This phot may be too dark, but, as they say, if you watch the news at all, you get the picture. It's one of a couple dozen photographs the NY Times ran last week, when all of us were looking back at what we've been through. It's just the second day of the new year now; most of us are looking forward, not backward. But the Times' pics are even bigger than whatever the photographer intended to show us when he stood there and snapped it, because some photographs grow into something more than pictures.
We suffered, and are still suffering, through two wretched wars (maybe more) that simply had no right to exist. Putin's insane attempt to kill Ukrainians in order to save them crawled into its second year. The sheer madness of war headlined daily news reports, journalists and their cameras covering thousands of stories, all of them wretched accounts of fighting men and women, old men with canes and little girls in football shirts, thousands who died or didn't but unimaginably suffered.
On October 7, Hamas fighters took motorbikes and hang-gliders across the border with Israel and committed atrocities that reminded a stunned world of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Yet today, brave family members hold out hope that somewhere amid the rubble of Palestine a handful of men, women, and children are still alive. Meanwhile, in retaliation, Palestinian bodies are dropped into mass graves, dozens daily. The five o'clock news was full--and still is--of horrifying stories of the endless suffering on both sides. Hamas terrorists were beasts, shockingly inhuman. Today 20,000 Palestinians are dead, the vast majority innocent men, women, and children.
It's January 2, 2024, this morning, feels like a brand new day. But in the Ukraine and Palestine, it's same old, same old. Sheer horror.
In 1995, I taught a course in the literature of the holocaust. It was the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of occupied Europe, and hundreds of prison camps and death camps throughout all of the region. Class met once a week and often featured guest speakers, including a quartet of men, now all passed away, who had been with Allied forces who stumbled into those pits of horror.
Fourteen weeks long it was, a dozen books. I was the prof, the leader. I'd written one of the books myself, in fact. But when we approached the end of the semester, I suddenly couldn't read anything anymore. Something in me refused, shut down, and it wasn't a refusal that anything to do with will. I couldn't have predicted it. It just happened. I couldn't read about any more atrocities. My soul was full. I limped through the rest of the semester.
2023 was a year of senseless wars that still have not abated. The photo at the top of the page is iconic, not because it is so unique but because it isn't. Remembering 2023 will mean grimacing at the unending that always, always, always comes with war. I'm a news junkie, wouldn't miss it for the world, but by the end of the year I was turning off the tv. There are thousands of stories in Palestine and the Ukraine. In 2023, we all heard way, way, way too many.
Come, Lord Jesus.
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