"The Nobodies" by Eduardo Galeano

"Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them - will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.

Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them. "

- Eduardo Galeano

So much is contained in those lines, that I'm already exceeding my bandwidth; hence, I'm not really going to add any insight of my own. One thing that did come to mind by the end of the poem, though, was Joseph Stalin's astute observation that "When one dies, it's a tragedy. When a million die, it's a statistic".

The nobodies may not all be dying. The sad truth is, though, that for the amount of attention we pay them, they might as well be.