I stared at the headline for a while in mute silence: “Austrian police say up to 50 migrants’ bodies found in truck.” It’s the kind of headline that you read and think, “Whatever awful realities will unfold underneath those words, they surely shouldn’t be nicely filed there on the side bar of a website, right underneath news of Celine Dion returning to perform in Las Vegas or Apple’s latest “media event” or the latest round of lies promises being served up by politicians on the election trail today. They shouldn’t be nicely filed anywhere.
But there they are. And the story is every bit as awful as the headline portends. Worse, actually. In the day since I first saw the headline, the number of dead has risen to 71. And there have been arrests made—human smugglers who apparently cared so little about their “cargo” that they allowed them to suffocate, agonizingly, in the back of at truck on the side of an Austrian road. Children, women, men, whose last memory on this earth will be of gasping for air and pounding on the side of a truck box. Of nobody hearing, nobody listening, nobody caring.
More headlines today: “Up to 200 feared drowned off coast of Libya.” More desperate people fleeing from war, more children, women, men for whom, apparently, the prospect of a long, arduous journey over treacherous seas, and the likelihood of more closed doors should they ever reach land was more palatable than the lives they were fleeing in Syria. Or Iraq. Or Libya. Or some other chunk of land ravaged by war and poverty, some other place where the thought of staying is so awful that even boats and trucks piloted by the smugglers seems preferable. How awful must a situation be to contemplate such things? How bleak must a future seem to put a child on a boat? In a truck?
