There is a chill in the air in Vimmerby this morning – minus one degree, the thermometer says, and the clouds hang about the sky as though they cannot quite decide whether to stay or go. Partly cloudy, the weather man calls it. I call it the kind of morning when you pull your cardigan tight and sit by the window and wonder what on earth the grown-ups have been doing now.
Because the grown-ups have been busy, you see. They have been terribly, terribly busy.
One month ago, they started a new war. The Americans and the Israelis are bombing Iran, and now the Houthis in Yemen have fired missiles at Israel, and Marines are arriving in the Middle East on great grey ships, and someone has struck a military base in Saudi Arabia and wounded American soldiers, and in Kuwait an airport sends black smoke into the sky from drone strikes. I sit here in my cold kitchen and I think: do the men who order these things have children? Do their children watch them leave for work in the morning and wonder what their fathers do all day?
In Tehran, they have bombed a university. A university! Where young people go to learn about the world, to read books, to become doctors and teachers and perhaps even writers. Now there are only broken walls and dust. And in Bushehr province, a family of four has been killed – a whole family, gone, like blowing out a candle. I do not know their names. Nobody has told me their names. But they had names, every one of them.
In Lebanon, a boy named Jawad Younes was buried on Saturday. He was eleven years old. His uncle Ragheb was buried beside him. Their family compound was struck the day before, and now there is a hole in the world where Jawad used to be. They say there were tears and defiance at the funeral, and I believe both, because that is what you feel when something so monstrous happens that your heart does not know which way to break.
I have been thinking about Jawad all morning.
When I was a girl in Småland, I knew that the world was large and full of terrible things, but I also knew that most people were good, that most mothers loved their children and most fathers came home at night. I still believe this. But I also believe that the good people have grown too quiet, and the loud people have grown too powerful, and somewhere in between, the children are paying the price.
But listen – the world is not only war. The world is also strange and wonderful and sometimes so peculiar that you have to laugh.
In Kenya, they are smuggling ants. Yes, ants! One single ant can sell for two hundred and twenty American dollars. People are creeping about with little containers, stealing ants from the wild, because collectors in faraway countries want them for their collections. Two hundred and twenty dollars for one ant! Pippi Långstrump would have had something to say about that. She would have bought a thousand ants and set them all free in the garden and invited them to a pancake party. Because that is what you do with creatures – you let them be.
And on a small island in Quebec, halfway through Lent, the people have put on masks and are dancing jigs in the streets. Few of them observe Lent anymore, but the tradition lives on – a beautiful little rebellion against the church that once ruled their lives. I love this. I love that people dance even when nobody tells them to. Especially when nobody tells them to.
In America, the people are marching. They call it "No Kings" and they fill the streets to say that they do not want a ruler, they want a leader, and there is a difference. In Minnesota, Bruce Springsteen sang to the crowds, and I imagine the sound carried over the flat land and into the sky. In London, tens of thousands walked against the far right, because they remember what happens when the far right gets what it wants, and they have decided: not again. Not here.
These are the Pippi people, I think. The ones who are strong enough to lift a horse but kind enough to set it down gently.
In Indonesia, they have done something that would make every child I ever wrote about raise an eyebrow. They have forbidden children under sixteen from having social media accounts. Just like that – no more scrolling, no more feeds, no more of whatever it is that makes children sit still and silent when they ought to be climbing trees and building rafts and getting into the kind of trouble that makes you a better person. I do not know if a law can do what a good forest and a long summer afternoon can do, but I understand the impulse. The children must be allowed to be children. That is the one rule I have never wavered on.
And in the middle of all this – the wars, the marching, the ant smuggling, the dancing – there is a horse race in Dubai. A famed race, they say, going on despite the war. The horses do not know about the war. The horses know about running, and the wind, and the feeling of being alive and fast and free. Perhaps that is not such a bad thing to know.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the war continues. It has continued for so long now that the world has grown tired of it, the way you grow tired of a headache that will not leave. Russian strikes have killed at least five more people. Peace talks have stalled because nobody can agree on where to sit down and talk, which tells you everything you need to know about why the talking never works. And in Pakistan, diplomats are gathering – from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt – trying to find a way to stop the new war before it swallows everything. Twenty ships have been promised safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty ships. It is something. It is not enough. But it is something.
And off the coast of Greece, twenty-two migrants died at sea. They had been adrift for six days. Six days without enough food, without enough water, in bad weather, on a small boat on a large ocean. They were trying to reach somewhere safer, and instead they reached nowhere at all.
I wrote once that everything great that ever happened in this world happened first in somebody's imagination. But I also know that the worst things happen because of a failure of imagination – because someone could not imagine that the people in the boat were people, that the child in the rubble had a name, that the family in Bushehr province sat around a table and ate dinner together the night before they were gone.
The temperature in Vimmerby is minus one. The clouds are thinking it over. And somewhere, right now, a child is watching the news, or overhearing the grown-ups, or simply sensing that heavy thing in the air that children always sense, and that child is asking: Why?
I have written so many books and I have never found a good answer to that question.
But I have found this: that kindness is not weakness. That courage is not the same as violence. That the strongest person in the room is often the smallest. And that the world belongs to the children, whether the grown-ups remember it or not.
It is minus one in Vimmerby, and partly cloudy, and the world is what it is.
But it does not have to stay this way.
