• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, September 3, 2015

Newspapers across Europe, the U.S., and around the world grabbed their readers by the shoulders and gave them a good shake this week.

The photos have to be heart wrenching for even the most jaded of readers, and for me, the first-time father of a 1-year-old baby girl, they were like a kick in the gut. The tiny crumpled form of a toddler, face down in the surf on a Turkish beach where he had washed ashore after the boat he was in capsized. Then the Turkish policeman, mortified, cradling the body carefully (too late), looking away so he won’t have to see the boy’s face.

The boy, a 3-year-old Kurdish refugee named Aylan, and his older brother Galip, both drowned along with their mother Rihan, while their father Abdullah survived. It’s the kind of tragic story that has echoed down the millennia in the Mediterranean Sea, that ancient grave of unlucky seafarers -- but this is 2015.

So why is it still happening?

While newspapers often come under fire for publishing shocking images, especially where mortality is involved (the New York Daily News’ recent cover showing the on-air shooting in Virginia comes to mind) this is one case where it is seemingly accepted without comment. Even the most squeamish readers must realize that they are supposed to be upset, that indeed that is the whole point.

It’s fair to ask what it will achieve. 

With luck, in Europe, the intended destination of these unfortunates, it will galvanize a practical political response of the sort that has obviously been lacking over the last two years. There will be no easy solutions to the immigration crisis, nor will it simply be a matter of opening the continent’s doors to everyone.

Not all the migrants qualify as asylum seekers, and even wealthy countries can only absorb so many indigent people, however desperate they may be. Yet clearly something has to change, and in democracies, the impetus must come from the people themselves.

For Americans who see this image, the impact is admittedly a little more abstract, but no less real. It might make us reflect on the hundreds or even thousands of immigrants who have died trying to cross the border from Mexico, doubtless including little children whose families are also fleeing violence.

Given its highly political aspect, many will reject that comparison, but the image can still serve a purpose for them, as for anyone else who sees it and feels some kinship with humanity -- simply bearing witness.