Omran is the Aylan Kurdi of 2016, the post child of a crisis that doesn’t really need it; it has many. Another year in the books. Another year of Syrians dying. Another year ignorance overpowered empathy. We gave up on Syrians a long time ago. Perhaps, even before the UN stopped counting casualties and deaths. Seeing this young child, covered in blood and dust, was tantamount to seeing a shaken up doll. It was dehumanizing. When he is shown to wipe the blood off his face, I thought he would scream, I wanted him to scream, because his people are not heard often enough; because he looked so inanimate but was miraculously alive. Unfortunately, living through what he has lived through is worse than dying. What happened to that boy is not an isolated incident, as the photo makes it seem. It is not the singular tragedy of an airstrike mission gone awry. It has a context, one that situates the US and Russian foreign policies in a tight corner. It’s high time we, as a global society, did something to make amends. For starters, stop looking away. That’s not empathy.
The tears that rolled down my face, the gulps of breath I had to take because every thing around me at once felt suffocating, the sensation of guilt that shrouded my being, are all forgettable because I don’t feel enough of it. I could not look at the photo for more than a minute without feeling ashamed of myself for forgetting. We have forgotten what it means to empathize, becoming accustomed to hearing about the troubles of the Islamic world on a daily basis. And so, we needed to see Omran’s suffering in order to understand it, which is odd, because suffering is felt, not seen; carnage is seen, and then counted, as a nod of acknowledgement.
Omran is not carnage, thankfully, yet he still had to be ‘seen’ in order for his story to be told. His story told through the photo renders an aura of inertness about him. This premium that is placed on images should not be necessary. I grow weary of seeing them because they do more to portray the victims as eternally victimized and ignores the life they once had. The life that consisted of waking up, going to school, playing in the park, going away for vacation, sleeping without the constant worry of airstrikes. At the same time, these images tie the fate of children like Omran to the fate of the war, giving them the title of the lost generation, the generation that grew up knowing only the war. So when we see these images, it’s as though we have been unconsciously expecting this. Suffering is normalized and so the next day, we went on about our lives as though we hadn’t just yesterday seen a very disturbing, a very disquieting image. We helped to perpetuate the very inhumanity at which we were so angered or shocked, only yesterday.
Omran is still alive. Omran matters not because he was caught in the menacing plot twist that made his family the victim of this heinous incident. He matters because he is not alone. He matters because he was a reminder going off unexpectedly when he should have been a penciled-in priority. He matters because he teaches us that we have forsaken empathy, and with it, our humanity.
