I saw something disturbing yesterday. I was reading Newsweek, and I came across the coverage of the hell that is breaking loose in Israel. I didn't have time to read the entire article, so I just was looking at the pictures and the captions to try to figure all of this out.

There were the obligatory crater in the middle of the street pictures, Middle Eastern men with machine guns, etc. Then I stopped. In the middle of one page, the caption read: "A dead child in Beirut." The child was face down in the street, covered with dust and a smattering of debris. This child, this baby, couldn't have been more than two or three years old. There was still some of that baby pudginess in his legs. My heart literally hurt, and it took all that I could muster not to run into Son's room, scoop him up, and hug him like I would never get to again. Some woman on the other side of the world didn't have that option that day.

I couldn't help but think "where is his mother?" Why was he still lying there, dead, in the street for this picture to be taken? This picture epitomizes how insane the whole thing is. I don't understand how children can be dead in the street and someone, anyone, can't see that the whole thing is doing nothing but killing the future? Maybe I don't understand the nationalism, the religious fervor that runs this. It just drives home how safe we really are.

While the image really bothered me, and I wish at some level that I hadn't seen it, it is probably a good thing that I did. It's enough to prompt me to try to understand what is happening in that part of the world. Enough to vote accordingly in the upcoming elections. Maybe enough to get someone else to do the same. Since I have assumed the responsibility for trying to raise at least one part of our future, it only stands to reason that I have a responsibility to the present, so no other mother will have to find her dead child in the street.