No one can say we don’t live in interesting times. But amidst the tumult and frenzy of domestic politics and global events one thing is for certain: the age of passivity is unquestionably over. The age of watching it all unfold on a TV screen or in between the pages of a newspaper, perhaps glancing and not taking it in; perhaps frowning and saying ‘someone should really do something about that’; perhaps noticing, caring, but feeling numbed by impotence and filled with anxiety (‘but what can I do?’), that age, is over.
In each bulletin of breaking news, in each press conference, sound-bite notification on your Facebook feed, and now, even, in each tweet, the gears of history are being turned.
You must pick a side, become active, do something, or else face the key question of the coming years and decades, from neighbours, friends, children and grandchildren: ‘what did you do when it all went to hell? When democratic institutions were sold out; when, under the cover of a dream of equality and plenty for all, massive stockpiles of wealth were horded by a few while billions went hungry and sick; when people, ordinary people like you and me, running from bombs, bullets and slaughter, drowned in the Mediterranean, struggled desperately in a ragged camp in Calais, or lived daily under the harsh, unwelcoming glare of a resentful population? What did you do?’
Each of us will have to answer this question, even if we have yet to fully grasp the magnitude of current events, the grand and epic scale of the human tragedy that is unfolding before us. I find myself asking it in the middle of the night, and whenever I catch myself in a carefree and comfortable moment. I’ve asked it so many times, but recently the way that I ask it has changed.
Just a few years ago I became a parent, and one of the things I wasn’t ready for about parenthood was the way it makes your body physically ache to hold your child; the way your body becomes child-attuned; the way your arms feel like they are only right, only fulfilled in their true purpose, when you have them curled around that tiny body, holding it close and nourishing it with love and care. My temperament is more cerebral than physical, so this somatic intelligence felt strange and surprising.
But if that took me by surprise, then I really wasn’t ready to discover that the feeling is not exclusive. I would see a child fall in the street and want desperately to pick them up, I would hear a child cry in a café or supermarket and my heart would clench.
And then I saw the picture of Aylan Kurdi, face down and drowned on a Turkish beach. It hit my body before it hit my mind or even my heart. I hated it yet needed to look at it, not entirely capable of discerning the difference between this toddler and my own, such that his death was news but hers would be a world-stopping tragedy. All I wanted to do was pick him up and hold him. I would look at that picture and my arms would throb with the hopeless need to pull him close and somehow look after him.
After Aylan, I lost the capacity to use the passive gaze, the TV gaze, the newspaper gaze. Pictures of dust covered and bloodied children being pulled from the rubble of Syria, or carried limply by parents after some atrocious drone attack, pulled at me as if they had claws. I wanted to do something, anything, to help these children. It daily stuns me that we can, passively, comfortably, let such brutality befall children anywhere, for whatever reason.
This isn’t political, it’s parental: I don’t believe that, in our supposed civilization as Europeans, Westerners or human beings, we should be allowing children to be terrorised, brutalised and murdered. And, as we not only allow it to happen but actually profit from the arms sales and conflicts that make it happen, I don’t believe we should be ignoring the human waves of desperation that such conflicts generate and send crashing against our borders.
As Warsan Shire puts it, in a poem that has become a rallying call for refugees and those that would see them treated as human beings : ‘No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark’ and ‘no one puts their children in a boat/unless the water is safer than the land’. These are not pictures, statistics or issues, they are people and no less human and no less feeling and no less deserving of refuge and safety than you or I.
So I cannot ignore these people, these parents and children, because I desperately hope that if I were in their situation my desperation would not be ignored. The age of passivity and comfort are over. How many time will we let our leaders fail us before we stop needing them to lead? We must all feel the call to do something, to be active and to work a little with discomfort if humanity, and certainly human decency, is to have any hope at all.