Witnessing Genocide: Infinite Echoes of Gaza
If you are not looking, if you are not seeing this, what is the point? Where has our humanity gone?
Every month, we have a staff meeting, and I leave home early to pick up breakfast for my coworkers. That’s how I find myself downtown staring out into the gray morning sky, waiting for the paper bag of hot-from-the-oven bagels. Across the street, a man returns from walking with his dog, and the smell of yeasty dough and steaming carafes of coffee is warm and homey. It is an ordinary day.
Mulling over the façade of the Pita Pit that’s been on the corner for as long as I can remember, I wonder what my neighbors would do if tens of thousands of bombs rained on us like the frogs of Revelation. If our schools burned and our hospitals crumbled and our children parents friends lovers teachers students grandmothers cousins leaders babies lay underneath.
Every day, every hour, images prick at my brain, their sting lingering as if someone stuffed my skull with nettles. I understand now what shell shocked looks like on the face of a five year old boy who watched his parents die. The cracks in my heart expand as I will myself to remember how to breathe in a world where the people with platforms and power are silent. I have repaired this heart a dozen times, but I am…
