The picture and the thousand words

Aylan Kurdi at Bodrum Beach

It was just a picture to don the morning papers to say what reporters do best. Some of their photographs become international icons of a bygone era. Every living soul would be instantly aware of the American atrocity in Vietnam at one look of the picture of napalm struck confused girl running aimlessly with burnt clothes. This picture the dead toddler by the Turkish beach may one day be the reminder of the danger of stirring of a hornet in the highly volatile region of Middle East. For the perpetrators, the US, it is a European problem, not theirs. No rubber dinghies would traverse the Atlantic to reach their shores.

You think a picture is just a picture, but you would be amazed at the dynamics and rhetoric that goes through before and after it goes to print. A dead body polluting the beach of a bourgeois beach resort.

The child has no life. Death has engulfed him, but the picture is subtle enough not to appear gory. The violence and uncertainties that he had seen in his mind, on he can tell. He does not look death, as though just sleeping on his belly in slumberland. All dressed up with new shoes, hoping to start life anew in a faraway land away from hatred and killing but what he found was blissful sleep in after-life. They say God's justice must and will prevail on Earth as He wanted. Is this the result He wants? Dead at an age when life is just supposed to begin?

For the record, the head of the family tried to migrate to Canada, but it was rejected. So, he, with his wife and two young sons decided to flee the war-torn zone of Syria, with the help of a rubber dinghy manned by flight-by-night private boatsman, to make it to the nearest gateway to Europe, Turkey. Just 10 minutes into the journey, the seas turned rough. The boatsman jumped ship as it capsized. The father helplessly tried to rescue his family but in vain as he saw his whole family drown right in front of his eyes!

Critiques called it sensationalism of newspapers to up their sales. Scenarios like these are daily occurrences in many parts of the world. Over-exposure may desensitise readers, and the impact and devastation of war could be lost. Pressures for political will to act could be slow in coming.

Others complained of the insensitivity to the grieving parent and wondered if the picture would have made such an impact if the child was not so Caucasian looking but African or Oriental in appearance.

Anyway, the Imperialist are just feeling karma at play. They stoke the quiescent hornets' nest with fire, drain the honey and expect the angry hornets to just go away. The busy hornets, through trials and tribulations, had built a self-sustained equilibrium which worked for them. And it is in a quandary. Where do they go? Away from the fire!

On the Imperialist side, they are debating whether they are refugees, immigrants - political or economic ones. Some refuse to accept refugees of a particular faith, claiming that, from previous experiences, they exhibit holier-than-thou attitude once they are strong. They refuse to blend with society and bite the hand that fed them!

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