9 January 20139 January 2013 Politics American children are more important than other children Stephen Wright Here are some photos of Barack Obama with American children. He has good rapport with children doesn’t he? Here’s a photo of Obama receiving the news about the massacre of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Here he is with some of the children from Newtown who weren’t murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Here’s the approximate number of children killed by CIA drones to date (January 2013) in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. 211 Here’s a story about a drone attack from a child who survived when one of Obama’s Hellfires dropped in on him in Pakistan. The text is taken from the Stanford-NYU website, Living Under Drones. Sadaullah Wazir, teenager, former student from the village of Machi Khel in Mir Ali, North Waziristan, was severely injured in a September 2009 drone strike on his grandfather’s home. Sadaullah has filed a complaint before the UN Human Rights Council. ‘Before the drone strikes started, my life was very good. I used to go to school and I used to be quite busy with that, but after the drone strikes, I stopped going to school now. I was happy because I thought I would become a doctor.’ Sadaullah recalled, ‘Two missiles [were] fired at our hujra and three people died. My cousin and I were injured. We didn’t hear the missile at all and then it was there.’ He further explained, ‘[The last thing I remembered was that] we had just broken our fast where we had eaten and just prayed. . . .We were having tea and just eating a bit and then there were missiles. . . . When I gained consciousness, there was a bandage on my eye. I didn’t know what had happened to my eye and I could only see from one.’ Sadaullah lost both of his legs and one of his eyes in the attack. He informed us, ‘Before [the strike], my life was normal and very good because I could go anywhere and do anything. But now I am not able to do that because I have to stay inside. . . . Sometimes I have really bad headaches. . . . [and] if I walk too much [on my prosthetic legs], my legs hurt a lot. [Drones have] drastically affected life [in our area].’ Perhaps Barack Obama could go to Waziristan and speak to Sadaullah Wazir and explain to him why he had to blow his legs off with a Hellfire missile. Or maybe Sadaullah could meet Obama in the Oval Office. It’s not as if he isn’t used to having children there. They could have their picture taken together. Stephen Wright Stephen Wright’s essays have won the Eureka St Prize, the Nature Conservancy Prize, the Overland NUW Fair Australia Prize and the Scarlett Award, and been shortlisted for several others. In 2017, he won the Viva La Novella Prize. His winning novel, A Second Life, was published by Seizure, and also won the Woollahra Digital Literary Prize for Fiction. More by Stephen Wright Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 2 First published in Overland Issue 228 24 January 202325 January 2023 Politics The end of the politics of care Giovanni Tiso The daily spectacle of televised briefings was not unique to New Zealand, and it may simply be the case that Ardern thrived when given the opportunity to speak to the public directly—in other words, that she was better than others at it. Alternatively, we could say that her rhetoric found in the pandemic the ground on which to turn into concrete action. Either way, the benefits we derived in terms of lives saved from the remarkable extension of that social license are literally incalculable. First published in Overland Issue 228 15 December 202216 December 2022 Politics Let them vote Sam Wallman At sixteen years old you're old enough to die in a war, have worked for two years, drive a car, leave school, pay taxes, get married, secure public housing, vote in over 15 other countries, have an existential crisis. Let 16+ year olds vote!