Did we do something when we should not have? Did we do nothing when we should have?
Commentary
Anyway you slice it, this world is the result of its dominant species, at once both awesome and awful.
Immersing myself in media the past few days, I generated enough notes for three or four columns. Love, hate, reason, superstition — all well-represented.
Then I saw the photo of that grieving mother. We have made so many of those in our short span on this orb and they all lead to the same damned and damnable place.
When, oh when, will we ever learn?
As the world plunges into the cauldron of World War Three, I hope and pray that all the sorrows of today represent an apex of the evil men do. (And it’s always men, greedy, power-drunk, reptilian macho caudillos.)
The single photograph which told the story of the Vietnam fiasco was the famous shot of a naked little Vietnamese girl, crying and screaming, running down a road among other peasants. Much of her skin had been burned off after a mass U.S. napalm bombing. She miraculously survived and became an anti-war activist all her life.
You can find the latest candidate for the Gaza War’s snapshot in everlasting infamy at nytimes.com/
Reporter Nicholas Kristof, the Tiananmen Square Pulitzer Prize co-winner (with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, the first married couple ever to do so) gave most of his Sunday column to THE PHOTO. (Linked to the web edition of this Barbwire at NevadaLabor.com/)
I teared up the moment I viewed it. I wept as I read Kristof’s description. I had a hard time reciting the text to a friend by phone.
And I’m having a slog writing this.
Kristoff got THE PHOTO from a longtime American surgeon friend, Dr. Sam Attar of the Northwestern University med school. He’s one of legions of candidates for sainthood who have risked the last full measure of devotion for victims of this monster mannunkind’s perpetual wars.
At a northern Gaza hospital, “he was preparing to go into the operating room one day when a woman called him over and asked him to photograph her young son, Karam, in his bed in the ICU. Sam went over and only then realized that the boy was dead,” Kristof reported.
“Every time staff wanted to cover him fully with a blanket, she would flip it back and say ‘No!’ and she would start talking to him, asking him where he went.”
(If you need to take a break now, so do I.)
Kristof continued “The nurses and other doctors who were in the ICU that day said that Karam died of complications from malnutrition. The United Nations confirms that Gazan children have starved to death.
“The nurses wanted to remove Karam’s body after he died an hour earlier but his mother wouldn’t allow it. In her grief, she told Sam that Karam was a prince and she wanted Sam to share the boy’s photo. Perhaps she thought this was a way of commemorating her son,” Kristoff noted.
“I’ve criticized the way Israel has conducted the war in Gaza and President Biden’s strong support for it, for a child is killed or injured every 10 minutes, according to the United Nations…This photo captures a preventable tragedy,” Kristof wrote.
“As I argue that it’s time to end this war, I think this photo has a persuasive power greater than my words…As we discuss Gaza, let’s keep in mind that the war unfolds through lives like Karam’s…(THE PHOTO is) a reminder to us all of what’s at stake,” Kristof concluded.
THE PHOTO is an elevated shot of an ER bed you’ve seen a jillion times on TV. A moveable curtain scrunched to one side, a black lifesigns monitor on the other. Karam lies small, half-covered with a red blanket, head to his left, looking thru eyes that cannot see to see, toward his black-robed mother. She grasps his hand as she kisses it.
I have foolishly and inexpertly asserted for decades that any war can be avoided if its seeds are smothered early.
You know, “peace on earth to men of good will” and all that pious nonsense, right?
Will this be the third and final world war? And will some of us be around for a new, permanent age of enlightenment when the better angels of our nature have finally prevailed?
Hope springs eternal, but wellsprings can run dry when all available water has been used for tears.
When will we ever learn?
HOW’D WE GET HERE? Read “Who Will Answer?”, the Barbwire of November 22, 2023 (JFK 60), at NevadaLabor.com/
“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” — Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973)
Vaxx up, stay safe, pray for Ukraine and almost 100 other currently war-torn lands.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbáno is a 55-year Nevadan, editor of NevadaLabor.com and a member of the César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us
Leave a Reply