The Killing of Innocents

A child pulled from rubble in one country is exactly the same as a child pulled from rubble in another. Same small body. Same parents screaming. Same future erased. The only thing that changes is the flag flying overhead and how much of our attention the cameras decide it deserves.

I keep coming back to that, because it’s the place where my entire way of seeing the world either holds together or falls apart. We’re all built from the same stuff. If that’s true — and it is — then an innocent killed anywhere is an innocent killed, full stop. Not a statistic. Not “collateral.” Not less of a loss because it happened somewhere unfamiliar to a name we can’t pronounce.

Selective grief

Here’s the uncomfortable part. We don’t actually grieve like that. We grieve selectively.

Some wars dominate every screen we own for months. Others — just as cruel, killing just as many ordinary people — barely register, because they’re in places the world has quietly decided matter less. Sudan. Yemen. Congo. Places where the dying is constant and the coverage is a footnote. The value we place on a human life ends up depending, in practice, on its postcode and its usefulness to a story someone powerful wants told.

That’s not a position I can hold. If a life only counts when it’s convenient or close or camera-ready, then we never really believed all lives counted at all. We just believed ours did.

The men who never bleed

Almost none of this is decided by the people who pay for it. Wars are chosen in rooms full of powerful men who will never feel a shockwave, never queue for water, never identify a child by a shoe. They make the call, draw the line, give the speech — and then farmers and grandmothers and nineteen-year-olds on every side do the actual bleeding.

I’m not naive about the world. Sometimes force is genuinely the lesser evil; sometimes there’s no clean choice. But I refuse to let that complexity drain the humanity out of it. You can understand that a situation is complicated and still insist that the dead were people, every single one, with as much right to a life as you have to yours.

Do better

This is where it lands, the same place everything on this site lands.

Doing better here doesn’t mean having a confident take on every conflict — God knows the loudest people usually have the shallowest understanding. It means refusing the trick that makes some innocents matter and others disappear. It means holding every child under every flag as equal, because they are. It means being suspicious of any story that asks you to celebrate, or shrug at, the death of ordinary people.

We are, all of us, built from the same stuff. The day we forget that is the day the killing gets easy. The least we can do — the very least — is refuse to forget it.