I’m not sure how to describe the images I’ve seen today. However, there is a depth of emptiness that is bone-deep. I feel as if everything I have known up until now has meant nothing. Life is so easily lost and so easily discarded, yet I think about every death that I see. I can’t separate myself from the images I see on my phone, on the news, or on my computer screen. Every death I hear about hurts. I realize that I am centering myself, which isn’t fair, but I’m unsure where to focus right now.

Here is what I saw today that broke me. I have never considered what happens when a person is crushed under a building. Conceptually, I understand a person’s body would flatten. I never thought that I would see this. Today, while viewing a video of a journalist in Gaza as he filmed the aftermath of an air strike, he showed a person being removed from under the rubble. The person’s body was still intact. However, the person’s head had been completely flattened, like it had been ironed flat. This person was sheltering in Maghazi Refugee Camp along with many others when it was bombed. The current death toll as of 12/24/23 at 19:45 CST is ~70 souls. Source

Maybe it is because I am alone on Christmas Eve, and I don’t have the distraction of loved ones, even though I don’t celebrate Christmas. I don’t understand how things can go on as usual while people have buildings being dropped on their heads. This isn’t the place I thought it was, and the people of this world are not the people I thought they were.

I refuse to lose hope in everyone. There have to be people who still care, that still feel pain when a fellow human feels pain, when a fellow human dies. We have just one planet, and hate will get us nowhere.