We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time.
- Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, 3/21/24, "The Shoah After Gaza"
Reading or listening to the news most mornings—national or international—is a Gothic experience, Gothic as in Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, his eye the eye of a vulture, bodies falling upon dead bodies and pulling them to pieces. Except that the eyes in the 21st century are the eyes of weaponry, man-made, and lethal, from the sky or on the ground as screeching protestors flee live bullets.
I am writing on August 5th and tomorrow is the anniversary of the American bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki on the 9th. As I have written before on this blog, I have a family connection to the after effects of these nuclear aerial bombardments. My husband's uncle, Norman Cousins, the founder and editor of The Saturday Review of Literature brought 12 "Hiroshima Maidens" to New York for reconstructive surgery. He and his wife adopted one of them:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/norman-cousins-peacemaker-atomic-age
As the American military brass descends on Israel, we await further escalations in the Middle East. Our beating hearts skip a beat. At least there's writing, a struggle for understanding, I tell myself. Writing as a form of activism. When we speak and when we speak out, when we speak civilly to one another, when we listen to suffering, our hearts settle, our pain eases.
Who among us has the best solution? I do not. Who can turn away from the atrocities in Gaza? No one. Too many. All of us. None of us. Some of us some of the time. Not turning away, even that could be the beginning of an awareness of our culpability, how we arrived at conflagrations and invasions in 2024. To have empathy for the injured on the ground, for the innocent children, for the search through the rubble of pulverized bombed out homes, whether it's Ukraine, Sudan or Gaza, or Israel, that is something, too. To donate to relief organizations, also worthy. But to ask the question what is wrong with us? And where do we go from here? And how can we heal from the atrocities and inequities we have inflicted upon ourselves and others ? And to remind one another that it is our taxes that pay for the military-industrial complex and a variety of despots in the world.
I have known soldiers, drone pilots and relief workers who have returned from wars. Many cannot sleep, they cannot eat, they cannot ever make love again, they drink too much. Once upon a time they were babies mewling and puking in their mother's arms, and then, suddenly, they were trained to be killing machines or doctors pouring blood into veins after a battle. Brave soldiers, heroic soldiers, patriotic soldiers, home from the seemingly unending wars, and suffering.
Though it's Monday, I'm writing a sermon, it seems, albeit an areligious one. Does it fly? Make sense? Heal your broken heart, and mine?