Save the Children

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.