The God Squad: A dead boy on the beach can open our hearts to an aching world

“What seems to us more important, more painful, and more unendurable is really not what is more important, more painful and more unendurable, but merely that which is closer to home. Everything distant which for all its moans and muffled cries, its ruined lives and millions of victims, that does not threaten to come rolling up to our threshold today, we consider endurable and of tolerable dimensions.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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I cannot get the picture out of my mind.

He was just a little 3-year-old boy, and the picture shows his dead body lying face down on a Turkish beach. He was dressed in cute clothes and little shoes.

His posture in death was exactly the same as the posture of my children at his age in life. He looked like he was just sleeping peacefully at that place where the waves and his life ended.

His name was Aylan Kurdi, and he drowned along with his mother, brother and others trying to escape the carnage in Syria in a boat that was too small for the sea. I want you to join me in anger and sorrow in praying for his soul and for our shared belief that although his body has come to permanent rest, his soul might continue its journey to a place where it can once again be sheltered in his mother’s arms.

The only reason we even know Aylan’s name is because of the picture. There have been no pictures of the quarter of a million other victims of the Syrian genocide like Aylan who have been murdered in Syria. The picture is the reason why the whole world now knows Aylan’s name. The picture.

And yet, the picture is a huge problem. There is an old slogan among journalists, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Stories of death and destruction usually push stories of courage and compassion off the front pages and the top of the news (the story of the three heroes overpowering a potential terrorist on the French train being a welcome recent exception).

It is the reason why traffic slows down even on the other side of the highway when passing a crash scene. It is the reason almost all of our blockbuster movies are blood soaked. We seem to have a perverse attraction to blood and gore.

However, what the picture of Aylan brought into focus for me is that despite the “if it bleeds, it leads” impulse, we really don’t actually see much blood in the news.

The shot is always cut short of the real blood. The pictures we see are usually picture of the scene outside the blood. I understand this instinct. Editors don’t want to send their viewers or readers running to vomit in the bathroom or to have children and adults traumatized by gruesome pictures of dead bodies.

I cannot blame them for trying to protect us from the savagery of our world, and it is true that such explicit pictures of death are almost pornographic in their addictiveness.

However, the journalistic reticence to focus an unflinching lens on the horrors of our times has deprived us of the moral shock necessary to fight evil. There is a reason why a picture is worth a thousand words, and by shielding us from the reality of suffering and death the way only a picture can, we are helped to move on when moving on is precisely the wrong thing to do.

The picture of a dead toddler looking as if he was just asleep on the sand is absolutely crushing, but it is a necessary crush. That almost unreal picture made Aylan’s life and death real, and made the horrible suffering of the Syrian people real in a way that no mere words can ever do.

It connects his life, his innocence and his little shoes to the lives of our own children, their innocence and their shoes in a way that helps us identify with the victims as real human beings.

The editors at the New York Times published an editorial about their agonized decision to publish the picture of Aylan on the beach. I am glad they struggled, but I am grateful for their decision.

The reason they were right in publishing the picture is not that we needed to be gratuitously shocked but because we needed to know the name of the little boy asleep on the beach.

And now, because of that picture, Germany agreed to give refuge to thousands of other Aylans and their families. Many people believe this change of heart happened because of Germany’s dark history. I choose to believe that the change occurred because Angela Merkel saw the picture of Aylan and because she is a mother.

May God receive Aylan’s soul.

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