Empathy
I haven’t been blogging lately. I just couldn’t.
It started with the massacre in Orlando. I made the mistake of looking at the faces of those killed. Boy, was that a bad idea. I probably could have loved each of them. They were killed by hate.
Baghdad. About 300 dead. Normal people. Shoppers. In the wrong place at the wrong time. In the wrong country. In the wrong story. Victims of hate.
It continued with the young man bleeding to death after being shot in his car. One too many. One that for some reason really hit me hard. This was a good guy. A really good guy. A guy many, many kids adored. And dead just like that. And yes, because someone was afraid of people with his color of skin. Someone had listened to the hate.
Then someone killing policemen. Targetting them at a protest, where people showed up to celebrate and honor life. More hate, and violence begetting violence.
I crawled away from the news. And I played a game, quite obsessively, to stop my mind from working, my heart from feeling.
But the world kept getting more bloody.
Nice. (Nizza, as we call it.) 80+ dead. Killed while celebrating a national day. Because someone hated too much, and chose a primitive, gruesome way to express the hate.
Coup in Turkey. Almost 300 dead. And the president”cleansing” not just the military, but the universites, courts and press, even parliament. Looks like a dictatorship in making, with the attempted coup as a convenient reason. Driven by greed, fear and hate of all who are on the “wrong side”.
Hate rising all over the world. Party heads spewing ever more vicious ideas of violence to counter violence. As if that ever worked.
And I wonder what will happen next. Hate has been unleashed, on purpose and quite deliberately. And at the moment, all attempts to ease it, to lance it, and let it bleed away, are in vain.
I’m being compelled not to feel – and compelled to feel.
Because someone has to witness all that pain, all those tears, all the heartache. Someone need to call out the hate, and spread love.
I did that for three weeks. And I’m exhausted.
I may have to become a cynical recluse. And write Romance to get my mind to see something entirely different. I’m sure there will be plenty of readers who also just want to numb their pain, and feel safe with a story, at least. Here is love that doesn’t fail. Love that overcomes even hate…
It’s a sad world right now. Too sad for sad stories.
