The vanishing point

All of a sudden, I understood that the people coming across the sea were not people in the plural, but in the singular. This I understood because I myself have children. I saw their deaths in his death. The image thereby penetrated my defenses, broke through the murmur and appeared to me as what it was: an image of reality. The boy was real, and his death was a real death. 
--The New Yorker.

{Photos of some of the people killed in Paris}

You wonder if anything would change if we saw the faces, heard the stories, of the people killed by all those bombs dropping from that vanishing point in the sky.