Everything about the picture I was staring at in my Twitter feed was wrong. But what really caught my attention was that t-shirt. Pink, sparkly and adorned with a dancing Minnie Mouse. My daughter, a devoted Minnie Mouse fan, had many similar versions of it neatly folded in her dresser.
More often than not she’ll insist on wearing one as I frantically try to dress her and get out the door to start our busy day. It would never occur to me that I wouldn’t be taking that same t-shirt off later that day and throwing it in the laundry bin, ready to wash away the stains of a happy few hours in crèche – paint, food, glue – nothing that wouldn’t wash out and guarantee another happy day of wear.
I had seen many horrendous pictures from the war that raged in Gaza over the summer of 2014. I found myself entranced by social media and its instant and continuous access to the situation as it was developing, for better or worse. It’s this up-to-date and uncensored news feed that I usually love about social media, but this time, it was those very things that kept me awake at night, tossing and turning.
I saw pictures of mangled bodies, most of them just children. Often they were lined up with their entire family, gone – just like that. Mostly I tried not to dwell on the incomprehensible horrors that were presented in front of me, like scenes from a tasteless war movie. But there was something about this picture that I couldn’t turn away from. Maybe it was the Minnie Mouse t-shirt, or maybe it was the lifeless little body that wore it.
The little girl was no more than a toddler. She lay there on that cold steel table, dead. She was blackened by whatever faith had befallen her, maybe it was from the debris from which she was pulled or perhaps a bomb or missile that exploded close by. Or maybe nobody knew why this little girl was dead.
As I lay in bed thinking about the girl in the Minnie Mouse t-shirt, so many questions went through my mind. What was her name? Did she have a family? Were they dead too? So many things I wanted to know about this girl I never met, yet who I felt I knew. This nameless victim that social media had brought into my home.
In the days that followed I grieved for that little girl, for her siblings and for her parents. But mostly, I grieved for this awful world we live in, where the picture of a dead child has become the norm. Where it takes something exceptional for us to even allow ourselves to register the horrors that lay in front of us. What have we become?
There are many who believe we shouldn’t be exposed to pictures like this. That social media lacks filters. But the truth is often uncomfortable. And the more uncomfortable the truth makes us, maybe the more it needs to be told. That child was innocent, one of hundreds of innocent children who were murdered over the long weeks of that summer. Her only crime was where she was born, the wrong side of the barrier.
That picture was all she had to give now. The hope that the world would be awakened at the sight of her cold dead body and that somebody would call ‘Stop’. I’m glad I saw that picture on Twitter, I’m glad it reached out to me and woke me up. Over the following weeks I joined the marches calling for a stop to the war on Gaza. I brought my daughter with me and hoisted her high on my shoulders. She wore her Minnie Mouse t-shirt and together we called for justice for the children of Palestine #FreePalestine
Karen Twomey Cybercultures 