Thursday 3 September 2015

The day the war began

Young boy washed up on the beach.
Photograph: Reuters

With the photo of a little boy dead on a beach, Canadians saw the real cost of the war in Syria today.

The news this morning did not draw our attention to the latest images of the atrocities of ISIS. Those fanatics in black devising ever more venal and gruesome killings to smear across the internet. To be sure, they are monsters to the very last man.

The images weren't of the horrific aftermath of a suicide bomber. The dead, the maimed, the traumatized. Another monster beyond all reason and humanity, intent on inflicting the greatest harm.

Our hearts were not engaged by the before and after photos of temples and monuments of the ancient world reduced to so much rubble. Over 2000 years of history, destroyed by monsters in hours.

No one hugged their child a little tighter after viewing an angry mob of foreign-looking refugees demanding to ride a train. These people are not monsters, but it's easy to imagine them as such.

Today we saw a dead little boy on a beach, washed up like refuse with his dead brother and mother. In the boneless way of youngsters, he looked like he was sleeping. His parents wanted to take them to Canada. Instead, his father is taking them back to Syria for burial.

It is easy to turn away from monsters. It is easy to vilify a people by reducing them to the worst of their people. We don’t just do it abroad, stereotyping and bigotry are alive and well on the home front. It is not so easy to turn away from a dead child. To cast a blind eye to all that hope and promise extinguished.

To that I say, publish all the refugees photos. Show us those suffocated men, women and children in the back of a refrigerated truck. Inundate us with hundreds of bloated bodies on the beaches and the bellies of ships. Go into the refugee camps and take their pictures, write their stories, tell us what they've endured and what they've lost. Rain down on us their suffering and their pain. Above all else, show us their humanity.
 
Do it over and over again and maybe, just maybe, we'll keep seeing real cost of war. 

The war that began today.

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