Jane Feinmann

It’s funny the things that get to you when watching the nightmare in Gaza, out of all the horrors you’ll see from day to day. Today I saw a video of a six year-old Palestinian boy whose legs had been amputated dragging himself through his tent camp with the help of a roller skate worn on one of his hands, and it just about destroyed me. It was one of those inline skates that showed up in the nineties. Rollerblades, we called them. Western boys played with them in summers full of joy and laughter and skinned knees and grass stains. Now a little boy named Mohammad Saeed uses one to help him scoot through the dirt, because his legs were blown off by western military explosives, launched by Israelis who probably played with inline skates when they were small. This genocide has been going on so long that the child amputees who live all over Gaza are learning strategies to get through life without their limbs. They did a study recently which found that virtually all children in Gaza now feel their deaths are imminent, and half of those surveyed said they wish to die. But their lives go on. Even with missing limbs, often amputated without morphine or anesthetic, their lives go on. Crawling their way through muddy tent camps, they go on. They find a way through each day. It’s the kind of thing that might inspire you if it were something you were just passively witnessing instead of something the western power structure you live under is actively inflicting on people. For those of us who live under the shadow of the US-centralized empire it’s a bit more emotionally complicated than an inspirational story about the indomitable spirit of the Palestinian people, because it’s also a story about how we failed to stop this from happening. When we look at Mohammad Saeed crawling through the dirt on his leg stumps with the help of a roller skate, we are seeing our own civilization reflected back at us. A genocidal dystopia of complete moral bankruptcy. This is what we have become. This is what we have allowed our rulers to turn us into. Oh Mohammad, I am so sorry. I am so sorry that we allowed it to come to this. I am sorry that your legs were taken from you, and I am sorry for everything else that has been taken from you on top of them. Your parents maybe. Your siblings maybe. Certainly some loved ones. Obviously your home, and obviously your childhood. I have nothing to offer at this time, either to my readers or to Mohammad Saeed, apart from my own sorrow. Some days all you can do is pour your heart out on the floor and warn passersby to try not to slip on it, tears streaming down over the gaping hole in your chest. None of this is right, and I don’t feel like pretending it’s right. I don’t feel like trying to put a positive spin on it or say it’s all going to get better. Some things are just terrible, and it’s okay to feel terrible about them. Feelings are meant to be felt. It’s sad and it’s enraging and it’s shameful and it’s damning, and absolutely nothing else. We live in a world of such breathtaking beauty and such jaw-dropping savagery. Explosions of love hiding behind every molecule in a society that is ruled by true monsters. We are big enough to hold these paradoxes. We are big enough to feel the majesty of creation and the gut-punch of genocide. The wet, juicy, sloppy love for our fellow human beings and the horror at how cruel we can be to one another. The exhilaration of life on this strange blue planet and the crushing grief of failure after failure to make things a little better here. Both the good and the bad are allowed to flourish in this world. Clearly. I have no answers or miracle cures for this. We do our best to be decent people and get through each day. We pick up our skate and crawl on.