Dear Aylan, I Have Failed You

 

 

 

Dear Aylan,

 

I know what I write here does you no good. You are gone from this world that failed you.

 

I write to you for selfish reasons. I write because I saw you washed up, alone, on a distant beach in Turkey. Seeing you has made me reflect about what humanity has done to you.

 

Many saw you. Like me many cried for you. We felt our hearts grow heavy and sink as we thought of you scared, confused and in pain as the sea took you. 

 

Yet we also felt shame. Shame for ourselves, shame for our species, shame that we are not decent people as we suppose ourselves to be. 

 

Some of us will be moved to action. Most will be moved to strong words online. 

 

I wish I could tell you that your death will move the hearts of the world. I wish I could say that the politicians in Europe and at the UN will at last agree to actually lead and do the right thing. I wish that I could say that all the racists and demagogues who demonized you, your family and those desperately seeking a new home will fall silent and that the borders and arms of the men who guard them will open. 

 

I wish to tell you this and perhaps one day I will. Yet fear is strong in this world you walked in for three years. These days, it seems to be all that drives us.

 

Fear dominates too many grownups, especially those with the most peace and wealth to share. We who have so much are terrified of losing even a tiny portion of what we have. We have so much to spare but we are selfish, petty and protectionist.

 

When we see those in need pounding on our doors we spend money we could have used to feed you on walls to keep you out. Never mind that the walls are more expensive.

 

Instead of making sure you and your family could have joined your aunty in Canada, we denied you. 

 

Why? Because we don’t want to lose anything we have, especially to people who don’t look like us, speak like us, and share the same faith as us. We didn’t want to feed you, clothe you, and unlock the doors of our schools to you because of who your parents were and because of where you were born.

 

We know better than to lump you with those terrible men in black who drove your family and four million others to flee for their lives, but we still label you and all your people as terrorists because it made it easier for us to push you away.

 

For this, I am truly sorry. You didn’t deserve to be rejected. You didn’t deserve to live all your three years on the run, in camps. Your hometown, Kobani, didn’t deserve to be pounded into dust by ISIS shells and American jets. Your nation didn’t deserve a president who mowed down ordinary people when they demanded their rights. 11 million of your fellow Syrians didn’t deserve to become homeless when the soldiers and the rebels fought each other for their country’s future, never stopping to realize that they were extinguishing an entire generation in the process.

 

We shed tears for you now Aylan, but we had none when your country collapsed into brutality. Our eyes were completely dry as we watched the camps in Turkey and Lebanon swell year after year. And not nearly enough of us shared photos of people like you stranded at sea when they tried to escape.

 

This hits me especially hard Aylan. It hits me because I was a guest in Syria. I saw your homeland when it was still beautiful. I walked among the ancient sites of Damascus, Hama and Kerak. I ate shawarma in the Old City and sipped pomegranate juice. I took a bath and got a massage in a Hamam and I talked with your people about your world and what you wanted from it. I saw children like you playing without fear in the streets.

 

Oh, Aylan how I wish you could have seen this beautiful Syria. All you knew of your homeland in three years of life was ruins.

  

It was a glorious sight Aylan, with glorious generous, hospitable people. The fact that my countrymen and those who share my privileged Western, first world life could not show you, a baby, the same hospitality and the same openness is a stain on us.

 

I pray that we become better people and that we cease to be ruled by fear. I hope that your memory rises from the depths and finally pushes us to welcome those who come after you with warm embraces.

 

If we do not than we, as people, as human beings, are lost and we never deserved to share this world with you in the first place.


Much Love,

Sean

 

 

 

Does Facebook Need More Misery?

Does Facebook need more misery?

This has been on my mind a lot lately.

As I’ve been trying to deal with my bouts of depression these past few months, Facebook (and social media in general) has been a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, it’s been a great way to share my darkest feelings and get support from friends. On the other, I’ve also felt as if I’ve been burdening others by putting negative energy in the newsfeed.

 This conflict, I think, exists on some level for a lot of people.

There’s an unspoken rule on Facebook that sharing too much negativity is taboo and that posting a status that reveals or alludes to a darker personal issue is simply attention seeking.

Personal problems should be kept personal, talked about in private or among close friends in a closed online setting like messages, email or Skype. 

These attitudes were what kept me in the past from sharing many of my problems online and they’re understandable.

Sharing too many personal issues online does get grating. It’s tiring to see that negativity in your newsfeed.

Yet at the same time I think there’s also a danger in allowing too much positive energy.

What do I mean by that?

Well, social media has a powerful emotional effect on people.

As much as we like to think that Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram are separate worlds from our ‘real life’ deep down we all know that what happens online is just as important as what we do in the office, at home or in the grocery store.

Our selves, for better and worse, are intimately connected to social media and the line between our day to day lives and what we do in cyberspace is increasingly blurry.

If you’re a millennial, this is especially true.

The younger you are, the more your feelings, attitudes and sense of self-worth are going to be informed by your online personas.
 

Now, you might say: ‘Okay, so doesn’t that mean we should focus on sharing positive or non-negative items so that we avoid bringing ourselves and others down?’  

 Well, in my opinion, no not necessarily.

Much like in ‘real life’ the unspoken rule about not being open about our miseries causes more problems than not.

For someone who struggles with depression, bipolar, loneliness, social anxiety or another issue social media is sometimes the only outlet they have for sharing their misery

Again this is especially true if you’re a teenager who’s practically been raised from the crib with a device in your hand.

If you’re wrestling with personal monsters the constant barrage of selfies, personal accomplishments, funny memes and self-aggrandizing updates makes it that much harder to open up both online and in person.

The fact that most people predominantly share good news about themselves, creates a false impression that everyone you know is in a better place than you and that no one else can relate to what you’re going through.

Essentially, it’s the iceberg effect. With social media, we almost always see the tip of the person floating above the water not the much larger, deeper part that’s beneath the surface.

Most of us know this. However, we’re human beings and that means what we know doesn’t always match up with what we feel.

Even if we know that the doctored Instagram images of Susie with her smiling baby don’t represent the hours of tantrums, dirty nappies and sleepless nights that come we parenting all we see is the smiling picture and that clouds our minds.  

 
The same can be said of Molly’s vacation to Spain, which no doubt was earned with hours of tedious paperwork and years of being unable to take long vacations.

Because of this, and because we are so intimately familiar with our own shortcomings and faults we bottle ourselves up.

 So what to do? If anything? 

Well, as I said before sharing every single difficulty is not warranted. Disputes with another person, no. Venting constantly about how awful work is, yeah probably not.

However, deeper issues I actually think are worth sharing. Deep personal misery, uncertainty in yourself, the fact that you aren’t as strong as you are at a moment are just as much a part of life as our happiest triumphs.

Sharing our miseries and uncertainties openly allows others to know they are not alone. It allows others to understand that most of us have similar or identical insecurities.

And when we do achieve something, the fact that we’ve been able to overcome the darker periods of our lives makes our accomplishments even grander.

I’m sure there are certain aspects of this issue I have overlooked or haven’t discussed.

However, ultimately I think adding a bit more serious, self-reflective and self-questioning updates about ourselves has more benefits than detriments.

If nothing else, the least we can do is know we aren’t the only ones who hide our miseries behind a smiling profile picture.

 

Eerily Relevant Mark Twain Quotes About America

  

(1)

'Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.'

 

 

 

(2)

'God created war so that Americans would learn geography.'

 

 (3)

 'Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.'

(4)

'Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently;they read its literature, but not that of the other side.'

 (5)

 'It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.'

(6) 

'...it is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate.' 

 

(7)
'A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe; but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.'

 

(8)

 'Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.'

(9)

'We have the best government that money can buy'

 (10)

 'In America, we hurry--which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us, and toss and worry over them when we ought to be restoring our racked bodies and brains with sleep. We burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe. When an acre of ground has produced long and well, we let it lie fallow and rest for a season; we take no man clear across the continent in the same coach he started in--the coach is stabled somewhere on the plains and its heated machinery allowed to cool for a few days; when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the barber lays it away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own accord. We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, but none upon ourselves. What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!'

(11) 

'If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.'