Update 17 - "Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground"

I feel- damaged in some way. It seemed to start last Saturday, which made me wonder if it was the news of over thirteen-hundred Israeli deaths after a surprise attack by Hamas out of the Gaza Strip. Hamas being the group currently in charge of the Gaza Strip. Israel responded with just as much force in retaliation. The result a week later is a pending invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israel, and over 3,200 dead between the two nations. Mostly civilians. A good number of kids. The NNN has been a horrific but informative source of images and videos showing the results of either side’s attacks.

I thought about posting some pictures here, but that’s somebody’s kid. It was somebody’s baby put out in a news conference bloody and on its back. It was a mother and child dead in the street with blood pooled under them in northern Gaza. There are other images. I know that many people would advise not looking at things like that, but I think the horror is important. When we call for the death of another person, it is important we not think of a corpse, but of the process of turning a living, thinking, human being, into a bag of decaying meat. We need to think of the ripples one death causes in a community, let alone thousands.

Now in addition to the pissing matches disguised as duels of honor that is the Republican versus Democrat debate, there is also a nice buzz in the zeitgeist about Israel v. Palestine. Suddenly you can pick a side and be morally vindicated by one mob of strangers or another. And I can’t feel that way.

I feel sick in the soul. This butchery has been going on for thousands of years. There are kids getting killed for their dead father’s beliefs. There are orphans who are just going to grow up to hate those that orphaned them. And all this shit will play out again.

I know there’s bad blood, to put it very-fucking-mildly. That being said, history should be learned from, but not necessarily repeated. I wonder if either side truly believes that they can stomp out the other. That they really think they’re making a better world the closer they get to genocide.

I think it is easy to kill, if one does not think. I don’t think that anyone should live their lives in a manner that doesn’t include thinking. I think the calls for more blood shows just how truly little we have learned as a species.