I fantasized about writing a dystopia when I was young. The story that I left half-finished and that I didn't get a chance to complete later on, was set at a time when the end of the world had arrived. I now remember that the most difficult part was not to write down the story but to imagine and describe how the world would be right before doomsday.I thought about it for days. Would continents break apart due to massive earthquakes? Would there be hell-fire from wild volcanoes all over the world? Would metropolitan cities be destroyed with nuclear attacks? Or would we have a big, dirty, dark surface up in the sky because of air pollution? Would climate change make us all wear masks and suits to protect ourselves from the extremely dangerous environmental effects? I was not only trying to create a scene for the book but also looking to find answers for myself: How would the world be when we come to the end?There is no doubt that I was under the heavy influence of some dystopian futuristic books and movies.It was a long time ago. Then, when the protests erupted on the Arab streets, a kid in Daraa in southern Syria wrote on his school wall with a can of black spray paint: "It's your turn, Doctor." Bashar Assad got angry, and every Syrian paid the price. The cost has been staggering: half a million people were killed in the last six years. Almost 5 million refugees, the majority of whom are women and children, have been displaced into neighboring countries, while more than 6 million people are displaced internally. Nearly 14 million Syrians need humanitarian aid, and 7 million don't have enough food. Some 652 children were killed in 2016 alone according to a UNICEF report, and at least 850 were recruited to participate in violence. More than 3 million Syrian kids have grown up with nothing but war, like their elders in Iraq and Afghanistan, making us wonder how their mental health and psychological stability will be in the future? But these were just statistics of a place like hell on earth for us who watch it all from the windows of our safe zones while making small talk with each other and drinking lattes.In the fall of 2015, dead bodies of those kids started to wash ashore on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. When I saw them first on the shores of Libya, I remembered that I had tried to fictionalize the world's end in many ways years ago. I had thought of numerous dark scenes back then but never imagined something like that. Maybe the end of the world would come in an era when the corpses of dead children were less important than dead fish. It was absolutely not normal to pass through days when self-proclaimed sensitive people grieved over a lion named Cecile killed by hunters in Zimbabwe, yet they said, "Don't show us photos of dead children." Maybe the end of the world was not going to arrive as in a scene from a dystopian movie, but in a way that ignored children's dead bodies washed up on golden shores on warm, sunny days. People would think of it as a regular day, but it might be the beginning of the end and no one would notice that day had arrived until the very last scene. How would you describe a time period when eggs of loggerhead sea turtles deserve more sensitivity than children washed ashore?I asked myself for days to recall the last time I felt like this, while the dead bodies of refugees who fled their war-torn countries to stay alive were appearing on coasts one after another, as if my brain was going to explode. I was frozen with shock and awe as if I was hit on my throat, feeling despair for not being able to do anything. Even crying over it felt like a luxury. The last time I couldn't find the right words to describe the tragedy was when I saw pictures of dead babies killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza that were placed in ice cream freezers since no room was left in the morgues. The last time I felt ashamed like that was when I saw a photo of a child being operated on with his eyes wide open without any anesthetizer after his legs were severely injured by a barrel bomb in Syria; it hit me like a ton of bricks since I was whining and concerned over having surgery the next day in a comfortable bed in a fully equipped hospital. And I recalled the last time I thought that we were responsible for people who were treated badly but we didn't know after seeing the images of children in Rohingya in Myanmar, tortured and hung because of their identity and religion. Now thinking, how did I continue my life after seeing the images of African children trying to stay alive in the grip of poverty and misery? How did I go on living after seeing all those?Not the first timeIt's been six years since the first children of thousands were killed in Syria. Amid ongoing diplomatic talks, there have been quite a lot of serious cease-fire violations. Syria was not the first, and will not be the last place, that unbearable killings and violence take place. It's still very far from being over, and yet we no longer talk about it. The top news is all about Donald Trump, Brexit, the rise of the far right in the EU, and the future of the Western world. We have already forgotten the millions of people who need protection and help.I am going to and coming back from big conferences, making comments in political discussions, getting on and off planes. And I am also asking myself when did all those images leave my mind? While I wait for my baggage at the airport now, and I wonder when I forgot the children of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Rohingya or Africa that were drowned and washed ashore? I remember the moment that I was looking at the photos of Syrians refugees that suffocated in a chicken truck in Austria and promised to myself that I won't forget it. What was that scared human being so much and force him to see an hours-long travel in a chicken truck as a pass card to salvation? How can I really understand the conditions that pushed them into the hands of greedy human-traffickers, while I still have comfort to stay away from the images of violence and luxury to forget them? How can I, how can we talk about their tragedy while we are just unblushing tourists who occasionally visit their traumas?After all, aren't we making selfish sentences such as "Let's take a selfie" shortly after we feel sympathy? I woke up in a room with a view of the Mediterranean Sea this morning, and I couldn't even look at it. Drowned children were not its fault, but I don't think I can see it as a nice deep blue sea for a while. But eventually I will forget. We all forget. Justice isn't done, and we all should be ashamed.