minerva-bamf-mcgonagall:

Taken from Cracked.com’s “6 Images of Kids Too Insane to Be Real (That Totally Are)”:

“The photographer has this child tagged as a ‘street boy.’ That’s not a generic descriptor. In Sao Paulo ‘street child’ refers to a specific type of young homeless in the city. There are thousands, if not millions of them in Brazil, and they’re largely considered pests. Roughly 20% of police homicides in Sao Paulo are minors. In fact, the street children are so reviled that local shopkeepers and low-level politicians actually put out bounties on their heads to the tune of about $50 per kid. As a result, masked death squads rove the streets of Sao Paulo at night, eliminating children.

And while that knowledge is incredibly awful, and gut-churning, and heart-dropping, and just makes you want to burn this whole miserable species to the ground and hope that nature knows enough to start from scratch this time, it also drastically magnifies the importance of this image.

This is not the same as a white, English-speaking child playing at revolutionary because he’s got the implied protection of society. This boy is not joking, and he is not safe. If he’s really a ‘street child,’ then those cops he’s challenging are the men that make half a week’s pay for murdering him, and would face no reprisal for it. And if he really is a ‘street child,’ then he is utterly alone up there: They’re so widely despised that it’s unlikely any of the other people in those photos have a vested interest in whether he lives or dies.

And he simply does.

Not.

Care.

Because there is nothing on this earth - not overwhelming odds, nor brutal police states, nor fear, nor violence, nor the kind of horrible, devouring apathy that makes things like the Sao Paulo death squads possible - that will ever, from now until the heat death of this whole screwed universe, force this kid to sit down and put his fucking shirt back on.”

I just read this and was about to put it into a post, woah

(Source: iamthepizzaslut)