Vol. 140 - Think of the Children

On kids eating sand and a modern genocide

“Think of the children.”

It’s an easy refrain. And, whether you’re a parent or not, when disaster strikes, be it natural, manmade, terrorism, or war, thinking of the children is an easy thing to do.

Considering the noncombatants, the kids who have little to no recourse when faced with the horrors of those things I just mentioned, is an easy default to put a face on human suffering. After all, the children didn’t cause any of this. And there’s usually little they can do to prevent it or to climb out whatever the resulting rubble looks like.

Of course, like it does almost everything else, parenting reframes everything.

Yes, I still think of the children. But when I do, it’s impossible to not put my own children in those settings. I see my own babies suffering those same, often avoidable fates, as so many others who, unlike my kids, didn’t win the geographic lottery (which, after all, is all nationality is. And yet we make it so much more than that. Odd, isn’t it?). And when I do, when I view the horrors of Palestine, of Ukraine, now of Iran, and even across our own country, in places like Flint, or any of the myriad little towns that are forever shaken by our country’s disinterest in even attempting to combat gun violence, I can’t help but see these moments in history etched in a different light.

When I was a kid, back in the eighties and nineties, was I aware of the starving children in Ethiopia and Somalia? Of course. Same with my young manhood, as I saw entire global regions gripped by despotic regimes, where the children often suffered the most. Those countless newsreels over the years, seemingly always somewhere in the Middle East, where a father carried his child’s corpse in a blood-drenched sheet-covered through a street of bombed-out rubble always hit me right in the gut. How could they not?

Of course, those gutpunches were fleeting, owing likely to the fact that, as a kid, a teen, a young man, I had “better” things to worry about, like riding bikes, listening to records, or trying to get laid (depending on the era). Lucky kid I was, having won that geographic lottery in such a big way.

These days, I can’t seem to shake these feelings, this constant, hollow sense of dread, of woe that I feel for the people affected by what’s happening in the world.

I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I’m an adult now, a man who has seen so much more of the world and met so many more people in it than the young man I was; that we’re about to enter the fourth or fifth once-in-a-lifetime event of my generation; that we live in an era where news pummels at all hours of the day; the fact that, within the last handful of months, two significant wars have broken out and we’re potentially on the brink of a third; or the fact that we’re watching a genocide unfold before our very eyes and no one seems too keen to do a goddamn thing to stop it.

Whatever it is, this feeling of dread, of horror, of hopelessness is sticking with me, hanging in my gut like a cannonball and I can’t seem to shake it. Even as I post about my stupid band’s stupid reunion show or the myriad moments I enjoy with my kids. Even as I sit here and type away for work or for this little newsletter, choogling along, sending invoices, chasing payments, traipsing to any of the dozen summer camps we’ve booked for our kids, as if nothing else is going on, as if the world isn’t coming apart at its seams. The feeling is becoming constant.

It’s even more disheartening considering that I’m one of the lucky ones. Not only did I win that geographic lottery but I’m also a straight, white, cisgendered, middle-class guy. I won all the lotteries. I have it as easy as anyone.

Considering as much, it feels weird to even voice this perspective publicly, woe is me and all. But our perspectives are all we have and this is mine.

And as I watch yet another set of horrors befall an entire generations of little kids, as I scroll through the horrors online—of kids recounting stories of their having to eat sand in an effort to survive, of little bloody sneakers in a bombed-out cafe, velcro-fastened because their now-dead owner didn’t yet understand how to tie a shoe, of more fathers carrying their dead babies in blood-soaked sheets—the pit in my stomach churns, despite the fact that, in the end, I’m more than likely going to be fine thanks to all those little lotteries that I did absolutely nothing to win.

I’m sure much of it has to do with that change in my perspective that is almost wholly due to the fact that I am now a father; one who, when he zooms out, has so little to worry about. Lucky me.