Syria
gases its own citizens. That's awful. Syria gases its own citizens, some of whom
are children. That's demonic. I am disheartened, angered, and tilting toward
misanthropic.
Humans
reach a deeper level of empathy when children are the victims of slaughter because
they're innocent. But what does innocent mean? They have yet to eat from the
Tree of Knowledge. Children only know what it's like to be a child. They are
not racist because they have yet to know what racism means?
We
are not children. We're not even adults. We're patriots, democrats, evangelical
Christians, pro-life, limited government, vegan, ivy-league educated, and left
brained. Aging is an exponential number of labels and definitions and ways of
distinguishing "me" from "them."
Why
is it so torturous to watch an eight-year-old girl holding a "God Hates
Fags" sign? Because she's too young to make her own decision to be a
bigot. She’s too innocent to submit her life to dogmatism. Like Salman Rushdie
once wrote, “Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.” (If
you agree, you should be equally repulsed by seeing a newborn in a New York
Yankees onesie.)
When
a child dies because someone's label conflicted with someone else's label, we
see the ugly beast in the mirror. Syria's civil war, like any battle, is a war
of ideas. The deaths of innocent children remind us how much we get caught up
in our labels and, for a moment, we envy their freedom from the straight jacket
of ideas that we all wear.
We
can never return to that innocence. We can only live vicariously through youth
sports, playgrounds, public beaches, and any place where a kid is free of our
restrictions that keep them from being kids.
Have
you ever watched a kid in their element? They're excellent at it. We're still
not good at being adults. We're still figuring it out. We wish we could go back
to subsisting solely on the Tree of Life. Every time we take away a child's
innocence – through war, indoctrination, sodomy – we get farther away from Eden.
