Firestorm
Have you ever been in a room that reeked of human blood? Have you ever seen rows of beds filled with people who all but have death tattooed on their foreheads, watching as every ounce of their most vital fluid runs from metal intrusions into the sanctity of their body, through enormous (relatively) plastic pipes into a machine and back through to them again, hoping and praying that somehow they can stay alive a little longer?
Have you ever considered hatred? Bombing a military target is still an act of murder. Bombing a bus terminal; maybe you wanted to disrupt the economy. But in daylight? In its busiest hours? And then a second bomb timed to explode when rescue workers arrive on the scene? Or the third bomb at the hospital when the few victims that survived were being brought to 'safety'?
Do you have a home? What if, tomorrow, the government decided that your home didn't belong to you? And when they asked you to leave, what if the police lifted you kicking and screaming from your home and left you in a refugee camp (a tent in the middle of the desert... in August)?
What is hope? And if you can, somewhere within you, have a concept of the word can you envision its absence? What if you weighed 400 lbs? There's a syndrome called 'obesity-hypoventilation syndrome'... let me put it in plain, painful English: there is so much weight on your chest that you couldn't breathe. In order to get you life saving oxygen, doctors cut a hole through your throat and directly into your windpipe. You're hooked up to a ventilator, which pushes air into your lungs through the direct hole so that you can survive. But since there's a hole in your throat, if you were to swallow you'd obviously swallow into your lungs and cause a chemical pneumonia... so doctors drill a hole through your abdominal wall and into your stomach. And then they place a long needle into your neck so that they can give you whatever nutrition doesn't fit through the hose in your stomach. What if that needle got buried in your own folds of fat, with moisture of course... and then it gets infected? And since you can't clear your own mucus from your lungs, a pneumonia of course. And since you can't move your body, the pressure of the bed constantly against your skin suffocates it of nutrients, developing ulcers that get infected...
what do you say to the medical student who has been seeing it for 17 days now, watching tears, trying to talk even though he knows you can't speak?
Have you ever considered hatred? Bombing a military target is still an act of murder. Bombing a bus terminal; maybe you wanted to disrupt the economy. But in daylight? In its busiest hours? And then a second bomb timed to explode when rescue workers arrive on the scene? Or the third bomb at the hospital when the few victims that survived were being brought to 'safety'?
Do you have a home? What if, tomorrow, the government decided that your home didn't belong to you? And when they asked you to leave, what if the police lifted you kicking and screaming from your home and left you in a refugee camp (a tent in the middle of the desert... in August)?
What is hope? And if you can, somewhere within you, have a concept of the word can you envision its absence? What if you weighed 400 lbs? There's a syndrome called 'obesity-hypoventilation syndrome'... let me put it in plain, painful English: there is so much weight on your chest that you couldn't breathe. In order to get you life saving oxygen, doctors cut a hole through your throat and directly into your windpipe. You're hooked up to a ventilator, which pushes air into your lungs through the direct hole so that you can survive. But since there's a hole in your throat, if you were to swallow you'd obviously swallow into your lungs and cause a chemical pneumonia... so doctors drill a hole through your abdominal wall and into your stomach. And then they place a long needle into your neck so that they can give you whatever nutrition doesn't fit through the hose in your stomach. What if that needle got buried in your own folds of fat, with moisture of course... and then it gets infected? And since you can't clear your own mucus from your lungs, a pneumonia of course. And since you can't move your body, the pressure of the bed constantly against your skin suffocates it of nutrients, developing ulcers that get infected...
what do you say to the medical student who has been seeing it for 17 days now, watching tears, trying to talk even though he knows you can't speak?