Lessons from history, Keenan,
Alan, we can see, was wearing little Velcro sneakers with yellow trim. Somehow it’s these little details that make those now famous images of him drowned on that beach hit so hard.
Those shoes feel so familiar to those of us who have a toddler at home, or who have had one, or know one. The way the boy’s skinny legs emerge from baggy blue shorts, dangling from the arms of the officer who has found him and cradled his body in his arms. His tiny fingers.
We recognize these forms, these details, from our own lives, our own families. And when we hear his father talk of holding tight to Alan and his brother and his mother after they were all tossed from the boat, of having his family drown one by one in his arms in the fake life jackets they’d been given by a smuggler who abandoned them, the sympathetic pain is almost unbearable.
The feelings are personal: Shock. Sadness. Shame.
Yes, shame. Shame at realizing that it took this tiny boy’s death to make us grasp the enormity of the crisis among Syrian refugees — one that has seen more than 2,500 drown trying to get to safety this past month, one that has left millions in horrifying circumstances. Shame that somehow so many of us had managed this far to more or less ignore it all. Shame that some of us here in our comfortable bubble were initially angrier at the spread of the image than at the situation that caused it to be taken. Shame that Alan and his family had apparently lost hope that they’d be able to come to Canada, where they had family who wanted to bring them over. Shame that our immigration minister and our prime minister, even as this was all sinking in, persisted in bragging about how much we do for the refugees fleeing Syria.
Many experts say these politicians are exaggerating how much we do. But our own gut, looking at the photos of Alan, says that however much they have been doing, it is not enough.
It is a feeling, more than a thought, maybe not yet entirely coherent, more moral than rational. This 3-year-old boy died while we talked up quotas and debated bombing campaigns. With him, an entire nation is dying. It hurts, suddenly, urgently. It feels personal now, at least momentarily. You can sense it welling up from Canadians, the feeling, the thought, the demand: We need to do something. Something more.
What can we do? It’s hard to say. Thursday morning, I walked past the news boxes showing the horrifying images of Alan Kurdi’s body on the front page to visit a monument to a horrifying image from history, likely the most saddening piece of public art in Toronto. At the foot of Bathurst St., five figures stand in Ireland Park, emaciated and desperate, facing the city skyline on the lakeshore. One sculpture is of a pregnant woman, another of a young boy. On the ground lies the figure of a sprawling woman dying, defeated, at the end of a long and terrifying journey.
The sculpture marks a moment in Toronto’s past that seems possible to look to for guidance: In 1847, during the Great Famine in Ireland, Toronto was a city of 20,000. In a period of six months, more than 38,000 refugees fleeing the famine arrived on overcrowded, diseaseinfested ships. Toronto mobilized to house them and to treat the sick.
The sheer numbers make a shocking contrast to Canada today, which admits 0.25 refugees per 1,000 Canadians. As Scott Gilmore has pointed out in Maclean’s, Germany has been taking 40 times that many per capita.
Our local history tells us we can do much more. Our guts, looking at that photo of Alan, tell us we need to.
In the middle of an election campaign, we can debate for real what we are as a country, and how much we can do, how much we’re willing to do. As much as some people — generally cynical partisans themselves — decry the “politicization” of a boy’s death, this is a good thing.
Good because Alan’s father has pleaded that his family’s death be- come a call to worldwide action: “We want the whole world to see this,” he is reported to have said. “We want the world’s attention on us, so that they can prevent the same from happening to others. Let this be the last.” But good, too, because what are elections for if not deciding what kind of country we are? And what helps define what kind of country we are than how we deal with the largest humanitarian crisis in generations?
So: How many refugees can we accept, how can we speed their journey here, how many more refugees can we support as they settle in other countries, how much aid can we deliver to the overwhelmed camps where they are forced to temporarily stay? These are all pressing questions in this campaign now. Personal questions.
But the impulse to do something can be more personal than that, too. People are now looking to charities like Lifeline Syria that try to privately sponsor refugees to come to Canada, and that have had a massive surge in interest in the past 24 hours. Many are inspired by the example of Icelanders, thousands of whom have offered up their own homes to convince their government to accept refugees. Most of us, feeling the personal shame of inaction, are looking for ways to do something.
Ultimately, the question is not whether we are doing “our share” compared to other countries. And it is not even whether we are doing enough, because the distressing truth is we cannot do enough, no one can do enough, we will not save everyone, we cannot prevent the death of every child in sneakers and shorts.
The question — if we want to be able to look our own children in the face when we help them fasten the Velcro on their own little shoes, and if we want to be able to rest after we carry them in our arms to tuck them into their beds — is whether we are doing all that we can.
And until now, it seems suddenly clear, the answer to that question has been no. ekeenan@thestar.ca