The children are speaking…Stop…and listen

Victor Glover’s (the pilot of the Artemis-II) Words: 

“Trust us Earth, you look amazing, you look beautiful. And from up here, you also look like ONE THING. Homo sapiens, all of us, no matter where you’re from or what you look like, we’re all ONE PEOPLE. The Earth from up here is just a fragile blue Planet without Nations or Borders…and from Space everything that we are fighting for and over just disappears. We are all ONE PEOPLE, and humanity is connected despite or rather through our differences.Earth is a “unique oasis” of a “spaceship” and we as a People should cherish this Planet and each other. And we should put aside our differences to find common ground.
And as we get closer to the nearest point to the Moon and the farthest point from Earth and continue to unlock the mysteries of the Cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries on Earth, and that’s LOVE. And to all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we love you, from the moon and back!”

Victor tell the above to the little girl in Curaçao (444 square kilometers of stories…135 kilometers of coastline)…and remind the adults around her that she has every right to be a trauma-free-child…because we are ONE PEOPLE:

E TERENO DI MI WELA

Patras di mi wela su kas
No tabatin pòpchi pa hunga kuné
Sí un huki skur i skondí, ku tabata usa pa eksperimentá riba un mucha su kurpa…
Ora ta hunga ‘Mama-ku-Yu’

Den kurá di mi wela
No tabatin lugá ni ora pa pasa kontentu
Sí tabatin un kasita kaminda tabata pasa oranan di doló na man di primunan 

Den kamber di mi wela
No tabatin lugá pa señorita ni inosensia
Pero sí pa maldat, skuridat, sèks, sushedat i mas aktonan perverso

Den balkon di mi wela
M’a siña ta pasivo i obediente

Den baño di mi wela
M’a siña sera mi boka i hasi loke nan bisa pa nan no kibra mi boka

Den e tera di mi wela su kura
A derá pa semper: mi kurason, mi virginidat, mi hubentut i mi inosensia! 

Victor tell the above to the little children in Svay-Pak-T Cambodia, so impoverished that they are sold into child prostitution from the tender ages of 6…and thus reminding their parents and other adults around them that no child should ever suffer abuse at the hands of other Homo Sapiens:

SVAY-PAK-T

In Svay-Pak-T
Worden kleine meisjes en jongetjes verwekt
Een aantal jaren genieten ze van enige ouderlijke liefde, verzorging en bescherming
Maar schrijnende armoede loert op de achtergrond en speelt een dominerende rol in vele beslissingen

Aldus…
Worden 6-jarigen, een leeftijd waarop elders in de wereld kinderen naar school gaan, netjes klaargemaakt en ingepakt als een postpakket, verkocht en afgeleverd aan sex-slaven-handelaars

Sex-slaven-handelaars, die op hun beurt weer deze kinderen doorverkopen…
Aan…

Aan rijke oude heren, die heen en weer gaan in Svay-Pak-T als ‘slechts onschuldige wandelaars op vakantie’

Sex-slaven-handelaars en ‘onschuldige vakantiegangers’…op zoek naar steeds jongere ‘prooien’
Die vervolgens na het misbruik, letterlijk worden opgesloten in kooien (2 m x 2 m)

Niemand die hun verdriet ziet,
want iedereen doet het teniet
‘Ach het valt allemaal wel mee’ en
Door deze kinderen draait de economie
Maar ik zeg: ‘Nee…nee…nee!’
Dit moetstoppen
Dit kan nooit kloppen
Kinderen horen vrij en blij te zijn
En wij volwassenen mogen nooit verhinderen
Dat kleintjes mogen ‘kinderen’

“When all of this started I wanted to thank God in public…and I want to thank God again,” Victor Glover said softly. “The gratitude of seeing what we saw, doing what we did, and being with who I was with… it’s too big to just be in one body.”
That single line — too big to just be in one body — has now become the heartbeat of a global conversation about what Space does to the human mind when Earth is seen from a distance where everything familiar disappears.
Glover described the experience of seeing Earth suspended in endless darkness as something that stripped away everything unnecessary — leaving only awe, an acute awareness of fragility, and a profound sense of connection to life itself.
Now, his words are resonating far beyond NASA, not as science alone, but as a reminder that some journeys don’t just take humans to Space…they bring them face-to-face with how small, and how deeply connected, we all truly are.
From 250.000 miles away, the Earth seems small, fragile and not complicated at all. Borders are blurred out, the noise disappears and everything that felt so important becomes QUIET. You don’t see BORDERS, you don’t see RELIGIOUS LINES, you don’t see POLITICAL BOUNDARIES.

Victor tell the above to the little children in GAZA and LEBANON…who are being killed and left under rubble to die, just because WE as ADULTS consider BORDERS and OWNERSHIP of LAND so darned important:

NO CHILDREN…MEAN NO FUTURE

I hate that we praise endurance
Like survival is something Holy
And not forced

I hate that brutality can unspool itself in broad daylight
And people barely flinch

As if shattering every building, every child
Wasn’t enough
They bombed the graves too
Set fire to God’s Olive Trees
Turned schools, churches and hospitals into rubble and ash
Places where in war there are no enemies

And then you look around and you realize that people that you care about
Don’t seem to care about these children
And they choose not to see what you see
As if these children’s lives matter less
Because once you see, you cannot unsee
Once you see you too become accountable
And they don’t want the burden of these children in their hands

But these children speak…even beyond the graves…like…:

“My name is: Jawad Ali Ahmad. I am Lebanese.
I have remained beneath the rubble since the eighth of April, not because reaching me is impossible, but because no one has deemed me a priority. I am from Hayy al-Sellom, one of the impoverished belts surrounding Beirut. I have become a deferred number on a list of victims. My mother is still waiting for me, answering those who come to offer condolences in a broken voice: “Wait… I have not buried him yet.”
In a land shaped by death at the hands of soldiers, even survival has its hierarchies and so does dying. Some are pulled out in haste while others are left behind, their pain cooling beneath the stones. In forgotten cities, people do not die only once. They die twice: once when the sky collapses upon them, and again when humanity arrives too late.

Others who lend a helping hand speak for these children

Some say children are light weights to carry, but today when I caressed her little girl cheeks for the last time…my chest felt like I was carrying the highest mountain of pain.
A little girl without a name, without a voice, because she was silenced forever…and yet her limp body spoke for her, more eloquent than ever before. A child without a voice as so many others, but their unalived bodies speak louder than words. Killed during “Operation Eternal Darkness”.

There are days when words themselves feel almost indecent. Yesterday was one of them. People we loved, for their gentleness, their poetry, their humanity were erased as if they had never mattered. Not for what they did, but for who they were…and where they were born and where they lived.
What happened under the strikes of the army, the Defense Forces, goes beyond logic, beyond even war. When highly populated cities become targets, it is no longer positions that are being attacked, but lives that are being denied.
And the most unbearable thing is not only the violence, it is the silence that follows. The silence of the dead, but most of all the organized, diplomatic, polite silence.…which ends up feeling like permission.
We are still told about the past, about causes and pretexts. But at what point do we accept that nothing, nothing justifies children beneath the rubble? At what point do we stop recycling history to absolve the present? Till when do we accept a leadership that looks elsewhere, clinging to postures while the country burns.
As if declaring mourning is enough to replace action. As if naming those responsible could bring the dead back to life.

NO!!! This Planet is not only in mourning. It is betrayed, abandoned, exhausted. But something remains: a clear-eyed anger; a memory; and above all that humanity, that they have not managed to bomb away.
So we keep saying their names…these children names…we keep refusing oblivion, because to give in to indifference would be to kill them a second time.
And I as an author will keep writing about them!

So on the occasion of Palestinian Children’s Day, I want to share this poem as a message from the Children of Palestine to ALL the other children and the adults of the World; those who have seen them, stood with them, and carried their voices forward. And those who have not.
With gratitude and with hope, I look towards a future shaped by peace, safety, and love, where no child anywhere, is made to endure what others have endured, and where childhood is protected as a Universal Right beyond all borders, identities, and differences.

I AM A CHILD

I am a child
Who learned early that the sky can fall
Without warning
And still I look up daily

And I write to you not from ruins
But from what remains standing in me
From a window without glass
From a street that remembers its name
From a schoolbag that carries more than just books

I write to you
You who saw us through screens and distance
Who heard our names before they turned into numbers
Who refused to scroll past our lives
As if they were only shadows
We felt you
Like a small warmth arriving across a long winter
Like a hand reaching through the noise to say: “You are not alone!”

We are not only what happened to us…
We are the kites that insisted on rising, even when the wind was tired
We are the chalk that drew tomorrow on broken walls
We are the questions that refuse to end with silence

And you, children of other mornings, of safer nights, of homes that do not disappear
You carried us in your voices, in your drawings, in your courage to say what is right
when it was not easy to say
You made the world lean a little closer to justice

So we thank you not as victims, but as companions on a road still being written
Because you understood that childhood is not a place on a map but a RIGHT that must not be broken
Let us build together a World where no child learns the sound of fear before the sound of their own laughter
A World where names are called for birthdays, not for counting loss
A World where the sky belongs again to birds and dreams and nothing else

We do not ask for your tears alone, we ask for your memory, your stubborn kindness, your refusal to accept a World that explains away our pain

Stay with us, not only now but also in the quiet days when the news-cameras leave, because we have discovered something stronger than sorrow…that when 1 child calls out for dignity and another answers a new world begins to breathe
So take this POEM and keep it open, write your names besides ours and let us promise each other: “That what happened here WILL END HERE and never again-never again-never again  will childhood be asked to carry the weight of the World!!!

Iona Taylor