Aug 14 2010

Photo of a Child in Iraq

Child

I can’t even remember where I found this photo, for a diary that never got written, and I never had much to say about it. It reminds me of the last line of Rilke’s poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo.

“You must change your life.”

3 comments

  1. This is from Glenn Greenwald 24 July 2010

    http://www.salon.com/news/opin…

    In April, 2003, she interviewed the doctor treating Ali Abbas, a 12-year-old Iraqi boy who had just lost 15 relatives, including his father, pregnant mother and three siblings, as well as both of his arms, in an errant American missile strike on the Baghdad suburb where he lived.  While this child had burns all over his body, some of them infected, putting him in constant pain, Phillips asked his doctor this question:

       Doctor, does he understand why this war took place? Has he talked about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the meaning? Does he understand it?

    As Joan Walsh put it at the time:  Phillips asked this “question” after the doctor explained that Ali said he hopes no other “children in the war will suffer like what he suffered”; “Phillips seemed shocked by Ali’s apparent inability to understand we were only trying to help him.”

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