However inconsequential it seems, an action achieves more than words.
The slaughter continues.
As you and I go about our day, a population deprived of fundamental rights for decades shelter from carpet bombing. Women, children, men, desperately hunt for food and water to survive the day.
Children without parents howl in bombed-out buildings they once called home.
Wounded grandparents bleed slowly to death, untended, unnoticed.
Bodies, wracked with pain, drift out of consciousness, beneath tons of rubble, listening for rescue that will not come.
Men holding white flags, trying to protect their family, are shot in cold blood by snipers.
Graveyards are be bombed and the living see, even in death, that they’re without value.
Today, another few hundred will be erased by a ruthless, supremacist military machine, supported by the richest nations in the world.
Then they’ll be erased a second time by a military propaganda machine and a complicit media.
Governments will mouth platitudes, but their actions will make plain that civilians, today, don’t matter.
Later we’ll each be asked why we let it happen.
Later there’ll be promises of ‘Never Again’.
Later there may even be some facade of ‘justice’.
There’ll be no ‘later’ for the many thousands who have died, and the many more thousands who will die in the months to come.
Some will respond with: ‘Yes but what about….?’
What does it say if we respond to abject suffering by pointing out that others suffer too?
Some will respond with: ‘Technically this isn’t genocide, or even a war crime…..’
What does it say if we turn our gaze away from the urgent need of a child today, so we can, instead, debate the meanings of words and the parameters of legal definitions?
Some will respond with a shrug: ‘it’s how things are in this world”. Perhaps they’ll trot out the tedious and discredted pseudo-science of Social Darwinism, or Machiavelianism, of plain, old-fashioned Supremicism in one form or another.
What does it say about us if we think that the best humans can do is to behave without humanity?
Perhaps they’ll say their God is loving and designed the world this way.
What does it say if we prefer institutionalised protestations of compassion to actual acts of compassion?
Some will respond with: ‘it’s complicated.’
It’s not.
The politics are complicated.
Ths history is complicated.
The human need is not.
Some will not respond.
They won’t want to offend anyone, or they think it’s unprofessional, or they fear for their job, or they’re busy, or, or, or…
I pass no judgement.
We must each of us, today, and for the rest of our lives, live with our conscience.
I struggle to balance my responsibilty to be aware of what’s happening, with my need not to get overwhelmed.
I struggle not to let fury drown out compassion.
I struggle against the easy fallacy of blaming civilians, on either side, in any conflict, for the barbarous actions of their rulars and the global corporations that profit from pain.
My struggle though doesn’t matter.
It’s dwarfed by the struggle of a single desitute human sitting in the wreckage of home, family, culture, landscape, nature, health, hope and future.
This horrific moment is the final, catastrophic death of any claim the West might make to moral, ethical or humanitarian principles.
We’re all in the rubble.
We must rebuild from the ground up.
We must start by putting aside every excuse for inhumanity, and embracing those who need unconditional care.
Human and other-than-human.
We must offer an unconditional embrace of life.
We must make a commitment to better.
Our commitment doesn’t matter to a man, a woman or a child sheltering, starving, as bombs drop from the sky.
Yet commitment is all we have.
Commitment which we turn, today, and every day, into practical action.
This is where I usually have a biography and invitation to connect.
Not today.
Please do what you can, today, to alleviate the suffering of people in Gaza.
Please do what you can, today, to alleviate the suffering of people in all zones of war, oppression and conflict.
However you do it.
However small an action it seems.
Please plant a tree or talk with a neighbour. Give money or amplify silenced voices.
Please imagine and create better.