kids, hey

“What about the dog Bim? And the chickens; they are to be fed”

“I wanted Harry Potter to Come (with his invisible cloak, yes we will not be seen)...”

“I like my dress, it cost three hundred roubles. (no you cant have it to mop up blood)”

“This is where he shot my dad in the head and threw him out of the window.”

“God? I don’t know, there is only force, military force.”

Words of some of the children survivors from the Beslan Massacre… They aired a documentary made by talking only to the children, it was strangely surreal, these cute little kids, doing what kids do, conveying the rather heinous imagery of their experience told with a paradoxically ingenuous yet deliberate tone. To turn down the volume one could have been watching ‘Kids Say the Sweetest Things’ with your ridiculously smarmy host Michael Barrymore… perhaps. But no, unfortunately we have a group of children mentally scarred talking of anger, revenge, and blowing up some Chechens in return. Eight years old. Certainly, kids tend to say things as they see them, sweet or not.

Violence breeds violence. What civilised sacks of steadily putrefying cells we are. Somewhere else, a rebel asked about Beslan laughs and throws across a remark about the children of Chechnya; ‘this is Beslan every day, our children are killed every day’ . Indeed. But what about the children of humanity; I fear they are dead already. Can you not feel their dry brittle little bones snapping under your feet as you walk blind through the forest?

Nobody informs you that you can see… it’s a tree. Not a figment of your imagination.