We are beings of contrast and change. Daily we walk the lines between anguish and joy, anger and compassion, despair and hope. The sheer range of emotions defies description, the strength they contain dwarfs the most powerful of titans.
I can recall a winter night during my sophomore year of college. I was visiting my mom in Florida over spring break, and I decided to take a drive. Driving is therapeutic to me. I love having time to myself, to think, to listen to music, and to just experience the feeling of moving.
As I drove along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, windows down, sunroof open with the warm Florida air coursing through my car, I was suddenly overtaken with tears of happiness. Everything just seemed right with the world, and every molecule in my body was brimming over with hope. I can’t explain it; surely it was some kind of cosmic alignment (or for the more cynical, some fortuitous chemical imbalance).
As random as that moment was, others are certainly triggered by those things that we see or hear. It can be a poem. A song. A painting, or a picture.
In our country now (appropriately termed ‘Admerica‘ by the always brilliant Arthur Gilroy), we are constantly under fire from a barrage of visual and audio stimuli. Because of this, we learn to give most things no more than a cursory scan, nary a second’s thought.
Which brings me to this. I am sure most of you have seen this picture before. I first saw it over 20 months ago, and it has haunted me like no other photograph I have ever seen in my life. Please, take a few seconds to look at it, to let it’s image become burned into your soul.
Every fiber of my being cries out in anguish, but still I am unable to tear my eyes away. I can hear the tortured scream issuing forth not from this little girl’s mouth, but from her very heart. The scream echoes inside my head, silencing all other thought except My god, my god what have we done?
We are coming up now on a time when we can set our path to change. It is within our power, and it is nearly in our grasp. And change we must. How many more Iraqi children are to be splattered in their parents blood? How many of our own children are going to continue to live starving in poverty and squalor?
It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
– Hubert H. Humphrey
How then, will we be judged? Not well, I think. It is too late to undo what has already been done, but the hour is near at hand for us to turn the tide. Should you, even for a moment, forget how important, how desperate, how urgent it is that we win this fight, let that little Iraqi girl remind you.
