Really, they’re not bandits or robbers–at least not if someone is thinking of that term as purely motivated by selfishness. This band of custom Playmobil toys are one of many attempts to help my kid think about the harm of greed and the honor of redistributing wealth in order to benefit the masses. From the perspective of “the haves,” these people would be thought of as villains, but “el no juzgarnos se les agradece; el beneficio de la duda cualquiera merece.”
I just like that line from the song that gives this group its name, and I wanted to throw it in there. Really, what I mean to say is that these toys help me to teach my son to think about the relationship between economic wealth and poverty–that we really are interconnected–and to imagine as heroes those people who work to overturn gross economic inequality.
Three of these toys are modeled after real people who (sometimes imperfectly) held such noble ideals. The fourth is a fictional character most of us have heard of.
