HERO

Imagine that you spent an entire day making vegetable soup, salad, and fresh bread.

  

Sustenance.

It's dinner time. Your child dips her spoon into the soup bowl, lifts broth and veggies to nose level, then flips the spoon, dropping soup back into bowl. Over and over.

 

She doesn't want to try one bite. Or pay attention.

You snap. Say something like, "Do you have any idea how many kids in this world are starving, and would give anything to eat a bowl of home-cooked soup?"

You'd like to think you're teaching your children to be appreciative; to understand that there's a great big world out there with plenty of people who suffer, and are in dire need of what most of us take for granted.

But the real purpose of making such a comment is to shame that child into eating the soup.

This morning as I read about the sudden death of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anthony Shadid, I felt a similar shame. Shadid, a giant in modern American journalism, spent two decades traveling throughout the Middle East, immersing himself in the region so he could understand the lives of the men, women and children so dramatically affected by political turmoil, revolution and war. 

An American of Lebanese descent, Shadid had been reporting inside Syria for a week, gathering information on the resistance to the government of President Bashar Assad. Attempting to leave the country, he apparently suffered an asthma attack and died. New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks carried his body across the border to Turkey.

The recollections of Shadid's colleagues speak volumes about the man:

“Anthony was a model for every journalist and a warm, generous human being... he displayed a nuanced understanding of the region but also a special sensitivity for ordinary people whose lives and livelihoods were at stake. No one was more committed to getting the full story of the Middle East and, above all, conveying its human dimensions.’’

“Anthony wanted to be as close to the action as possible, to see firsthand what was happening. He respected the people he wrote about. And he was as good a person as he was a journalist, which is saying a lot.’’

“He mastered Arabic so he could talk to people, unfiltered by others. No other reporter covered the region with as much depth of knowledge, cultural awareness, and historical context as Anthony Shadid.’’

"He brought a poet’s voice, a deep empathy for the ordinary person and an unmatched authority to his passionate dispatches.”

 “He changed the way we saw Iraq, Egypt, Syria over the last, crucial decade. There is no one to replace him.”

 “.... he wrote poetry on deadline... .He was one of the kindest, most compassionate, most empathetic people I ever met. He’s such a great friend. And that’s what made him so great as a journalist—he was able to somehow find compassion and empathy in everything he touched and wrote about.”

Mr. Shadid’s determination to write the story led to great risk and peril. He was shot in the shoulder while reporting in the West Bank. He and three other journalists were kidnapped in Libya by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, held for six days and beaten before being released. His final assignment in Syria was arranged through a network of smugglers. Traveling by night to a mountainous border area in Turkey, he entered Syria with Mr. Hicks after pulling the wires on a barbed-wire fence apart and squeezing through them - all the while avoiding being discovered by pro-government authorities.

In an interview last December on NPR's "Fresh Air," Shadid recalled a previous journey into Syria: "I've done things that maybe I wouldn't have done in hindsight," he said. "It was scarier than I thought it would be.... [but] I did feel that Syria was so important, and that story wouldn't be told otherwise, that it was worth taking risks for. But the repercussions of getting caught were pretty dire....I don't think I'd ever seen something like what I saw in Syria... You're dealing with a government that's shown very little restraint in killing its own people to put down an uprising. ... And I got to spend a lot of time with [the activists] because I spent a lot of time in safe houses."

Connecting with people on the ground.  And all across the globe.

The loss of the talent, character and voice of Anthony Shadid is profound. His work explained in vivid, human detail how policy decisions affected ordinary lives, and how ordinary people had been forced to pay an extraordinary price for living in a region, practicing a religion, or belonging to a particular ethnic group or social class. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remarked that she read Shadid's  work very carefully, as he "had his pulse on what was happening."

Shadid's prose was beautiful and brilliant. In the opening of his new book, “House of Stone, Shadid writes, "Some suffering cannot be covered in words. This had become my daily fare as reporter in the Middle East documenting war, its survivors and fatalities, and the many who seem a little of both. In the Lebanese town of Qana, where Israeli bombs caught their victims in the midst of a morning’s work, we saw the dead standing, sitting, looking around. The village, its voices and stories, plates and bowls, letters and words, its history, had been obliterated in a few extended moments that splintered a quiet morning.”

Anthony Shadid died while attempting to understand and explain the transformation of the Middle East and the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces.

He lived, attempting to teach his readers - and the world - that there's a great big world out there with plenty of people who suffer, and are in dire need of what most of us take for granted.

Freedom. Peace. Hope.

 

RIP Anthony Shadid. Your death was an immeasurable sacrifice, that has shamed this child into eating the soup.

QUING Hereby Decrees: Heroes don't demand our attention, but they deserve it.