I’ve just been in to kiss my daughters and rearrange them in their beds, as I do every night. I’ve just smoothed their blankets and moved lost teddies closer to them, as I do every night. I’ve just stroked their heads and listened to them gently snore, as I do every night.
Tonight was different. Not in routine; never in routine… But it was different. Somewhere out there a mother or a father in Syria have done just this. Among the war and discord in their country, they’ve gazed at their children and smoothed their hair and taken a breath in awe at the life they created. A life that, for all intents and purposes, the U.K. is about to help rip apart.
Isis, or Daesh as they don’t wish to be known, are cowards. Cowards to hide behind civilians, innocent men, women and children. Cowards to use those innocent people as collateral damage, knowing the bombs and guns and war about to descend on them will cause death and destruction that Syrian people have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with.
But hey, what’s a few more lives right? A few more dead if it means we can just get to ISIS. If we can just kill people to show them that killing people is bad. To teach them that they are getting to us. You know, there’s a much faster way to stop ISIS. Faster and with less death. Less collateral damage.
Stop funding them. Stop providing them with weapons. Stop providing them with training. Stop paying them to bomb us and provoke war and fear and help the governments commit controlled mass murder. But they won’t. They want the world fearful. They want the world at war with each other and now, now the UK are getting their bombs ready to rush in and join yet another fight that is nothing to do with us. Another fight that will drag on for years and destroy families and futures. And for what? Oil? Money? Power?
There are mothers out there who imagines castles in the sky for her children. There are mothers out there kissing their babies goodnight and marvelling at their innocence.
There are mothers out there just like me, who have no idea how their lives are about to change.
And I wish it would just stop.