The Lessons of Aleppo – What Parents Pass on to Their Kids
Aleppo, a city in Syria, has a population of 2.3 million people. Chances are that you had never heard of Aleppo until the media splashed a video of a five-year-old victim of the brutality the city faces each and every day. As parents, our hearts ache for this small boy who sat alone, covered in dust and blood. We wondered why no one was there to comfort him, and we wanted to hold this child to show him that there was still humanity in this world.
What is to become of him? What will he grow up to believe about a society that so cruelly took his family and left him alone in the cold? This is how it starts: A seed is planted for a life of revenge and bitterness. This boy’s childhood is gone forever, and we recognize that the anger and destruction in the world is caused by our inability to climb out of the darkness.
The tenets by which we live our lives are set in place at a young age. Our surroundings, our lifestyle, our parents all shape our personality, our beliefs, and, yes, our future. We are bound by our culture, our religion, and the land we occupy, and we become trapped in thinking that our reality is the best reality. But while we hold on tightly to what we think we know, we are also trapping our children, embedding our beliefs, impressions, and life into theirs.
We watch the news and read headlines in our comfortable homes, hardly able to fathom what is happening in Syria or Turkey. We can’t possibly leave our lives and our jobs to go there and help. So we wonder, what can we do to make a difference in the world? How can we make an impact and keep these tragedies from happening?
Here are four things we can do right now to contribute to a better world and specifically to the crisis in Syria.
Reevaluate our own beliefs. As parents, we all know that our children adopt our mind-set. We need to be honest and see whether we are carrying any seeds of discrimination ourselves. If we are prepared to change and grow our own beliefs, we can inspire our children to do the same. This is summed up clearly in a verse from The Translucent Revolution, How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World: “Are we divided inside? If we are divided inside, there’s no way in heaven or hell that tomorrow we’re not going to have a divided world. It doesn’t matter if we’ve got the best of intentions in the universe; what really matters is the state from which we act.”
Our children inherit our internal state by osmosis. Being mindful of that can be the most important contribution we make toward a better world. We all carry forth into adulthood a little something that does not serve the world today, something clearly not worth passing along to our children. Know that every single time we soften our grip on a hurtful or false belief or opinion, we send a healing ripple into the ocean of life.
Open up a dialogue. Talk with your children, age appropriately, about the challenges our world faces, especially in the Middle East. Share with them how we are destroying each other in the name of religion and country. Educate them that this all stems from feelings of superiority and entitlement. Lead the discussion so they understand that we all have the right to live a good safe life and that no child, no human, should have to suffer at the hands of another.
Give of your time. Get out into your community and volunteer as a family. One of the most important things you can do is to plant the seed in your child’s mind that we are all one. Race and religion don’t matter when it comes to living in a peaceful world. We are all part of the human race. We never know which careers our kids will end up in, perhaps as part of the military or living overseas. Teach them early on that our similarities are more important that our differences. When we plant the seed of oneness in our children, it has the potential to unite the whole world.
Donate. If you are most comfortable giving a financial donation, there are many ways to do that.
Save the Children
International Committee of the Red Cross
Catholic Relief Services
UN Refugee Agency
UNICEF
Involve your children in this endeavor. Encourage them to contribute a few dollars from their allowance or piggy bank. Have them stand beside you as you make this contribution. Having them be part of the process will empower them to do so on their own in the future.
Mahatma Ghandi once said: “I am a Hindu. I am also a Muslim. I am also a Jew and a Christian. Some would even say I’m an atheist. Religion and the color of one’s skin—what useless ways to define and establish a nation!”
It is true that we have no control over our children’s fate or the adult choices that they will make. What we can control is the seed of love we plant in them and the soil of unity and oneness that we raise them with—right now.
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