Once Again, Lost Boys and Child Soldiers

This issue of child soldiers keep popping up everywhere I look. This morning, while flipping through an old issue of Time Magazine, I ran across this article: "Pop Culture Finds Lost Boys".

In fact, the point of the article is that these child soldier and "lost boys" from Africa are showing up all over the place in pop culture. The article discusses Ishmael Bay's book that I mentioned yesterday and also points out that child soldiers are being featured in a whole host of recent movies.

One of the interesting questions raised by this article is whether or not this media saturation will really raise the profile of this problem or simply trivialize it as another plot element. The last paragraph sums it up well. You should read the rest of the article too.

Now that the celebrity-entertainment complex has its huge eyeball trained on the issue of child soldiers, the danger is that they will become trivialized--cheap, ubiquitous images, dropped in like clip art for a hit of emotion and danger. But with a memoir as vivid as Beah's, the clear-eyed tale of a child determinedly pursuing his own humanity against all odds, the spotlight may yet produce more than just titillation.