I haven’t been here in a bit. Trying to tend my own garden, love where I can. The fruitlessness of words. It would seem that we are supposed to accept the deaths of over 7000 children in Gaza. Watch helplessly as the piles of dead children grow. Their bodies as sacrifice to — what? — I honestly don’t know what. Revenge? Correction? Defense? Money? Power? Land? These things are old. It feels — what? (good?) to type the words, to wrestle with confusion and anger and sorrow. Madness. The absurdity of thinking otherwise. A kind of desolate resignation. I watch the “stories” of one of the intrepid reporters there, in Gaza, I watch as men scramble over rocks and pull gray bodies from the rubble. Babies in men’s arms, legs and arms, heads, dangling. A faint cry over and over mamamamamama. I listen. A thin flowered mattress used as stretcher to carry the wounded (so many children) where? The mind asks dumb questions (where are those thin mattresses coming from?). I see a young man digging frantically with his hands and I feel cold and dread-ful because what are we here, we humans, accepting this violence, these piles of dead children. Are we giving up, even as we sit here, fat and easy and safe, talking and typing talking and typing. Arguing over what abouts and how abouts. A woman I know insisted that the numbers (of dead children) are inaccurate. The people there scrabbling and scrambling in hell, after the bombs drop, helping one another even as they wail. It would seem that the acceptance of these piles of dead children and the endless violence is the end of humanity, a giving up, but I think otherwise (for a moment) when I watch that man there wrap the gray dusty body of a woman, the red jewels spilling from her head, in a flowered cloth. So gently, still.
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Oh Elizabeth, THANK YOU! For finding the words, for writing them, for knowing that the people trying to insist this mass murder of babies is justified, are just dead wrong. I can barely write anything these days, because just carrying on with my life in the face of this horror seems ludicrous, and yet what else can we do but take the next breath, do the next indicated thing, keep living, while so many keep dying. Thank you for your humanity, for helping me understand that I'm not crazy, I'm seeing what I'm seeing, the nightmare is really happening, even if outside my window the leaves turn peacefully, a world away from gray bodies being pulled from the rubble, the sobbing fathers, mothers, children, the hollow eyed doctors, and everyone starving, everyone parched. And now it is raining here, and all I can think in that the people of Gaza are forbidden to collect rainwater, as by legal statute it belongs to the Israeli government. How can this be?
It sickens me to know, to see, to understand, that the world cares nothing for children, that they are disposable, collateral damage. I want to scream at someone, but to who? When I was pregnant with my middle daughter, children were dying in a war. When I was pregnant with Katie, children were dying in a different war. Why the fuck is this still going on?