Lifestyle Fashion

Where, oh, where is the love?

Do you remember the scene in the musical “Oliver” when little Oliver looks out the window at the busy street below and his loneliness at being an orphan is reflected in his voice as he sings, oh so plaintively, “Where, oh, where, oh where is love?

I thought of this scene from Oliver when I looked at a YouTube photo of another little boy, this one in a red shirt and blue shorts, whose body was lying face down on the shores of the Mediterranean. Another sad and lonely child, but this one was too real. This little boy was dead.

Oliver was fiction and eventually found his mother and family, but there was no Hollywood ending to the story of the little Syrian boy, whose name was Aylan.

When the image of the boy lying asleep on the sand first appeared on the television screen, the producers warned us that the photo of the little boy might be too graphic for their audience.

They wanted us to be able to shield our eyes from the awful truth of innocence betrayed, and what really happens to little immigrant children caught up in a nightmare they had no part in.

But you know something? We needed to look at this little boy because he was one of us. Little Aylan did not fall from Mars. He was family and now he’s dead. And if many of us shed a tear when seeing him, perhaps we owed him at least that show of our affection. Hopefully, we can do more.

The three-year-old’s lifeless body was a flesh-and-blood lecture to the rest of us that we cannot afford to ignore. As Americans, we have always been steadfast in responding to the human needs of our brothers and sisters around the world. It is what we are; it’s what we do.

President Obama has promised that we will take in 10,000 refugees. That’s a start. But we need to do more. We need to show the world that our nation’s true wealth lies not in our gross national product but in the generosity of its people.

A generation ago, a past generation of Americans dug deep into helping the impoverished and desperate victims of World War II with the Marshall Plan. We can do it again.

Where, oh, where is the love? It’s right here in this generous land of big-hearted immigrants. Let’s do it for Aylan.

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