Sometimes You Don't Look Away

There are so many atrocities in the world, and not all are far away. Horrendous things happen in your country, your town, in your suburb. Every week, sometimes every day, we hear awful things in the news and read terrible things in the paper that take our breath away, plant horrible images in our heads that will never leave, and leave us thinking, THIS is the worst...how can this happen...what worse thing can possibly happen next?

Sometimes, you make the decision not to listen and not to look. Because sometimes it's just too much to bear. And we have to keep going in our own lives, for our own children, and our own mental health. So sometimes we choose not to look. And we feel bad at not looking, but we still don't look. And that's normal, it's human.

The massacre of people in their homes in Houla last week made me look.  The first I saw was some stuff on Twitter on 27 May, with references to this article in The Guardian. Newspapers featured the bodies of the executed and mutilated children on their front page - something news editors do not do lightly.

Days later this article in The Times added more - and it is so unbelievably, graphically horrible what was done to these kids it is a struggle to read, and must have been an awful thing to report on. This article is now available outside The Times pay-wall, and is titled Syria: the Tipping Point.

We can't even imagine what this whole thing was like for the victims and survivors, or their families, neighbors and friends.

I am confident the world will not look away on this. It is easy to blame governments and diplomats for doing too little, or doing nothing.

But I think this, surely, is not going to be one of those times.

We still don't know who did this, exactly. But whoever did it, whether government forces or not, clearly intended to incite terror and civil war.

But the regime in Syria must be held responsible, and I believe it will.



So, I feel a little silly doing this, but I will add my voice:

Today, Friday June 1st, is the day bloggers around the world are calling for action on Syria.


Sign these petitions calling for action from world leaders to stop the killings:


Save the Children

and

Avaaz.org

The following was posted by Kate Takes 5 today:

"Yesterday morning we started off with one tweet and four people who had made the decision not to look away. By 1pm we had reached 50,000 people and made 91,000 impressions. By 3.30pm it was 77,000 and 117,000, and Syrians journalists and bloggers were getting involved. If one person tweeting a link to an article can snowball to this then just think what 77,000 can do."


Thank you for reading.


Please tweet or share this post - or the links within - in whatever way you can to spread the message. 


If you are a blogger who would like to participate please write a post and use the hashtags #tippingpoint #Syria #Stopthekilling to promote it.