Happy New Year!

I wake up to news briefings and the editorial pages on the Times. I can confirm that yes; these are still the End Times, Happy New Year.

My IBS flared up like crazy last night and this morning my stomach feels knotted tight and my shoulders are aching. I guess I wouldn’t be an American without a nervous condition. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing that I’m running out of money and that the world has gone crazy and I’ve got no time. Because I can’t sit quietly anymore. I can’t afford to. I need to spit some bile, god knows everyone else is doing it. Why not me? Because what I’m doing now is poisonous. I can’t hold it all in, and, I don’t know, maybe I’m curious or something, about speaking aloud?

I won’t stay quiet, because I can’t believe what’s been happening. Four months ago I wouldn’t have thought I’d be seeing suicide cells massacring concert goers at the Bataclan, or the flare of Russian cluster munitions on the plains of Hama, PKK militants all but cut in half by Turkish CROWS on the border, KALIBR missiles sailing in from east and west. Maybe I’m just wishing to myself that all of it might be like a game or a film. But the limbs in these videos are real, and the gore isn’t stylized at all, and it’s happening now, every day, all the time, and the only reason none of us are seeing it is because we choose not to.

I don’t think anyone really needs to be thinking about this stuff everyday. But I’ve come to feel it as a sort of duty, given how easy it is to sit back and have everything served to us all airbrushed and sanitized. When was the last time you saw a corpse on CNN? When we don’t see it we don’t have to think about it. That isn’t exactly rocket science. So I keep watching the raw stuff, even if it’s probably hurting me.

Last week I saw an image from a video in my sleep – white phosphorus raining from a night sky over Idlib in a heinously festive cloud, like the afterburst from a Fourth of July firework. Only this firework isn’t burning out, and the silver stars are spreading, blotting out the sky with light, and I know that those stars will burn into me and through me and keep on burning. And I’m running and running but I can’t get out from underneath it and I’m wondering how it will feel, if it will burn straight through to bones and if I’ll live to feel it, how my final breaths would be spent choking to death on a fire inside my own lungs.

It’s such an ugly business, killing on the scale that we’re collectively killing on, the way the beaches of Lesbos are piled with discarded life jackets fifteen deep – how desperate must you be to run that way? How can any of us, safe and cozy at the bosom of America, even begin to understand that?

Empathy is a tricky thing. We can’t even kill a stream of ants without shutting down a little. RAID is a nerve agent, not far off nerve gas—Imagine suffocating to death while your bones are wrenched into horrible warped contortions and snapping apart in the middle. Add to that the sudden realization that you’re on fire and your eyes are melting. That’s RAID – that’s what you’re doing to like, 2500 beings whenever you hit one of those big ant trails in the kitchen. If we opened ourselves up all the time to that kind of suffering we’d all be fucking insane before we hit ten.

So a bit of filtration’s a good thing, but I think as a nation we’ve maybe pushed it too far, and that a genuine understanding of what’s happening suffers for it. I think that between the left wing’s safe spaces and the right wing’s burgeoning fascist utopia we’ve forgotten that the world is a very complicated place, that events and individuals can be nuanced, that a human mind is capable of juggling a multitude of perspectives without shattering, and that an attachment to comforting rhetoric won’t save us. Where was I looking while rhetoric became this overwhelming, all-powerful thing?

The truth is that people are dying, and that the dying is awful, and that when you see it you understand something, even at remove. You understand because a part of yourself will want to be sick immediately, to move away, to close your eyes, because the sight of suffering and death is so upsetting. True violence is disturbing beyond measure.

I saw a bad one the other day, some Al-nusra militiamen jumping an SAA outpost. It’s a go-pro video which gives it an odd, first-person-shooter sort of vibe, and there’s this scene where a kid is firing his AK into corpses. There’s this slightly overweight man lying there with his head cut away above the forehead, his brains in a kind of mucous-y red pile on the floor, eyes half way out of their sockets, and his belly is just rippling and rupturing with the impact of the bullets. The kid doing the shooting has the glassy stare and twitchy movements that scream “captagon” and I wish I’d never seen his face. I wonder if he felt sick later, with the amphetamine out of his system and that image seared into his mind, rolling over and over for however many days he has left before getting ripped in half by a GRAD barrage or strapped into an up-armored MACK truck with a bed full of ammonium nitrate and a promise of heaven.

It’s enough to keep you up at night. To make you despair. And at home we’re baying for it, calling for carpet bombing and glowing sands. Do these people have any sense at all of what they’re asking for? Shouldn’t we all be seeing things like this, as a prerequisite for judging the necessity of action? Shouldn’t we all be tasked in some way with understanding what it means to die in the manner we’re advocating? You hear the final sounds of a man choking to death on his own blood through smashed and ruined lungs and tell me that you’d wish a thing like that on anyone.

So convince me otherwise, tell me that we aren’t headed over a cliff. Help set me at ease, because I’ve never seen footage like the footage I’ve been seeing. Because I don’t remember a time in which so many separate crises seemed poised to come down all at once. Because I can’t stop looking at it all and I want you to look too.