"Seek peace, and pursue it" -Psalms 34:14
All I can think now is that it's important for us to watch this and suspend our making of meaning. As soon as we experience and are present to the horror unfolding, before we choose to make our meanings and fit them into our biases and worldviews there is what happened: refugee families lethargic and hysterical, suddenly faced with gathering their belongings and moving their shattered lives somewhere else; a son, wandering from man to man and screaming, whose grandparents are buried in the rubble (at the 28 minute mark); young boys filming on their celphones; eyes scanning the sky with what the journalist describes as a "sixth sense" for spotting MIGs.
One man, around the 29 minute mark, shows the blood-stained, empty interior of a van which was used to transport the wounded and dead, then makes his meaning: swears that he'll avenge these deaths in other villages and against Bashar Al-Assad himself, and the cycle of violence continues.
PBS Frontline journalist Olly Lambert is "the first Western filmmaker to spend an extended period living on both sides of Syria's war - and to document, on camera, the realities of everyday life for rebels, government soldiers and the civilians who support them."
"Despite all the training I've had and the knowledge of being in conflict zones, what does one do when there is an airplane coming back to drop bombs of that size? Would it be more likely the plane would drop the bomb in the same place or would it drop it somewhere else? Perhaps this is the safest place? I had absolutely no idea. You're just as much risk a hundred metres away as in this spot," he said.
Take these images and leave them on the table. Do not sift-- all violence is violence. The growing heat of knowing violence and not dismissing it, staying with the pain-- the roar of jets reverberates even over here. How do we respond, we who aren't ensnared in the day-to-day business of war?
On what to do, and thoughts about Anarchism and the Gospels, and societal Psychosis:
I'm thinking after watching the video of how to align my feelings with my actions, how to appropriately respond. Maybe a 1930s version of Steve Day would fly overseas to join the action, as did the young men and women who joined the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War (including about 1600 Canadians, who were followed as communists during the hysteria of the Cold War).
Or should I turn all my savings over to buying ambulances, shovels? That second point is radical but I am drawn more and more to the truth of it-- when I keep asking myself, interrogatively: "why, and why, and why?", I eventually can't ignore the fact that my savings represents hundreds of lives saved. Frivolity equals deaths, in real numbers.
As someone who was raised Catholic, this is the non-negotiable message of the Gospels; if you have two coats, you give the second coat to someone who doesn't have one. Don't wring your hands about it.
One of my favourite quotes on Anarchism came from an interview in the Catholic Worker Newspaper a few years ago. Paraphrased, it says that anarchism is an acknowledgement that there is never an end point, no perfect decision, no final answers, no systems. We are constantly creating a new world-- it is evolving, evolving...
"I'm not going to play at this sandbox anymore," is what Anarchism says to me.
Politics as usual is part of the automatic business of humans making meaning and finding patterns. One medical test for psychosis that I saw described on The Nature of Things was that participants were played static white noise and asked whether they heard voices in the noise. Participants who heard the static forming itself into ghostly voices were found to be more predisposed to psychosis.
Maybe that's what we do when the static gets too loud, when the jets roar too loud? We dissociate from the present and begin to assemble meaning?
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