Pedestrian

What would it feel like to be the world’s punching bag?

Come on, give it a try, give it a go, punch all you like, hurt all you want, cut all you wish, punch as hard as ya feel like it … you know why?

Because the world … just won’t give a fucking DAMN!!!!

Just imagine how the world would have responded differently if instead of Gaza, it was … Albuquerque or Bruges that was continuously and routinely slaughtered by a rogue, violent regime. Would innocents be “collateral damage? Would presidents and PMs call restraint on “both sides”?

The extremism inside Iran, the brutality and fascism outside of it have just left me speechless and at a loss for words.

What is there to say? What is there to do?

But rage has an unequivocal way of waking the senses. Screams come from deep INSIDE of you and hit the walls of the universe … with no consequence. For those questions I have NO answers. For my own rage and anger, I seek to find a few.

Today I purchased drugs for a diabetic cousin who no longer has access to her drug in Iran. I was lucky enough to know an Iranian drug store owner who was willing to accept cash for drugs offered to me under the counter, lucky enough to know a person willing to take them to her by the end of the week … luck has a funny way of working sometimes, huh? and a cruel, cruel way of not. For I am sure that there are thousands of cousins out there whose stars weren’t aligned this morning.

Today I read of the 100+th death in Gaza as the world watches in silence, in complete & utter indifference, in total oblivion. Yes, I’m sure the US president  has “regrets for loss of life”. But he can take his regret and stick it up his a** as it is HIS government, HIS artillery, HIS veto power that give the Israelis the go ahead  to kill and destroy EN MASSE with NO consequence.

Today I write with RAGE. Rage that always exists in some form or other, anger and disillusion that I carry with me every minute of every waking day. Anyone who has followed my journeys on this blog would know that in my own small way, it has been an attempt to change this rage into conversation, into words, into poetry … as best as I am able. As badly as I am unable.  I have learned to walk, talk and eat with this anger, to carry it on my shoulder as one does a never growing, disabled limb.

And yet, sometimes, the images in the outside world grow so dark, so evil, so monstrously macabre that the limb simply stops to function.

WHY do we live in a world where victim and victimizer are turned upside down? Where day is presented as night and night as day? When people living in the world’s biggest open air prison are subject to indiscriminate slaughter and NO one stops to wince? When a country is ILLEGALLY forced to endure WAR time conditions, elaborately called “sanctions”?

Call Obama, Harper, the lot of these murdering, monstrous fascists by what they are: KILLERS & murderers dressed in Armani suits. We in the Middle East are too used to these killers and murderers. We can smell them from thousands of miles away. So please, the next time I see you carrying a sign of Khamenei with devil ears, if he’s not sitting beside Obama in the picture, I will fail to take you seriously. Not only will I fail to take you seriously, but you are only a walking symbol of why we endure the pain and suffering that we do: blindness from the ignorant, cruelty from monsters.

The people living in America, Canada, etc today can simply NOT imagine what it is like to go to sleep one night and die under bombing. They can not imagine how it must be to die in a battered hospital after being attacked on the fields with nerve gas. What it must be like to have a sick child whose drugs you can no longer afford or find.  They can not imagine what it is like to have your entire life go up in flames and shadows and death. And so the LOT of us become criminals by our acquiescence, by our silence, by that blind, ugly prejudice that you may not even speak of …

but the rage you do not feel, and the anger you do not express and the tears you do not cry are your green light to let the fascists burn the earth with no consequence.