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Stories of the World
the arm of god in gaza
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“An arm, that’s all that’s left of them” the caption reads. An image of Gaza in my Instagram feed.
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An arm;
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hand left limp and perfect,
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like that of God’s hand, in the Creation of Adam.
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This arm, human; painted in gray dust by the remnants of bombed buildings, rubble and genocide. A man holds them in a piece of dark cloth with the last remains of his neighbor, friend, brother. The person attached to it lost to the inhumanity of war, death, destruction, retribution, greed. One life lost of thousands, babies burned, starved, left for dead, stolen. How can we turn our heads comfortably on our pillows at night, sleeping soundly under the sound “freedom.”
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Whose?
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At what cost?
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Who earned the right to live this way? To die that way?
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We sleep under the same starry sky, yet I don’t fear the sound of jets. “That’s the sound of freedom” they say.
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Ours,
not theirs.
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Our comfort allows complacency, compliance and contentment. Safely inside heated homes we read about sorrows of the world and the loss of children, not our own. We acknowledge brutality, and shake our fists at the television and phones, and go on to eat a full plate of dinner.
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Who are the generations lost to war? Artists, philosophers, writers? Poets? Mothers? Fathers? Sisters? Brothers? Sons? Daughters? Elders who couldn’t escape?
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Elders who wouldn’t escape.​
Man in Aleppo, Syria Photo by Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images
An image of Syria comes to mind. An old man sitting on the edge of his bed, smoking his pipe, listening to a gramophone. His building bombed, nothing left of the windows, rubble and open sky now sit in his apartment as companions.
Turbo Tax tells me how much I owe each year to death. Line 2: The fraction of one bomb dropped on civilians, in a country I’ve never seen, on a family I never met, for a “Freedom” I don’t think is necessary.
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The next squares on my Instagram feed are of my friends’ kids laughing. Start juxtaposition to genocide, but that’s the algorithm. A cute baby hippo, fall colors to paint your cabinets, an ad “For $25 you can have a Harris/Waltz yard sign.”
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No thank you.
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I won’t vote for reality star fascism, but I can’t fully support administrations that condone and fund genocide.
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Where are we to stand?
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My heart hurts trying to comprehend the enormity of the world. My youth lead me through intellectual battles of ‘right and wrong,’ fighting for the people, “Viva la Lucha,” Live the struggle.
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Buddha says “Life is suffering.” The freedom of my suffering, doesn’t compare to the suffering of occupation; to lives lost, family lineages ended, homes stolen and pieces of each other found in the street.