Another image of a child made international news the same week as the Naramore trial did locally. It came from Aleppo in Syria, where 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh, caked with dust and blood, was pulled from the rubble left behind after an airstrike by Russian planes, or maybe by their Syrian allies trying to stave off rebel forces still trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship. Does it matter? Not so much as the life of one child.
No wonder the child's picture has captured the attention of the world. To quote the photographer who dug him out of the wreckage along with the dead and dying: "We were passing them from one balcony to the other" when someone handed him the wounded child.
He in turn passed the child on to a worker who rushed little Omran to an ambulance headed for one of the hospitals left standing in that storied city now become a war zone.
One of the nurses who treated him there described him as "in a daze. It was as if he was asleep. Not unconscious but traumatized--lost."
Who can keep a dry eye when confronted with such an image? By now it's been reproduced on front pages across this country and far beyond. Suffering makes the whole world kin.
Editorial on 08/23/2016