The Children We Forget
And other musings on this feast day
When others hear “Holy Innocents,” maybe they envision the ancient story of King Herod — a jealous ruler whose brutality is tucked neatly into scripture. But as I read my friend Brian Terrell’s post about this feast day on Facebook, it makes me think about how power changes names, yet the pattern stays the same.
Today I’ve been thinking about who the holy innocents actually are. Not in theory, but in our world. However, the more I think about them, I think about how difficult it’s become to stay informed without drifting into numbness, outrage, or resignation.
The holy innocents spoken of today aren’t relics of faith or figures frozen in history. And they’re not symbolic by choice. They’re the ones who bear the cost when power is, or feels, threatened — both in Herod’s Judea and Trump’s America. Their lives are shaped, interrupted, or ended by decisions made far above them. And all of it is justified in the familiar language of safety, strategy, or necessity.
The way I understand the holy innocents in modern terms is that they are the children in classrooms turned into political stalemates. From Perry to Uvalde to Sandy Hook, kids become casualties while adults argue safety, rights, and optics.
The holy innocents are children of migrant neighbors, separated from their parents — detained, displaced, or left alone by shifting policies designed to deter rather than protect. In children, fear becomes leverage as their trauma becomes messaging.
In my own community, the holy innocents are children growing up food- and housing-insecure, absorbing the quiet violence of instability. Hunger, stress, missed school days, and shrinking possibility don’t register as emergencies, but it shapes entire futures all the same.
They holy innocents are youth in over-policed communities, where surveillance replaces trust and “preventative security” teaches children that innocence is conditional.
And beyond our borders, the pattern repeats.
Children in war zones are killed or displaced not because of ideology, but because power is contested with weapons. We become numb to it because it’s not in our backyard, as their lives become headlines and statistics.
Refugee children cross borders alone or grow up in camps, suspended in permanent waiting, paying the price for geopolitical decisions they didn’t make.
Children in climate-disrupted regions suffer malnutrition, displacement, and interrupted education as environmental collapse collides with political inaction. They inherit consequences without ever consenting to the cause.
Girls denied education under authoritarian rule lose their futures as a demonstration of control. Power asserts itself through restriction. Innocence absorbs the loss.
The holy innocents aren’t holy because they are perfect or pure. They are holy because their lives expose the moral fault line we’d rather smooth or jump over. They reveal what we are willing to protect, and who we’re willing to sacrifice.
Hello, I’m Sarah Scull. I’m a former journalist, and a proud member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. I’ve been featured with the Iowa Storytellers Project, but offline and beyond the stage I’m just a band mom, quilter, historic preservationist, arts advocate in Southwest Iowa.
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Sarah, thanks so much for this comprehensive share. The Innocents are also children living in homes with overwhelmed parents who have no available avenue for assistance. The unseen face lifelong consequences.
Terse, succinct and directly to the point . The plight of the innocents also extends to the endless cycle of hopelessness, which is created when 50% of all sales in our country is derived from 10% of its citizens. The suffering you so exquisitely describe, remains hidden by the four or five corporate conglomerates controlling all public information media, who determines what ‘news,’ is. Every faith believes, treat others, as you would be treated. Thank you for this exposé of who the innocents really are.