It's sometimes said that pictures speak more strongly than words, but this image is surely an example of both.
My brother sent me this compelling image before Christmas, and I'm very grateful to David Wolfe and his colleagues in Texas for giving us permission to include it on Share Radio. It speaks so strongly of the hope we all need as we approach the New Year but, most importantly, of the need to give children a future.
It was, of course, very good to hear that the United Nations eventually passed that resolution in the week leading up to Christmas, but the violence continues in the Middle East. There were 29 children and young people killed in the Hamas atrocity, but the most recent estimate from Gaza was over 8,000 children dead. As our commentary last week said, it's a cruel echo from the Massacre of Innocents in the wake of Christ’s birth two thousand years ago.
How can the deaths of children in Gaza be referred to as ‘collateral damage’?
So in this commentary, in the spirit of David Wolfe's image, we recall two really important messages about valuing generations to come: the first from Jesus, and the second from the book that I would choose to accompany the Bible and the works of Shakespeare to that mystical desert island: ‘Wind, Sand and Stars’ by Antoine de Ste. Exupéry.
Jesus was absolutely clear in his teaching about cruelty to children. When making this statement from Luke chapter 17, ‘It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble’, no doubt he was also aware of the horrendous massacre in and around Bethlehem, instructed by Herod just after his birth, and which had caused the Holy Family to become temporary refugees in Egypt.
Adult aggression is often met with adult hostility (notwithstanding Jesus’s teaching that we should learn to love our enemy), but there can be no motive that justifies taking the life of a child. Millstones will be on order in abundance to deal with the thousands of children who have been killed over the past two years, both in the Middle East and Ukraine.
All young people have a world of opportunity ahead of them, but their ability to achieve that potential is so heavily impacted by the way they are treated by adults in childhood and adolescence. That's why I so much value the epilogue of ‘Wind, Sand and Stars’, written nearly one hundred years ago by Ste Exupéry: but as true today as ever.
Every human born into our world has the same mix of amazing potential, whatever their gender, nationality, race or religion. It's not nature which condemns them to mediocrity and despair, but nurture.
Therefore, let us all make a new year resolution to vastly improve the way we value and respect children and young people: not only for the sake of their current circumstances and prospects of survival, but also to give them all a real chance to achieve their true potential as adults.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio