There are not words

Earlier this week, I encountered something that made me pause – I had just taken my seat at work for the morning.  In keeping with what is after many years become a well-worn routine, I let the computer fire-up while I successfully acquired a caffeinated beverage and settled in.  It was just after this that my break from autopilot occurred as I began skimming headlines, in observance of a brief internet obeisance before diving into email.

Amongst the usual leads regarding celebrity divorces, election gains and starlet’s outfits, CNN included something that stood out as just a little heavier:  “Syria:  Battle for the cities.”  Naturally, I skipped right over it and went on looking for something about the sci-fi movie I saw over the weekend and was now in an extended process of picking apart with my wife and friends.

And then I didn’t.

Here I was, just beginning rehearsals on a play about war crimes and presented with a parallel story, detailing real-life events just like those addressed in the very text I was working on.  Not happening sometime in the past, not happening in a fictional place – but happening right now in the real world.  Today.

So I’m sitting there, in my cube at work, looking straight down both barrels of what I hold important and what I treat as disposable information.

Well, I didn’t like the way I felt very much.  And it seemed somehow “not right” that in my handy little research notebook for this play, I lacked even a single photo from the conflict in Syria.

So I chose to click on the link to the story about Syria.  A country that I understood to be in the process of being ravaged, but with an understanding that was completely empty.  Which is to say, I understood this was so only in a cognitive sense.  The words, “Syria is being ravaged,” were both the beginning and end of my knowledge on the matter.

I want to pause here and state that I certainly don’t mean to imply this choice to view an internet link was or is somehow emblematic of a great shift in my perspective or that it represents a fundamental improvement in my quality as a human being.  It’s important simply because it’s the next event chronologically in the story.  And because the above link led me to Google searches and more headlines.  This time with the world “children” in them. 

I made myself keep clicking.  There are, it turns out, a lot of really graphic photos related to the conflict in Syria freely available on the web.  Like many of you, I’ve seen enough photos of atrocities in my education to last a lifetime, especially in my ongoing research for this play.  But so many of those are of the aftermath, of desiccated corpses unearthed, photographed across a distance of time removed in black and white.  The internet changes things, though.  You can see the faces in these shots.  Real human faces.  Across the globe virtually in realtime.

And again:  children.

There really aren’t any words.  There is not a sentence I am capable of writing that wouldn’t somehow diminish the things contained in those photographs.  If you want to see them for yourself – and I’m not asserting here that you should do so – but if you choose to look for them...simple Google searches for “Syria Houla” and “Hom Massacre” will bring back what you’re looking for.  Click the link to view images and turn off filtering in the Safe Search settings.

And one last time:  I cannot stress enough that these are EXTREMELY GRAPHIC IMAGES.

There’s no moral at the end of this story.  No life lesson.  From my perspective, it’s a story about trying to figure what that lesson could possibly be.  I don’t know if I could do it every day.  There’s all the obligations.  Places I have to be.  Things I have to get done.  They require a certain amount of mental stamina and a certain active desire to find islands of fun and joy within the rush in order to simply keep on…going.  Is it reasonable to expect a compassionate human being to somehow pay attention to every truly horrible thing that happens in the world and still make it to work on time?

Whether you think taking a look at photos of war crimes is important, right now, wherever you happen to be, is a choice that belongs to you.  It’s also up to you to define for yourself what that choice even means.

But on that morning, for a brief instant, I caught just the tiniest glimpse of what happens to people in ravaged places…and I have to believe that as an artist telling the story of this play, it’s important that, for a moment, I stopped and wondered at what horror they must feel when such things can happen in the world – and yet be overlooked.