A moment of your time ... for the innocent, voiceless and forgotten 

By ADAM COUZENS
(adam at adamcouzens.net)

BOMB kills another 74 in Syria. Famine claims thousands in Somalia. Unicef estimates 29,000 children under five dying each day. 

  The statistics wash over us in a torrent of daily headlines. Having worked in newsrooms for 15 years, frankly I’ve become numb to it. Call it a defense mechanism or just desensitization, it’s actually a helpfully protective function that allows one to continue to operate each day amid the ceaseless horrors over which we have no direct control. 

  Yet, periodically, a small detail or anecdote emerges with a sobering and horrifying reminder of the innocent, voiceless and forgotten humanity behind the numbers. 

  Several years ago a news image of an unidentified girl amid the famine in Somalia brought me undone. The photo showed a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor weighing the skin-and-bone 5-year-old in a sling. She was too weak to stand; the caption reporting she was barely as heavy my own healthy daughter, then a 6-month-old. 

  This week a tidbit of information in the coverage of journalist Marie Colvin’s death in Syria again muted the incessant noise and urgency of everyday between my ears and in front of my eyes. 

  It was a recording of Colvin’s final report the day before she and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed during a bombardment in the devastated Syrian city of Homs. 

  “I watched a little baby die today," Colvin told the BBC. "Absolutely horrific, a 2-year old child had been hit. They stripped it and found the shrapnel had gone into the left chest and the doctor said 'I can't do anything.' His little tummy just kept heaving until he died.”

  Listening in my car on the drive to work, I screamed and was weeping in reflexive disgust even before I could fully comprehend the abominable scene. 

  All I could do was stop the car. Images invaded my mind of my own 3-year-old son, if his body – his little barrel of a chest – had been torn open by violence, his eyes wracked with unimaginable fear and confusion as he convulsed toward death. 

  It was unbearable, and yet it happens every day – and not just at the hands of malignant, despotic regimes, but as a mere collateral consequence of war. 

  Unicef says the impact of war on children is hard to estimate due to a lack of reliable and current statistics. But the international poverty and justice advocacy agency, Oxfam, reports that 80 percent of all deaths in modern conflicts occur to civilians. 

  What contempt humanity shows for its most fragile and defenseless members, what indignity, anonymity and insignificance they endure. 

  Just hours before Colvin’s death, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper queried her on the appropriateness of delivering such graphic accounts as the child’s killing. 

  “That baby,” she said, “probably will move more people to think, ‘What is going on and why is no one stopping this murder in Homs that is happening every day?’ ” 

  Even as a fellow journalist, I’ve never understood how correspondents like Colvin can willingly risk death and injury to report from inside war zones. 

  I could never do it myself, but I am indebted to those like Colvin and Ochlik who do so, and sometimes die in the process. 

  At the very least it affords people like me the opportunity to be momentarily interrupted by details of the injustice dealt that anonymous little Syrian child, and to honor him by allowing the memory of his short life and indescribable sacrifice to affect me. 

  To spur me to send money to Amnesty International, to volunteer with a local child advocacy organization, or simply and, probably most obviously, just to cherish every moment with my own kids and some day pass on the little boy’s story to them.

Postscript: CNN's Cooper has published the following video of the death of the boy, who is identified as Adnan. The footage may disturb.