Lydia

You know, the killing is so relentless that you almost get used to it. A classroom of children killed every single day. You write about it, you read about it. Someone’s mother digs herself up from the rubble. Someone’s father is split in half. There was a video of wounded man using his arms to crawl across the road. Another man is so hungry he weeps. You read the stories. Each one is more brutal than the next and somehow the brutality is banal. You are numb, for better or for worse. But there are moments in the day, maybe just a singular moment, when you actually contend with the magnitude of the tragedy, when you are able to quantify the loss and in those moments you feel crushed—there are no adjectives. There are people mourning their lovers. Students missing their teachers. Orphans. Widowers. Grandmothers who look just like your own. I cry when I think about the people who were martyred just hours before they could apologize for something, or confess to something, or have something to eat. Or the slain who believed they would survive. And as the rancid rotten people of the world pontificate and debate the definition of genocide, you are at war with yourself, trying desperately to ignore the material meaning of the word. You read the news and you read the news and it is so hard to accept that the dead, the thousands of people they are slaughtering, they are your loved ones and your loved ones’ loved ones. This isn’t just a bad dream.