Are you like me? Caught up in this month’s flurry of media chatter surrounding Apple’s iconic iPhone? On this side of the globe the rave is about AT&T losing its exclusivity as the only carrier of the iPhone, a journey which they boast have served them well according to an account in last week’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile Verizon, already riding high on it’s prestigious platform, expects to rake in an estimated 10 million new users in the United States alone. Quite an upgrade to it’s already established 93 million subscribers according to Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein. The atmosphere is brimming with opportunity and great expectation.
Personally, I dream about replacing my Blackberry Curve with the iPhone. If for no other reason, than just to join the festive throng. I haven’t decided yet though. My husband will need to vett that decision and I think I already know the answer.
I do feel a tinge of sympathy for the smaller players. While the analysts fear that AT&T could lose 1 to 3 million subscribers, consider Sprint and T-Mobile. Are they slated to lose what they do not even have? Sounds like negative territory to me. Roger Enter of Recon Analytics makes a stinging observation,” When Verizon comes out with the iPhone, there’s only one carrier in the U.S. that will gain customers, and that’s Verizon.”
Yet, I am 100 times more impassioned about something else. It’s the thing that keeps me up at night, that sends streams of tears down my cheeks in public as I read Lisa Shannon’s poignant account of her travels to the Congo in her book A Thousand Sisters. There I was, in the waiting room at the Immigration Office in Brooklyn, delighted that I was about to officially become a citizen of the United States but could not resist the urge to turn the pages to learn of yet another baby dying of neglect and malnutrition. Another mother who had been raped. And not just raped, but whose reproductive system had been forever maimed.
Baby Found in the Forest 
And what does one have to do with the other? What does a crying, abandoned baby have to do with the iPhone craze? Well for one thing, the baby in Congo cannot call anyone. Well, I agree. That’s obvious. But what isn’t so obvious is how our appetite for iPhone desecrates the lives of five million souls and counting. In the words of one journalist, we have ‘bloodstains at our fingertips.’
Let us continue the conversation…
