Our bus left the station and, as we headed toward the Turkish mountains, I asked the man across the aisle if I could see his newspaper.
I write about news so I read a lot of it, and when traveling I always glance through local newspapers even if I can’t understand the language. I don’t speak or read Turkish. But that day, the day Israel bombed, journalism around the Middle East seemed to translate easily into a language anyone could understand: “Death. Destruction. Children.”
The man handed me the Turkish daily carefully. I opened it to the front page, and for the first time ever in my son’s life, I told him not to look at the newspaper.
I blanched as I saw the photos of the little baby — obviously a newborn, still swaddled in a blanket and covered in grayish dust from the collapsed cinder blocks of the building where it and its parents had sought refuge. Its little mouth was slightly open in what surely had been its last gasp of life. The man holding it up for the cameras seemed dazed — too full of shock to be angry yet. Another photo showed just semi-buried hands — an adult man and woman’s, both wearing wedding rings, fiercely clasped together with that of the tiniest of fingers — another little baby — all covered with dust and rubble, and all three clearly dead.
America didn’t see these photographs: “Death. Destruction. Children.”
But our tax money paid for the bombs, dropped mercilessly on civilians by a nation we regard as our closest ally, Israel, which created the moments the photographers captured.
I gasped. I felt ashamed. And for the first time on a long trip, I felt concerned for my and my child’s safety.
After what my country and its ally did to ordinary Lebanese civilians, why should we not also be at risk? That someone might seek to avenge the deaths of so many innocents seemed perfectly comprehensible to me. Just ask anyone with a child.
Tiny fingers, mouth making that perfect little “oh.” The coos and gurgles babies make, no matter where they are, in Manhattan or Qana or on a big bus weaving through the Turkish countryside. Rich or poor, children are a joy. The odds of whether a child will grow up to be a “Hezbollah terrorist” should not be the test of its right to life as an infant.
Death. Destruction. Children. For the first time in my and my young son’s life, I hid the newspaper from him. “Don’t look,” I admonished him.
Later, I wondered why I’d hid the truth from him, and I realized it was because I couldn’t answer the questions I knew he’d ask. Like, “Why would people kill little babies and their parents,” “Who did that to them?” and “Will the same thing happen to you and me?”
I strive so that my son will know a world with mercy in it, but sometimes I wonder. I was born and raised in the southern United States, where a bloody civil war was fought from 1861 to 1865. As a child, I had elderly schoolteachers whose own aged relatives had regaled them with vivid stories about this infamous war.
A white-haired, harlequin-glassed lady mesmerized our class with her description of Union Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and his merciless “march to the sea.” These Southerners did not object so much to being on the losing end of the war; what appalled them was how that war was won.
Sherman developed a policy of “total war” against both Confederate soldiers and civilians. Sherman claimed the North was “not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” His 62,000-man army terrorized thousands of women and children (the only inhabitants, since most men were fighting). Sherman’s army set fire to their homes, burned down farms and storehouses, and commandeered all remaining food, even from slaves, for the Union Army. Sherman’s men ripped up the railroads and destroyed every piece of infrastructure they could find.
Who knows what happened to the women and children back then, but one can imagine the murders, rapes, and mayhem.
Death. Destruction. Children.
US President George W. Bush likely didn’t hear such stories growing up in Connecticut, Maine, Texas, or any of the other tiny locales in which he’s hung his hat.
Too bad. If he’d grown up Southern, he’d remember those stories and the unforgiving hardness of voice and glare of eyes that mask a grief that is simply inexpressible, but filters down through the generations.
Death. Destruction. Children.
The man who handed me the newspaper can see I’m American. But he also sees me cringe and blanche when I look at the photos.
He sees me tell my son not to look. “America good,” he tells me evenly, his eyes full of understanding without knowing anything about the South, “Bush bad.”
I pray that America is still good. I strive so that my son will know a world with mercy in it. But sometimes, I wonder.
