Between
posts of sleeping babies and chihuahua videos, I see this. This. It
seems impossible to carry on but also completely easy. I feel
compassion and heartache as I read the article and see the pictures,
but as soon as I look up from my phone, it's gone. Like it isn't
there. Like it never happened. Is that normal? Some kind of
self-preservation? Well, I don't want to be self-preserved. Real lives ended in forceful, brutal ways. Heads severed from
bodies, yet here I sit with my head firmly attached; across the
world- my neck is in tact. All around me, children's shouts of
excitement echo off the walls of this aquatic center where I now
mourn. The kids swim, slide, splash, dive. They are rightly oblivious
to the crazy sickness of hatred and pride which clambers to strangle
out freedom. Devotion to the God of peace ended the lives of these
Ethiopian men on the sunny beaches of Libya. The contrast between the
beauty-beach and the ugly that occurred there is deafening and odd.
My swimming-pool life contrasts their martyred lives in the same odd
way. I feel silent, helpless, supremely lucky and unfairly
privileged.
