We are all of us pebbles
The first time I saw a picture of a dead child on the internet was September 2015. I had given birth to my firstborn three weeks prior, had been home from the hospital almost two weeks, and was scrolling Twitter as a way to distract myself during a painful 3am feeding.
There he was, little 2 year old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee who had been escaping with members of his family from Turkey to Europe and was drowned when their boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea. Sure, I had seen children depicted before their deaths and I had seen children shrouded after death. But never something quite so horrific and in real time.
I have seen a lot of violence in the media in my lifetime — both fictitious and real — but nothing shocked me to my core the way that image of little Alan did. And I have seen other dead children since then — from other conflicts both nationally and globally. But that first image, while I held my three week old son in my arms, changed the way I exist in the world in a fundamental way.
Since October 2023, I have seen innumerable dead and dying children, almost daily. Not just children, with horrific images and video footage, real time assassinations, death be wrought on people who are simply trying to live their lives. This TikTok video best illustrates some of what it has been like to be on social media for the last six months:
This video depicts two individuals simultaneously existing in front of their screens (on social media, presumably). On the left side, the person is clearly in a house, with a window in the background and their laptop in front of them. On the right side, the person is clearly in an active warzone. As the video goes on, the reality of privilege becomes clearer as the person on the left is able to turn off the computer (and the violence), go outside, live their life, while the person on the right is living through violence with no escape.
I’m not here to argue the morality of war in general or this genocide in particular (because honestly, many others are already doing that, much better than me.) And I don’t want to distract from the point of my writing here.
I don’t care what your political ideologies might be, your religion, or your place of birth. There is no fathomable reason a child deserves to die.
Let me repeat. There are no circumstances in which a child deserves to die.
That is not even to speak to whether a child deserves a life in a warzone, to witness death and destruction all around them, to scavenge for and hold onto what childhood they have, before their deaths. Only the most morally bankrupt of us would find excuses for such violence and destruction.
It is not lost on me that the countless bodies of children I have borne witness to in the last six months are not white bodies. That the parents in mourning, taking last selfies with their dead infants and children, are dehumanized. That the diaspora and those on the ground in Palestine trying to make the world see them, see the violence being enacted upon them, are delegitimized. That Indigenous and stolen bodies everywhere are seen as less than white, colonizing bodies. That those of us bearing witness to murder, depravity, and unspeakable violence are gaslit and silenced by our governments, mass media, and members of our own communities.
To be clear, to excuse the deaths of thousands of children by trying to show they are “less than” in some way, to dehumanize them, to somehow imply they deserve life less than my children, is wrong. Every single child deserves life. There is no excuse for raining manmade terror on them. Ever.
Every dead child I have witnessed, I mourn. I mourn for the life they never got to live. I mourn for the world that should have been for them. I mourn for the world that failed them. I refuse to become desensitized to the violence, to the horror, to the soul-rending sadness that comes with the death of children.
And the most horrible part of all of this is that it shouldn’t take dead children flooding social media to get people to move. We shouldn’t all just now be waking up from our propaganda induced comas of complicity, realizing the world has always been this way and we just weren’t able to see it. But we’re waking up now and we cannot unsee.
I do not sit back and hope the world will become a better place. I do not wallow in regret for the time before when I didn’t know better and lived aware of the violence around me. I cannot mourn and then go about my day. I cannot feel the cracks in my heart and then not act to correct this violence. I educate myself. I have read books, watched videos, listened to those asking to be heard. I’ve turned to my own platforms — my own voice — and searched for ways to help, to support, to effect change in the world.
I cannot change the whole world. I know this. But that doesn’t mean I can’t look around at my own community — to the people that live, work, and play around me — and try to make a difference.
I can be one pebble that causes ripples, joining all the others in an ocean to form a wave.
It doesn’t feel like enough. I suspect I will never feel like I am doing enough. Tomorrow I will wake up and see more dead children on my social media feed and I will mourn and I will fight to see a world that believes no child deserves to die.
Learn to Liberate https://twitter.com/learntoliberate
Care for Gaza https://twitter.com/CareForGaza (https://www.gofundme.com/f/careforgaza )
The PCRF (Palestine Children’s Relief Fund) https://twitter.com/ThePCRF (https://pcrf1.app.neoncrm.com/forms/donate )
Comprehensive reading & media list from Palestinians: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16hSogPulZskEYNeDQ06VsRxT6XJAwEYsGQCqfrM5hGs/edit?usp=sharing
Learn more about the BDS Movement: https://bdsmovement.net/
