At the bottom of the screen a text was running.
Short, cold, ordinary:
“Strange Baby starved to death.”
Today we started the day with another painful news.
In Fatih, Istanbul, a two-month-old baby died of malnutrition.
I stopped for a moment.
The television did not stop.
The screen did not go black.
The world kept spinning.
But something died inside me.
Strange Baby
I don't know if his name was Strange, or if we gave him that name.
But I know this:
That baby was not strange or poor.
The strange thing was the cruel people who left him to starve to death.
He was two months old.
So he only lived for 60 days.
When the things a baby needs to survive are so simple:
an embrace,
a tit,
a compassion,
a feeling of “I see you”...
Every second he breathes,
deliberately, willfully, blatantly starved.
This is not a story of poverty.
It is not a question of absence at all.
This is the deliberate killing of compassion in man.
The most vulnerable,
the one who can't express himself,
who has no language but to cry,
in a system that cannot protect
deliberately causing death...
What else do you call it?
Babies are the most vulnerable.
They cannot escape.
They cannot speak.
They cannot complain.
They cannot resist.
They just wait.
He waits even when he is hungry.
He waits even when it hurts.
Even in death he waits.
This baby waited too.
Maybe every second,
“They will come now”.
Maybe every time you cry,
“Someone will hear.”.
But they didn't come.
They did not hear.
In fact, they have heard...
and they shut up.
A society is measured by how it treats its babies.
We watched a sub-band on the screen today.
Tomorrow another sub-band will flow.
Then another one.
And every time
we'll get used to it,
we're gonna get a little more numb,
a little more “normal.”.
But no.
This is not normal.
This is not humanity.
“Strange Baby is dead,” they say.
No, no, no.
Strange Baby was murdered. right in front of our eyes
And with him,
and our humanity
once again
at the bottom of the screen
silently
it just flowed away.