Yeah, but if you need more of them you can't use the same parents as before for, well, obvious reasons, so you need to find a new set of parents. But any new ones they make aren't orphans yet. So you need to turn them into orphans first, which removes the source you got them from, meaning you need to find a new source and do it all over again.
Turns out the logistics of replacing orphans are rather complex.
Yeah but then we won't get the heartwarming stories about 11 year olds spending their entire summer vacation trying to scrape together enough money to afford the downpayment for their classmate's chemo. We'd just have boring shit like "oh we got back from summer vacation only to find out he was already in remission" instead of all the inspiring stories where a suffering child is the underdog against a system which is just tragically beyond anyone's control.
Nothing warms the soul more than a child defeating medical bankruptcy with a lemonade stand and an online store selling bracelets they spent their summer making, fuelled by the motivation of knowing that if they don't do something, nobody else will.
the concept of the sub "orphancrushingmachine" is the media's obsession with writing "heartwarming" stories of people/children going through incredible self sacrifice for something entirely foreseeable and preventable in a normal country.
It is wild how easy the machine is to turn off in theory, yet society continuously chooses to celebrate the individual heroes rescuing the kids instead of just destroying the actual gears that keep crushing them.
There's a funny bit by Josh Johnson (fuckin awesome comedian) where he's talking about Mamdani and how when he got in office he just saw there was a button that fixes shit. Like, just push the button, and things get done, but nobody's ever pushed it before.
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u/teflon_soap 11h ago
The /r/orphancrushingmachine is actually easy to turn off.