made of limits. We would like to give everything to everyone, to be generous dispensers of well-being and happiness, but the limitations we are made of force us at every moment into decisions and choices that may seem like cruelty and selfishness to those who have even less than we do.

The number of beds in a house, the amount of food on a table, the money in our pockets, the toys in a room: in our hands everything is finite; there is enough for someone, but—except in very fortunate circumstances—never for everyone, even though we live on a planet where there would be enough for every person. There are degraded areas of cities where the eviction of shacks made of cardboard, belongings and rubbish is claimed as an act of justice and civilization: whoever lived there before is invisible, the only thing that matters is that the new old abandoned factory where they will live is far from here. What George Orwell would have called a “non-person,” even though they are still fully alive, only needs to be handed a sheet of paper saying they must leave my land.

Some believe it is right to decide whether a child may receive help, have rights, or continue living in a nation based on where they were born and where their parents were born, the God they believe in, the color of their skin, or the language they speak, because in the limitation of resources and opportunities, what is wrong with putting first those who belong to my loving family, my identical community, my own nation, my chosen people? These are explicitly discriminatory feelings and arguments, but they also reveal the exhaustion, fear, and resignation caused by a model of hospitality, citizenship, and coexistence that does not work and that no one is thinking about how to change.

Because truly helping a person is far more complex than adding one more place at the table or putting a roof over someone’s head. Since we have no grains of sand to count, at Felicizia, in order to learn how to walk together on the road of friendship and send hatred away from our hearts, we play at tying our shoes to one another. If people do not get along, they may fall; the fast must slow down, the brave must help the fearful: by staying close, you can feel the heartbeat of the person beside you, forced to walk at the same pace as the one you wished, at least for one morning, could be for everyone a “non-child.” In friendship, the one who goes faster does not win; being first or last means nothing—we all win only if we arrive together.

Marco Grossetti
NP February 2026