Aug 12, 2024

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

They bombed the Tabeen school in Gaza City with so much explosive force that not a single full body was recovered.

It was just pieces of people everywhere. They bagged body parts in 70-kilogram piles to try and estimate a death toll.

It was impossible to identify bodies or sort out which parts belonged where. Just one big stretch of undifferentiated carnage. Kind of like how the entire Gaza onslaught is starting to feel.

These massacres are all starting to blur together, like the lifeless bodies ripped apart and mixed together in bags. We westerners say “another massacre” when we talk about it, referring to it as just one more nightmare in an uninterrupted deluge of nightmares that’s been going on for ten months.

But it wasn’t “another massacre” for the people who were there. For the woman whose foot that used to belong to. For the boy who used to own that arm. For the man whose intestines those once were. For them it was the end of the world. For their loved ones it was unfathomable anguish.

Each and every one of these victims in each and every one of these massacres felt as much as you and I, cared as much as you and I, hoped and dreamed and loved and longed like you and I, and was just as capable of suffering as you and I.

Their bodies intermingle in the wreckage and the massacres intermingle in our memories, but we can’t just let it all blur together into background white noise. We can’t let this become our baseline. Our new normal. We can’t let them do that to us. We can’t let them rob us of our humanity like that.

Do not let them harden you. On top of everything else they’ve taken from this world, don’t let them take your caring and sensitivity as well. Every death in that school was just as significant as the earliest deaths when this nightmare first began. The only thing making us see it as “another massacre” is our reflex to avoid feeling it all for the first time from moment to moment.

But this is all happening for the first time. That woman had never died before. Neither had that boy, or that man. All their hopes and dreams and plans were cut off for the very first time. All their experiences. All their relationships. Everything they had to share. Those endings deserve a bit more weight and a bit more reverence than having been part of just “another massacre”.

It’s safe to feel. It might hurt, but it won’t harm. We can just pause, put our hands over our hearts, feel the feelings deeply and respectfully all the way through, and then get back into the fight to try and stop this thing.

The victims deserve our sorrow. We deserve to have wide open hearts full of compassion. And the monsters who are doing this absolutely do not deserve to take it away from us.

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