The image of a toddler dead on the shores of a Turkish beach flashed across my screen a couple of days ago.  A refugee child fleeing the terrors of Syria with his mother, father and brother.  Along with the little one who died, his mother and brother also lost their lives in the journey to freedom from persecution, destruction and death. 

A country at war; it’s people fleeing death and destruction; both sides blind to the plight of the people living within the country; both sides ignorant of the damage that is being done to its people; both sides guilty of mass murder.

There are no innocents on both sides of the war – the only innocents are the victims who die at the hands of those who would wage war.

That little body, alone on the beach – what did that little one feel in his last moments?  Did he cry out for his mother and father and brother?  There is no doubt that this little one did not understand what was happening, or why he was in the water, or why he was fleeing his country, his home, his relatives, his people.  He was too little to understand.  I cannot, for the life of me, understand what that little one went through in his last minutes alive.

The little one’s passing has evoked an international response with people calling on others to open their hearts and minds and homes to help those fleeing war, conflict and injustices. 

We are seeing people opening up to being more decent, kind and loving.  This little one’s death opened the world’s eyes to the plight of those fleeing war and atrocities but for those who wage war, their eyes remain firmly shut as do their hearts and their ears. 

They remain blind, uncaring and unhearing.

Another horrific image flashed across my screen as well, that of little ones with their limbs chopped off.  What kind of person does that to a little one?  In what world do we live in where we allow this to happen?  What mind conceives of this? How far has man’s inhumanity towards another sunk to?  To hack off a limb of a child – what does this serve other than to terrorize?  What has that little one ever done to deserve anything like this?  Where is the intervention?

Countries at war cannot be looking at the images of the slain innocents for if they dared to see, they would find a way to resolve their differences without further bloodshed. 

Whose heart remains untouched when they see a dead child – a life lost for no just reason?  Perhaps if the warmongers saw in that dead child the face of their own child they may just rethink what it is they are doing.