This photo of an injured child from a bombing in a Middle Eastern city has been haunting me. It is not quite as painful as the famous Viet Nam war photo of the naked little girl who had been burned with napalm -- but is there any comparison when children are badly hurt by war? Surely it must make readers of the NYTimes stop and think about the victims of this horror about which we read nearly every day. Here is a small child -- looking utterly numb, time has stopped for him, he may not know how he got to sit on the orange chair. We cannot imagine either. He was doing something normal, probably with a trusted adult when there was a noise ... a noise that stopped time and then.... we don't know. We hope he will forget ... probably he will forget but his life has been changed forever. Possibly his mind has been changed forever.
We sitting in our comfortable chairs reading the newspaper or looking at the computer cannot imagine what has happened to him... we don't want to. He is half the world away ... but we see children his size, his age around us and we cannot begin to imagine what it would be like if a bomb went off just then ... This happens too, too often in too, too many places in the world, every day.
2 comments:
June -- Children are the innocents yet they are exposed to these wars. So sad for this child and the world that we continue to fight battles. I always wonder what good do any of these wars do except to teach us how to destroy. -- barbara
It's ironic that the rhetoric of war is so often that it is to bring about peace -- yet it seems no war has every truly resulted in peace.
Actually I have been reading some rather ancient history, Roman, Japanese, Southeast Asian and find that in some places peace seems to have been effected for several centuries, but the circumstances were unique as was the social structure.
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