Our reaction to an individual tragedy may not be strictly rational. So much the worse for rationalityThe horrors of the first world war were clear enough to everyone who fought in it,as Wilfred Owen did: “If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in, or / And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,/ His hanging face, like a satan’s sick of sin / If you could hear, and at every jolt,the blood / arrive gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”.
But for those who watched from the consolation of the home front, it was still easy to believe the veteran lies. It took 10 years or more from the end of the fighting for Owen to be widely read, and for the great novels and prose memoirs to appear which peopled the trenches with individual soldiers whose deaths made a terrible and compelling sense so that a whole generation saw through the uplifting official generalities to the grotesque and specific horrors of reality. Something like that has happened now,very much more quickly, with the death of Aylan Kurdi. One photograph has turned something we all knew was happening, or but somewhere little-known and far absent,into a wrenching tragedy that demands instant action.
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Source: theguardian.com