dragons

Four months in, I’m still following the war in Palestine. The first live-streamed genocide, the indie reporters are calling it, and I am online daily for the raw footage, compelled. Something about bearing witness, something about not looking away. The thought that we change outcomes just by observing events. This morning, printing dragons on fabric in honor of the lunar new year, I thought of the old maps. “Here be dragons,” they said, warning of the dangers of entering uncharted territory. The physical landscape of the war zone has been mapped, but there are certainly monsters greeting us at the intellectual edge of what we believe we know about it. We grew up with the sanitized version of war: terrible things happen, yes, but only perpetrated by the bad guys and only far, far away. What I am beginning to understand is, it was always this atrocious. And we have always been complicit. Starvation, disease, and humiliation are weapons in every general’s arsenal. Innocents always die. The few who give the orders do not particularly care about the fate of the ones who carry them out. Here be dragons, indeed. Maybe if we watch them, maybe if we expose the parts that have been hidden, forbidden. Maybe there is power in simply making the darkness visible. The possibility of change, freedom from the repeating cycle. If we look, if we metabolize what we are seeing, if we refuse to look away.