The dim grey light of another winter day fills the windows of my home.
posted by jeremy on December 27, 2003
...Libya welcomed a team of UN inspectors who arrived Saturday to evaluate the nation's nuclear program and determine if it's fulfilling a pledge to abandon efforts to build weapons of mass destruction...
...The afternoon attacks, which wounded more than 100 people, came in rapid succession, targeting a military logistics camp near a university, a base housing a Thai-run hospital and the city government center, where US military police are posted, officials ...
...Anyone taking time to ponder the fate of the predecessors of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan over the last three decades would not find the facts very reassuring. One was hanged, another died in a suspicious plane crash ...
...Four children from a church camp were among seven people found dead after mudslides ravaged a canyon recently burned bare in the San Bernardino Mountains, officials said Saturday...
...Officials in Dhaka say 15 Bangladeshi peacekeepers were among those killed in Thursday's crash of a Lebanese airliner in the west African nation of Benin...
...The US Agriculture Department said on Saturday the Washington state dairy cow infected with mad cow disease had probably been imported from Canada but Canadian authorities called the statement premature...
...A British mission trying to find life on Mars accepted yesterday its space probe may have crashed but remained hopeful despite failing for a third day to detect a signal...
...With the arrival of Europe's first interplanetary probe at Mars and two more US spacecraft on the way, the red planet will be under intense scrutiny for months as scientists attempt to figure out ...
...Michael Jackson will begin his fight-back against charges that he sexually molested a child by telling millions of Americans tonight that there's nothing wrong with sharing a bed with children...
...Hundreds of Israeli soldiers searched for suspects on Saturday in this city described as a hotbed of militant activity, fatally shooting a Palestinian during a clash with stone throwers, ...
...US President George W. Bush, who once branded Iran part of an œaxis of evil”, and other world leaders today rushed aid to Iran, struggling to struggling to cope with an earthquake disaster that killed some 20,000 people. From China to South Africa, Europe to Australia, nations reacted swiftly to send rescue workers, doctors, tents and cash to help deal with what appeared to be the world's worst earthquake in at least 10 years...
I click on this last header & read what pops up. I then sort thru five or six other articles, each from a different source, each with differing statistics... Each filling me with more sickness than the last & I've just... just discovered that my perspective on the world, at least for today, has utterly changed, shifted, slid somewhere very dark & utterly hopeless.
I've just found out that yesterday, the Iranian city of Bam was almost completely leveled by an earthquake with a death toll reaching possibly, good-fucking-christ, 40,000. I sit there, coffee growing cold, forgotten cigarette now but ash & I try to imagine the faces of 40,000 people & I find that I can't even come close. 60 to 70% of this city of 100,000 are either dead or injured, all in a heartbeat.
In a fucking heartbeat.
The entire universe crashing down around you, destroying you, everyone, everything ever & no meaning to it at all, just the shifting of tectonic boundaries, just the way things go & go. It's not enough that the socio-economical conditions of our sad little undeveloped band of primates works against you, nor that the emperor of America is waging a not-so-subtle war against your culture in the name of oil, but that the earth itself... The earth itself crushes you, takes your happy miserable tiny only lives.
I am a cynical fuck but not today. I am so fucking tired of all this idiot death.
Grief overwhelms me. I feel like crying, throwing something, raging. I suddenly can't handle just sitting here in this basement, staring at this fucking monitor, so goddam safe, all wrapped up in this secure little world of mine, this vapid opulent beast of an empire. I want to fly there now, help however, wherever I can. Dig survivors from the rubble. Help identify the dead. Distribute food rations. Set up tents for the homeless. Hand out blankets for those that are freezing in the zero temperatures. I want to comfort crying children. I want to... I want, so badly... I want, I want... I just want to take it all back.
& I know, I know that I can't do shit. I sit there for the better part of five minutes, sit there slumped with my head in my hands...
Wanting to, trying not to, cry.
