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Diane Engelhardt's avatar

Western governments, among whom I count our Canadian government, owe their citizens major compensation for the psychological stress and emotional upheaval that they have put us through due to their callous, cowardly support for Israel. If our elected, may I remind them, politicians stood for the same values, if they had the same moral courage and clarity that their voters have demonstrated, we would not have to suffer the degree of frustration, despair, anger and desperation that has taken a toll on everyone of us! These people are not only irresponsible, they should be made accountable! They have betrayed us, they have forsaken us, they have turned their backs and farted in our faces!

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Saige's avatar

Thanks for your honesty Diana. I've been wondering how to write my next sub stack and feel the load of guilt for being unable to write because I long to write with hope but I have to convince myself to feel hope first. I have to convince my family, my loved ones that I am hopeful. I have to make the glimmer larger. I've been thinking about how to widen the lens, to make it bigger, because only then can we see a different future.

And this means feeling the pain. We bear this differently, each of us, this pain. There have been times when I could not cry, but I am not this way now.

For me the tears are there, too close to the surface. They come up at random places in public - like the supermarket check out counter, when I feel someone looking into me, when I feel exposed, up it comes, like a wave breaking over the rock.

I wrote a poem some years ago, it contained the line 'every pore is a tidal pore'. The other night I collapsed. My husband held me as I lamented, wailed.

As a journalist I have covered some atrocities. I saw some terrible things and who was unable to stop the terror. So many reporters who reported on horrors carry guilt. I was driven by a desire to change the world and now I feel the tug of children who - in their dying gaze - tugged me so hard, begging me to do something to pull them back into life. The Palestinian children carry me back to the Aids babies I saw in Romania. For a long time after, I suffered from insomnia and finally realised my sleeplessness was due to regret, due to guilt. The guilt for not doing the most human humane thing. I had to go back to that place in my mind, I had to do what I should have done then. Hug every one, carry every baby out.

I have interviewed people who did not seem then to realise they were failing to act humanely. I came to realise that very few people look evil. Netanyahu is the exception rather than the rule. Everyone can become an angel or a monster and in a monstrous system so many people - people who in many spheres of life seem good - become monsters.

I want answers and I feel bereft. I feel guilty when I don't attend our Palestinian rallies and exhausted when I do. I belong to a group that has been labelled terrorist even though it is peaceful. I feel swept up and out of myself because the horrors we are witnessing are too huge.

Not only am I not writing my next sub stack I have staggered into a hiatus with the next novel. I was writing about adventurous women whose lives were hidden from our histories, I was writing about men who did some pretty rotten things, I was writing about conscience and choice, I was writing towards that glimmer on the horizon where hope and change can be found. But I cannot write at all if I cannot find that glimmer in or outside myself.

From all the carnage, all the losses, all the griefs and trauma I must rise somehow. Because you and I and others I meet here have been given a gift. It is the gift to write about the real world with honesty, it is the gift to write and that is a thing of beauty. Perhaps we carry them all with us as we write, all those who deserved to live, perhaps all we can do is write because if they were here they would use their gifts. If we hide, if we huddle, if we bury our heads in the sand we bury our souls while theirs rise.

The one place I do find healing is in nature. Away from the roar of man-made machines, away from the killing machines and the machines that signal progress, rolling back and undoing, unwinding, to being; being a feather or a stalk in the grass. Then I can stir, then I can fly.

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