Children are magical. They arrive innocent and new, a chance for humanity to have a fresh start. An ordinary result of human biology and the propagation of the species. Nothing quite prepares you for the miracle of that moment. I remember meeting the eyes of every one of the four children I birthed. I remember witnessing their existence and entering into an immediate unbreakable contract of love and protection. It wasn’t just a child born that day it was also the day I became a fierce mother.
It is our duty as adults to nurture our children. To love and protect. To deliver them to a world with a future. But not just our children. All children. The children of the world are all our children. You don’t need to meet a child to hold them. Their eyes look beyond their parents to us all.
Yet we fail. As adults we continue to betray these children. Our contracts lay dusty and broken on the floor alongside discarded toys and promises that this will be different. It’s not. Circumstance makes perpetrators of us all. We are by our mere existence, complicit in the failure to deliver our, all children, a future free of poverty, of war, of sexual abuse, of climate catastrophe.
The story of our parenthood is the same as the story that came before us. We are the result of traumatised children having children continuing not just our gene pool but the unbroken legacy of trauma and pain. Every generation of adults has the opportunity to break the chain. Every generation fails. How do we as a world of fierce mothers and fathers transform our pain into protection? Our greed into good? Our hate into peace?
Right now over 1.2 billion children live in poverty. A recent study in Australia reported one in six Australian women and one in nine men have been sexually abused by the age of 15. Globally, one in seven 10–19-year-olds experience a mental disorder. Depression, anxiety and behavioural disorders are among the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents. Our children are being born into a world with an uncertain future. 90% of the diseases resulting from the climate crisis are likely to affect children under the age of five. They watch adults continue along the path that is authoring their demise.
Right now in Gaza children are being killed. The region has a population that is so young that 40% of its residents are under the age of 15. And 40% of those who have been killed in the siege of Palestine are children. Little kids. Babies. Toddlers. Teenagers. Children who arrived innocent to this ancient conflict, but became part of the cost of ‘retaliation’ for a crime they did not commit. A consequence of a world they did not understand. Choices they never got to make. At the time of writing this, almost 4,000 Palestinian children have been killed. They continue to be killed at over 100 a day. Tiny bodies whose limbs protrude from the rubble of the homes where they once played, pay the price for the failure of us all. The failure to adult. The failure to protect. The failure to understand peace. The failure to resolve our conflicts in any other way except with more conflict.
Gaza is like a walled-in primary school under siege. Millions of children trapped in a nightmare they can’t escape. And those children who survive? What happens to them? They are a generation that will live with trauma as their parent. Their trauma as the hand on their shoulder that leads them to radicalisation and the continuation of a brutal pathway that will hurt, kill and betray future children.
Hamas currently have 240 Israeli hostages, of them around 30 are children. Many who do not know why they are captive. All these children hurt and traumatised and killed because of the anger and the vengeance of old men. They are the human cost.
No matter where you stand on this assault on Gaza, whether with Palestine, or with Israel, dig into your most primal duty and stand with the children. All children.
Killing children is wrong. It is the worst crime of humanity. And their blood is on all our hands.
Until children stop being murdered, none of our hands will ever be clean.
Ceasefire now.
– Mandy Nolan
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
