THE WAR on poverty now appears to be a forgotten war. We have been waging war against it, but the problem is that numbers do not lie. In fact, one does not have to look for government statistics. One only needs to do a short walk around the city in order to find the ubiquitous presence of impoverished children. The harrowing tragedy that is human poverty does not only diminish the value of life; it also bespeaks the unequivocal reality of systemic abuse in which human beings are ultimately exploited and reduced to powerless artifacts.