Sometimes the Injustices Around the World Really Get to Me...

Sunday, 01 February 2009

Sometimes the Injustices Around the World Really Get to Me...
Guest post by novelle360
Disclaimer: This Post Includes Graphic Details
My job really gets to me sometimes.
The work itself.
When putting together a page filled with particularly grim news, I often joke that we should hand out straight razors and nooses with the next day's paper, but the truth is, it doesn't always seem like it would be that inappropriate.
Some nights I lay awake unable to sleep thinking of the horrific injustices going on around the globe. Some of the images of war that never make print haunt me. Stories of people I'll never meet, whose language I'll never speak, will stick with me for months, maybe longer.
Just last week, for example, I was scrolling through images of Israeli and Palestinian fighting, searching for something to go with a story on the war in Gaza, when I found one that literally caught my breath.
It was a picture of a little girl buried up to her neck in rubble, just her bloodied head exposed, drained of color, covered in dust. She was dead. Just one more child civilian casualty in a war I'll never understand. A rescuer's hands were poised in a nearly pointless attempt to free her.
She couldn't have been older than 3.
My thoughts immediately jumped to her mother. If she survived, I'll bet she begged for death.
It took everything I had not to cry or vomit.
Moments later, I edited the war story that included details of a toddler who was waiting for help in a hospital, her left arm blown off to the shoulder. The reporter described her as "wide-eyed in shock and fear."
A little farther east, in Afghanistan, a 14-year-old rape victim was near death because her older brother had performed a forced abortion on her in the family's barn while her mother held her arms down.
He explained that he did it to avoid the scorn that comes with premarital sex. Even rape is considered the victim's fault in that country and is hardly ever prosecuted.
He had cut her open to perform the operation and sewed her up with heavy string used for closing burlap potato sacks. She blacked out, but told police she remembers him holding the baby above her.
A little closer to home, a Texas death row inmate dug out his last remaining eye and ingested it in his jail cell. Apparently he ate the first one awaiting trial.
The event prompted his lawyer to ask for a retrial, explaining his client should've been deemed mentally incompetent and, therefore, never would've been sentenced to death.
For killing his wife and children and carving their hearts out and carrying them around in his pockets.
That night I found it particularly hard to fall asleep. Maybe that's why I like to indulge in a few chapters of a mindless novel or stupid YouTube videos before laying down.
I've struggled with the existence of God all my life. It's hard not to question a higher power when you know such travesties are taking place.
Even still, I pray for them.
I pray the bombs stop. I pray the little girl's mother finds peace. I pray that the toddler without an arm can escape to a country where her injury won't cripple her right to marry and have children. I pray that the teenager survives, shares her story and becomes an agent of change in her country.
Then I pray that my little girl will never know pain like that.
And that the memories and images will fade quickly for me.
Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.