SHE SHED MY TEARS

Did you see the agonizing images during the week of Omran, the five year old Syrian boy whose haunting video on TV has told a story of the wickedness of man in a way that a million words have been incapable of telling?

For the entire five years of Omran’s life, breakfast, lunch and dinner every day have been punctuated by bombs, bullets, rockets, shrapnel, violence destruction and death. As I
watched the haunting images of Omran on TV, as the child tried to wipe the blood off his face with his bare hands, I was traumatized. I could not imagine what must have been going through the child’s mind. Did I say child? Omran is not a child. He never had a childhood. A wicked world forced Omran to see things that many an old man cannot even contemplate.

Does it make any sense that in this battle for power, Assad, the supposed leader of Syria, has invited the Russians and Iranians to help him bomb the living daylights out of the old women and children of his country? Before now I thought that the primary duty of any leader is to protect and shield the children and vulnerable in his nation from harm. I shed tears at the sight of those haunting images of Omran. I was worried that I might be one of the few who would see the depravity in what the world has turned into. Then I saw CNN anchor, Kate Bolduan openly shed tears on TV upon seeing the same images that have haunted me. Kate Bolduan shed my tears.

If the image of Omran Daqneesh does not get the world to stop the massacre in Aleppo, then the world no longer deserves to be the world. It should come to an end.

Not long ago, we all watched the Iraqi Yazidi people trapped in a mountain in the north west of Iraq as hundreds, including women and children, fought to throw themselves into one small helicopter. The helicopter had come to drop humanitarian aid to the thousands struggling to survive without shelter, food, water or medication on the top of the inclement Mount Sinjar. It is mind boggling to think that those very frightened and incredibly traumatised people were not victims of a natural disaster like an earthquake, a tsunami or a hurricane. In this day and age, they were being hunted like rats and rabbits by fellow human beings intent on slaughtering all of them not because they had committed any crime but simply because of whom they are and the way they worship. That is how mad the world has gone!

It makes no sense that such things can still happen today in a world where with a small smart phone you can now Skype and talk with and in fact see the pimple on the face of anyone in any village in the remotest part of the world. Is this not the same world in which you now just enter a car, press a button and type in your intended address, and a voice from nowhere tells you when to go left, to go right and to drive straight until you get right to your destination? This is the same world in which with your small ATM, debit or credit card, you can travel the globe as if you are carrying several Ghana-must-go bags full of cash. Can you imagine that this madness can happen in a world in which on your tiny cell phone you can ‘google’ anything and obtain zillions of pieces of information that you may not have been able to get from the biggest library man has built?

How is it possible that people can harbour such prehistoric, crude and base instincts in a world in which so much progress is being made?

Is it not bizarre that in a world of cloud computing and unmanned drones, a group of bandits known as Boko Haram remains out of control, recklessly killing, abducting, burning and blackmailing the entire Nigerian nation with the video of many kidnapped young girls, the daughters and sisters of people who have done nothing to Boko Haram?

How did it happen that in a world with satellites that can pick up the smallest movements thousands of miles away, a world of laser guided missiles, Iraq can be run over by a crazy terrorist group called ISIS?

Sad.

See you next week.