The Wheat Field

As the President praises Putin, a photograph tells a different story

I was touring the streets of the ancient Marais in Paris with a friend recently when we saw a sign down an alley for a pop-up gallery exhibit of prize-winning news photography. As a lifelong journalist, I had to have a glimpse, if only for a few moments.

So many of the pictures featured the refugee crisis. Living here in the U.S., an ocean and thousands of miles away, our news tends to dwell on the politics. But in Europe the crisis is inescapably in the foreground, and one after another, the photos vividly captured the aching human drama.

Then on a far wall was a gigantic picture of a wheat field. As I got closer, I saw that some solitary object was sitting in the middle of the waves of grain, although I couldn’t quite register what it was.

I moved to within inches of the photo and continued to stare for several minutes. The object was oddly familiar, but my brain refused to compute, somehow not allowing me to understand exactly what I was seeing. Then, very slowly, bits came into clear focus.

A chair.

A blue chair.

A chair from an airplane.

Still strapped in the chair was a person.

A human being.

Parts of a human being.

The image was taken by Jerome Sessini at the site of the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down by rebels in Ukraine on July 17, 2014. Russia had armed the rebels with anti-aircraft missiles, and they shot down the passenger plane filled with innocent civilians.

As the horror hit me, I stepped back and noticed that I was surrounded by Sessini’s grim photos from that day. You can click on this link to see them for yourself. It would be wrong for me to simply show the picture of the chair here without giving you fair warning.

The image of that chair in the wheat field came back to me this week after hearing our President yet again praise Russian President Vladimir Putin. When confronted by Fox News about Putin being an unrepentant killer, Donald Trump dismissively said, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”

The remark has received widespread condemnation, for all the predictable reasons. While America is not perfect, any comparison with Putin’s Russia is an outrageous false equivalency. Our leaders do not routinely assassinate their critics in the United States, and we don’t allow for the wholesale murder of innocent civilians. We’re not a strongman dictatorship, and should not aspire to be one.

Take a look at that photo of the wheat field if you need to understand why. That could be your loved one strapped into that chair. Or you.