Do you remember the scene from the musical “Oliver” when little Oliver looks out the window onto the busy street below and his loneliness of being an orphan flows into his voice as he sings, oh, so pitifully, “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 he found his mother and family, but the story of the little Syrian, whose name was Aylan, did not have a Hollywood ending.
When the image of the boy lying asleep in the sand first appeared on the television screen, the producers warned us that the photo of the boy might be too graphic for their audience.
They wanted us to be able to shield our eyes from the terrible truth of betrayed innocence and what really happens to young immigrant children trapped in a nightmare in which they did not participate.
But you know something? We needed to look at this boy because he was one of us. Little Aylan didn’t fall from Mars. He was family and now he’s dead. And if many of us shed a tear at the sight of him, perhaps we owe him at least that token of our affection. Hopefully we can do more.
The three-year-old’s lifeless body was an in-person sermon to the rest of us that we cannot afford to ignore. As Americans, we have always stood firm in responding to the human needs of our brothers and sisters around the world. It is who we are; is what we do.
President Obama has promised that we will accept 10,000 refugees. That is a start. But we need to do more. We need to show the world that the true wealth of our nation lies not in our gross national product, but in the generosity of its people.
A generation ago, a past generation of Americans dug deep to help the impoverished and desperate victims of World War II with the Marshall Plan. We can do it again.
Where, oh, where is the love? You are right here in this generous land of big-hearted immigrants. Let’s do it for Aylan.