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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

     The late evening news was almost over and I sat idly watching the screen as two boys, ten, maybe eleven years old, cycled along a sunlit road. The pair of them seemed familiar as they pedalled side by side their tyres making lines in the dust. They had a look about them of my grandchildren, that mixture of innocence and bravado that little boys have when they cycle standing up gripping the handlebars legs pumping up and down and their bottoms swaying with the effort. We live on don’t we through our children and our childrens’ children. They define us, validate our existence. When I meet old friends out come the photographs and the competition begins. Who’s the tallest? Who’s the brightest? Yours are doing well? Mine are doing better. Yes, it changes us having grandchildren, we would lay down our lives for them, kill for them.

 I can hear echoes of my two sons as I listen to my grandsons’ elephant jokes and complicated riddles, they make me laugh and my love for them is overwhelming and unconditional. But they are adventurous boys so my joy is tempered with fear, they are vulnerable and always at the back of my mind is, what if----

When their fathers were the age my grandsons are now and I lay awake at three o clock in the morning the graveyard hour, my fears were that my two boys would drown their upturned faces pale and ghostly as they floated past my outstretched arms. Now I only have to hear a distant siren at a time when the children are cycling home from school oversized blazers flapping round their saddles and my heart will miss a beat

 Our children and their children travel the globe these days and we are all citizens of the same world. Whatever our race, colour or culture we share a common humanity and we have the same hopes and aspirations, but most of all we want to protect our children, we want them to be safe.  

As I watched the television screen that evening, the sun dappling through the trees onto the backs of those two little boys, two little boys so like my own, my eyes shifted upwards from the cycling children to a military helicopter hovering overhead and I knew, I just knew. The screen went blank as the cameraman’s body parts were flung in the air then other cameras rolled and I saw the debris and the children in their shorts and striped tee shirts laying on the dusty tarmac their bikes a few feet away. They could have been sleeping, each of them on their side their legs curled up to their stomachs an arm tucked underneath.  

That was Wednesday the sixteenth of April 2008 and on Monday the twenty-eighth I read in the newspaper that another four children had been murdered in Gaza. It doesn’t bear thinking about; the  clean socks and pants for the following day still in the drawer, the exercise books untouched in the school bag and those soldiers, the soldiers in the helicopter going home after what they’d done. Could they eat their supper? If they had children of their own did they cuddle them? Read them a story?

Losing a child must mean unimaginable grief and a terrible rage in the heart. How could one not want revenge, a reprisal, reparation? And are we not just as culpable. Crimes against humanity take place in our name. It is nothing to do with us we say but the taking of young lives wherever it happens, in Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan places our own families in danger, makes our children more vulnerable, less safe.

We are running out of road and the drums of war still beat; the world is getting smaller and when parents in occupied lands demand an eye for each of their child’s eye then we have no defence and soon the whole world will be blind.