Aylan Kurdi was 3 years old when he washed up on the Turkish beach near the resort town of Bodrum this week.
His picture, face-down in the surf, has stunned the world and put the refugee crisis unfolding in Syria on the front pages in a way it hadn’t been before. A boy was dead; there had been many boys just like him who have died along the way, and we have failed to save them — we’ve failed, they can be forgiven for thinking, even to truly care.
This boy looked like my 2 ½-year-old son. The Velcro sneakers, the shorts and red shirt — it could be my son’s outfit any summer day.
I spent the day after the picture’s release on the shore with my family. It was the last day of our vacation and, as my son played in the surf on a Long Island beach, I kept flashing back to Aylan. I didn’t want to be morbid, but the idea that this could be my child was hard to ignore.
There’s something in us that makes us care more when the victims look like we do or live a life similar to ours. Ask most white New York working mothers what murder case of the last few years stays on their mind and it will likely be the Krim murders on the Upper West Side. That was the gruesome 2012 killing of a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old by their nanny while their mother and sister were just a few blocks away.
“This could happen to me” is a powerful feeling when witnessing something particularly awful. “That couldn’t be me” is exactly what leads us to inaction. It’s unfortunate, but it’s also quite human.
I don’t imagine that a crisis like the one in Syria, where people are risking their lives to get their children to safety, can happen to my lucky, American-born children. But being a Soviet-born Jew means I don’t have the luxury of discounting it, either.
My family’s history includes a lot of running. Pogroms, Stalin, my great-grandmother and her sister leaving all of their belongings and running for their lives in World War II as the Nazis approached their town.
It’s a history of escape and survival. It ends with being refugees to America, getting to a freedom no one in our lineage had ever known before. It wouldn’t have ended without free people caring about our cause, caring about those oppressed half a world away.
We have failed many children in history, as we have failed Aylan, and the call to “do something” isn’t enough if all everyone does is repeat those words while the slaughter in Syria continues.
As we read about Aylan’s father holding his wife and two young sons in the water after the boat capsized, then feeling them slip away, we have to know it’s long past time to care; it’s time to act.
There’s no easy solution, of course. The countries turning away refugees aren’t doing it out of malice but to protect their borders, their own security. And there’s no simple answer to “picking a side” in the Syrian civil war. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made us too squeamish about trying to influence events in far-flung places, particularly in the Middle East.
This reluctance, too, is understandable. It’s also far past its moral expiration date, and the rot is impossible to ignore. It’s time to face up to the fact that the world still does expect America to engage — that the world still needs America to engage.
Four years and more than 200,000 dead. And counting.
Maybe America’s desire to disengage is slowly changing. A Quinnipiac poll this week found a slight majority — 52 percent — of Americans would support sending ground troops to Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS.
Fifty-seven percent say we’re losing this war, which isn’t surprising, since we’re barely fighting it.
I didn’t spend the day at the beach hugging my son. I yelled at him for throwing sand, I made him wear his hat even when he didn’t want to and kept him away from other kids’ toys as best I could. He lived the life of a child free from the worst kind of danger, and at the end of it, I got to close up his Velcro shoes and take him home.
The Syrian crisis is in our face now; let’s not turn away or wait for more Aylans to wash ashore.