War Is Messy, It's Just the Way It Is
In every corner of the world, every minute of every day, a child is harmed.
Lately I’ve been feeling a familiar sense of helplessness when I read the news. The other day, after a conversation about the war and the children caught in it, I suddenly remembered a line I first heard as a teenager.
“Children? You mean someone is killing children? Go!”
It’s from Karel Čapek’s play Mother.
Dolores, a woman who has lost her husband and four sons to war, finally relents and allows her only remaining son to enlist — to protect the most vulnerable.
Someone is killing children.
In every corner of the world, every minute of every day, a child is harmed at the hand of one of us grown-up mothers and fathers.
Yesterday it was a school.
Last week it was a neighborhood street.
Tomorrow it will be somewhere else.
So where do I go? What should I do?
Some time ago, I posted a photograph of a small boy lying face down in the sand.A friend warned me: “Be careful. If you post a picture of a dead foreign child, you should post a photo of a dead child of your people as well.”
I must balance an image of a victim from the Other clan with an image of my clan.
Otherwise, I could be seen as the enemy of my people.
To post an image of a child’s lifeless body is not enough.
It could be misleading.
I might be leaving out the justification for the murder of that particular child.
I might be withholding the perfectly logical, explicable reason for his death.
I might be omitting the story of the violent actions of members of the Other Clan which incited his murder.
War is messy.
It’s a mess, I’m told, one that inevitably involves the death of children.
That’s just the way it is.
But what if we viewed all the photographs of the dead as images in our family album — a family in which the mothers and fathers are failing to protect the children they claim to cherish more than anything in the world?
What if there really is no Other? What if it’s just us? Which direction do we aim the missiles then?
What story about “the Other” are we willing to believe?
And what would change — if we refused that story?
What if history isn’t asking us to choose a side? What if it’s asking us to become the the adults, the parents we claim to be?
Would our capacity to mourn protect us from collapsing into silence and passivity?
How about you, friends? I’d love to hear what this brings up for you.
What helps you stay human in a world that sometimes feels unbearably harsh?