If you haven't heard about the refugee crisis going on recently, I can only assume you live in a cave. Thousands of people are trying to escape from hideous situations in Africa by coming across the Mediterranean. They're not coming over on nice Sealink ferries either, but on overcrowded tiny boats and dinghies. And they are dying in droves. They are drowning. They are hiding out in lorries, suffocating, and then being abandoned. Some of them have survived long enough to get to Calais, where they are trying to get here (some by running through the Channel Tunnel...which...bravo, sirs), and England takes umbrage because their holidays are being slightly cocked up by it. NOTHING GETS IN THE WAY OF AN ENGLISHMAN'S BOOZE CRUISE! NOTHING!
Now, being a fairly insular, bigoted, if not downright racist island, there is a lot of anger at these refugees. Fucking up the borders, causing queues (QUEUES! QUELLE HORREUR!), stopping Only The Young's first single being released on time. Trying to get in here and steal our jobs AND benefits, or whatever we think people come here for. The media and government are doing their best to inflame the situation by describing people as 'swarms', dehumanising the reality of thousands dying in desperation, and thus making it easier to overlook it.
So, this po-faced grumpiness on the right is then tempered by increasingly flailing arguments on the left. It's a humanitarian nightmare, and needs resolving, but it won't be resolved on Twitter or Facebook. Twitter and Facebook however didn't get that memo, and an image of a drowned toddler is now circulating to convince the right of the error of their thinking. "LOOK!" they scream "CHILDREN ARE DYYYINNNG".
Now, this is awful. It's awful on several levels. Since this is the internet, have it in bitesize chunks:
1. The death of any child is awful. The death of a child uprooted from their home to travel across the sea in the night, in circumstances adults describe as terrifying, is unimaginably awful. That's the problem with the entire refugee situation - it is unimaginable to the majority of even the poorest British folk. Showing a dead baby isn't going to suddenly make a lightbulb click on in their heads. Stories from the refugees themselves MIGHT, but it is generally beyond our national ken.
2. The bulk of the "SHOOT THE FUCKERS" brigade are a bit thick, let's be honest. Shooting unarmed people solely for wanting to come into your country is what they might do to you in North Korea, and is not in any way a logical solution. The people voicing this sort of argument are the sort of simplistic idiot you really are not going to convince with a thousand dead child pictures. They don't want a debate, they just want it to go away so they go back on their booze cruises, and refill the papers with nice titty pictures of some bird from Big Brother instead of all this suffering and horribleness.
3. If the only way you can win an argument about a horrendous situation, that really doesn't need any embellishment, is by showing dead baby pictures, then you need to RETHINK YOUR DEBATING STRATEGY. The problem is not necessarily the person you're debating with, but your own tactics. Or they are a slightly better educated version of number 2, in which case, cut your losses.
4. Now this picture is in the social network domain, you can guarantee that in a year or two it will be recycled as some god-awful clickbait meme. "THIS CHILD DROWNED BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T PRAY TO JESUS AND WEAR SUNSCREEN, LIKE AND SHARE FOR A PRAYER". You know the sort of fuck awful bollocks that's endemic on Facebook. The identity of the child is currently unknown, but surely deserves a better memorial than that. Which brings me to the most important point...
5. That's someone's child. A family is bereft right now; on top of everything else, their baby didn't make it. It's likely the parents didn't either, but we don't know for certain. Nonetheless, if your child had just died, in any circumstance, would you want their photo shared around social media, without your knowledge or permission, solely to make a gloating, political point?
During the Vietnam war, a photo was taken of a napalmed child and became emblematic of the futility of the struggle. Sometimes a photo can speak louder than a million pointless arguments. But that was in the time before the ubiquity of media.Anyone who really cares about the refugee situation - with a positive or negative bias - has thousands of sources at their fingertips, video footage, political commentary, individual stories, photos.
It is not your job to educate through sensationalism.Leave that to the tabloids.
UPDATE: The tabloids seized upon that photo with glee the very next day, and behold, David Cameron changed his policy on immigrants. It's a strange state of affairs when our government can only do the right thing when The Sun and Daily Mail tells them to.
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