Boy on beach... (NYTIMES)
The first disturbing photo shows a small boy. He is wearing a red T-shirt and long shorts that stop below the knee. His shirt is hiked above his waist, exposing his midriff. He is wearing black sneakers with no socks. And he is dead, face down in the rocky surf.
Why this boy?
It feels like an obscene question to ask of the photographs of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian Kurdish child whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey yesterday morning, images that have since appeared on the front pages of the major American and European newspapers and flooded Twitter with video montages andsorrowful memes, the social-media equivalents of the stuffed animals and bouquets that pile up at the sites where children have died in car accidents or shootings.
But as human rights groups have grown hoarse reminding us, nearly 12,000 children havereportedly been killed so far as a result of the Syrian civil war. Nearly 2 million more are living as refugees, according to Unicef. Both theIslamic State and its enemies have enlisted child soldiers in their causes. It’s not just the numbing statistics that are familiar. The Internet is full of images of dead Syrian children, and it’s hard to imagine that the people who were transfixed by Aylan on Facebook yesterday had not seen at least some of them. Why this picture? Why not all the others?
For me, it was the shoes. Aylan appeared in my Twitter feed early yesterday afternoon, and I spent the rest of the day wrecked by his image. More than once I found myself staring out the window, thinking about the boy on the beach. I have a young son, a couple of years younger than Aylan but close enough to him in size that every detail of the photo — down to the angle of repose that, as more than one artist noticed, so precisely echoes that of an exhausted child asleep in his crib — was terribly familiar.
Last weekend, I was at the neighborhood playground trying to wrestle my son’s feet into a pair of shoes — his first — that he was more inclined to chew on than to wear. Which was fine, really. He doesn’t walk yet, not quite; he mostly just shimmies along the edges of furniture like a fisherman trying to negotiate the rail in a storm. After a few minutes, I gave up. Forget it, I thought, as he cheerfully kicked the shoes off into the weeds under the park bench. He has the rest of his life to wear those things. He’ll have all the time in the world.
If you have spent a Saturday morning like this, then this is what you see when you look at the boy on the beach: Aylan’s mother (Rehan, who drowned with him, as did Aylan’s older brother, Galip) or father (Abdullah, who survived), pulling the Velcro straps tight, in anticipation of a voyage they can fathom and the boy cannot. There are many things separating your life from theirs, of course. But from another angle — the vantage of the still-new parent, who has recently learned to view the entire world through the lens of the myriad risks it poses to a child — all that really separates you are a few strokes of misfortune. On Wednesday morning, someone like you was helping Aylan put on his shoe......
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