writing is sorrow; having had written is sublime
Long, too long America,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and
prosperity only,
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing,
grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse
really are,
(For who except myself has yet conceiv'd what your children en-masse
really are?)
From Drum-taps, 1865
Speaking from my privileged First World perspective, our, meaning the United States’, response to the Syrian war has always been a very conflicting and troubling issue for me.
Poor me, right, when there’s somewhere around 500,000 Syrians dead and over 10,000,000 displaced.
Poor me, indeed.
But since all pain is relative, all I can do is acknowledge/empathize with/pray for the atrocities external from me while focusing on finding some way to mitigate or at least reconcile with the conflicts and turmoil internal to me.
So far I’ve been unsuccessful…