Just One Drowned Child

I simply can’t find the ‘right’ words to write about the tiny child’s body washed up on a beach.

The tears in my eyes seem almost an empty insult to the vision.

In my imagination I see that the whole world right now is feeling bereft, but I know that is fantasy. While there are plenty of comments and an extraordinary amount of  sympathy and horror towards the reason that we have been forced to face such a graphic and upsetting image, it is not, I suspect, the ‘turning point’ in any politician’s attitude – nor will it change the attitude of any war-mongering seeker of power.

We, in the west, do not have a clean conscience. It is ‘our’ readiness to ‘go to war’; the readiness to (so eagerly) show might and power and the readiness to drop bombs and obliterate anything – and anyone – in the path of this obscene mission that has caused the world to divide. The result is not world peace BUT this excruciatingly sad image of the drowned child.

In Australia refugees are treated like vermin and the majority of people still think that we have to ‘stop the boats’. Sadly many people are more interested in the doings of the vacuous Kardashians than they are interested in understanding about atrocities being perpetrated throughout OUR world.

Yes, it is OUR world and darling little three-year-old Aylan was one of OUR children as much as he was a little Syrian.

 

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