Back in October 2023, the first video that stuck with me was of a young Palestinian boy with big, frightened eyes as he stood in a corner of a crowded hospital, shaking in fear after just having survived a nearby explosion. The fright, anxiety, and complete desperation on his little face and tiny body was absolutely gut-wrenching to watch. I remember thinking to myself at that time: It can’t get worse than this.

I woke up yesterday to a video of a man holding his headless child in his hands. It has only been getting worse, and this is by far, the worst of it all.

In between the video of the frightened young boy to the video of the headless child, I’ve seen:

mothers crying in agony trying to identify their children’s charred dead bodies;
young girls watching their entire family burn to death;
children with tears rolling down their cheeks as they returned to their tents with only a grain of rice;
a boy screaming for his father as he watched him erupt in flames;
a brother scraping his dead sibling’s bloody guts off the roads;
children organizing their damn own press conference, thinking that the world will at least listen to them and their pain;
lifeless children lying dead on the floors of hospitals, roads, and tents;
a child sharing whatever little of the food he could get to the other children around him;
a family of 3 children sleeping in a tent with water seeping through the top;
children being shot at point blank.

There are times when I have to remind myself to feel because I fear my body has become desensitized as a way to cope. But this is nowhere near the level of agony and pain that the children of Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Palestine, and so many other children worldwide are currently facing.

You know what all of these children have in common? They are all being used as mere tools to propel political ideologies of a select group of people who are capitalizing off of their man-made societal power. How low have we stooped as a society that we now use children, hell even infants, as political accessories? We are failing our children.

Choose children over war.

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” – James Baldwin