John Simpson, one of the best known (and at times, controversial) of the BBC's foreign correspondents, has just done a piece on From Our Own Correspondent (Radio 4 - download the mp3 of the entire edition or read the transcript of Simpson's piece) which is worth some time. When Suffering Gets Personal charts his change of attitude to violence and its effects following the recent birth of his little boy...
"...in Kabul the other day, and in Baghdad a couple of weeks earlier, I could not help noticing a change within myself. I tried to find out dispassionately what had happened, of course, but when I looked at the bodies on their stretchers and the injured moaning in pain I felt a new kind of anger. I knew immediately what it was all about.
Last year, after four miscarriages over a period of some years and virtually giving up all hope of having a baby, my wife and I had a son: a healthy, active, jolly little boy we have named Rafe... With six billion people on earth, having a child is scarcely a rarity. But in our case it was so unexpected, so gratifying, that Rafe seems to us like a miracle.
I already had two daughters by my first marriage and have always, fortunately, been close to them: even more so, now that we all - weirdly - have children of the same sort of age. But I confess that when my daughters were young I was not so aware of their uniqueness: everyone of my age seemed to have children then. I understand things better now.
And to see the miracle of other people's lives snuffed out wantonly on the streets of Baghdad or Kabul, or London for that matter, for some scarcely understood political or religious motive, seems to me nothing short of blasphemy.
Having been through the first and second Gulf Wars, and watched the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Nato bombing of Belgrade in 1999, I do not really care any longer what the cause is. It is the civilians on the receiving-end who matter.
I am sorry if this sounds pious or sentimental. I do not mean it to be. But I have finally understood something, through the blessing of having another child late on.
It is that life itself is immensely valuable. Not just the lives of people who think and look and maybe worship like you and me, people who are attractive or well-educated or rich, people who are the right type of Christian or the right type of Muslim. All lives."
[Read the rest online...]
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