Angelic toddler can alter history

A Turkish police office carries the lifeless body of three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi. Photo / AP

IT'S DIFFICULT to fathom what can turn the tide when it comes to public opinion about atrocities and human suffering.

The public are seemingly almost immune to starving African children. That's been around for as long as Bono has been singing about them at concerts. Families in Thailand refugee camps? Out of sight and sound. The world has been displacing communities, violently and tragically, for almost as long as the human race has been on this planet.

In modern times, media has captured the agony of human suffering, frequently to indifference. But this image of a 3-year-old toddler, reduced to a piece of flotsam on a Turkish beach, has fixated the world.

First off, it is unusual for mainstream media to show a dead person. The Times-Age has only done it once before, with a stillborn baby, to promote a fundraiser for a "cuddle cot". The public's reaction was sympathetic and positive.

There is the almost peaceful, sleeping, unblemished look of the child as he lies front down with his cheek in the sand. Many deaths, when they are portrayed in photos, are unsympathetic to dignity and appearance. The toddler looks angelic.

What brings some to tears is the realisation that while his parents had a choice, and made the choice, to head out on a dangerously unseaworthy boat into the Mediterranean, his concept of life was absolute love for his parents, and complete trust in what his parents decided to do. Once things went wrong, he was lost overboard, torn from that security, and he perished alone. He had no chance.

I cannot blame the parents. There is no stopping a family, from a country with appalling problems, who wants to reach for something better elsewhere. The idea of restricting migration is a modern social concept, against the natural urge of humankind to roam for better pastures.

Can we overcome our modern disdain for refugees and migrants, the roaming strangers, and realise we have a humanitarian crisis, not a grubby border problem?

The photo of the toddler could be the photo that changes history.