Our Humanity
Me,
Focused.
Sometimes impatient.
Backgammon across globe.
Played live, in real time.
Your flag draped on your avatar, telling stories.
I watch the news like breathing, eyes having grown wider these past years.
Safe over here I only have to suffer through the segments for minutes; only two senses must endure the secondhand torture.
Earthquakes and floodwaters churn underneath all the forest fire smoke. The oceans are adorned by fields of plastic. Deserts are expanding. Earth cannot spin fast enough to escape its fate. I cannot turn away.
Falling bombs and buildings exist on a map in my mind. It has started smoking. War is pluralizing and machine guns dot some continents. As do faces of arrogant men where the flames erupt from the surface. I only see the visages of women where the parchment has grown thin. The legend says they weep.
This map sits down at my computer, an integral part of my consciousness. I instantly know the flags that sit across from me. I now find myself crying at the knowledge of where some of my opponents are situated. In the deepest part of the suffering. Disasters. Wars. The hatred, the pain, the lifetimes of suffering cast upon them by the dust their feet churn up simply for where they were conjured into being and for the body they inhabit and the blood they circulate through their innocent skin.
What I do is sit quietly, as patient as a glacier. No words are able to be shared here. I think of their suffering. The unfairness and ugliness of so much that is wrong. I marvel at their strength to endure even minutes of what I have seen, and me with only two senses exposed.
I think of Love, that simple word that feels like an intention to shield someone from hurt if you can. I do not know how I can. But I would. I would give anything.
Our humanity is being misplaced along with the wellbeing of our planet. Our futures. I watch the news and feel ashamed.
If someone can have a brief respite by escaping into an ingrained game
I will be here, finally having learned patience.
Can't we all become patient?
Think of love.
And do
No
Harm.
