The Cold Candle
Dec. 19th, 2024 05:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootI love these early mornings. The stars are still very bright.
Woken again, thinking, restless. I will never forget 2024, because the fates of my life said 'Debbie, this year you will go to school.'
I studied and helped to create a tool which may help local people determine what happens to the place around them, how to argue for more schools and medical facilities, how to preserve places of beauty and happiness. I helped fight a good fight and win.
One of the important principles of this year has been a meeting with Evil.
Only not really. A meeting by proxy, a meeting with other people's memories. We went to S-21 and Choeung Ek, as we might visit Auschwitz or Dachau, a mark of respect perhaps, to seek understanding of what it was like, to open ourselves out across time and be there, wish it were otherwise, pray maybe. But of course, one cannot really feel yesterday's reality. One can only imagine. Yet even that imagining, poor though it is, will reach down into one's bones and shake one in the darkness.
And again, dreams that are not dreams of the adversary, visions of a stranger with stern mien who turns and in a terrible voice says 'blame me? How dare you?'
What has lit this cold candle tonight? Thoughts of Sarah Sharif and all that cruelty, so terrible I can't even hold it in my mind. Thoughts of Israel and Palestine. I know seemingly kind people who repeat endlessly how Israel has no right to exist and should maintain a spirit of repentance and self-hate in awe of Schrodinger's Palestine which manages to be innocent and defenceless as well as powerful and unforgiving all at the same time. They do not trace their own passionate beliefs back to the possibility that they hate Israel because they see it as the proxy of America which they hate much more, or that their anger might be born out of older uglier customs.
But for all that, it is beyond wrong to harm civilian populations. We all know this. Hamas powerbrokers are unlikely to be hiding in the rubble, would one not look beyond the border? Find the money; how much more money has poured into their coffers courtesy of the recent action? How many more recruits look to them? This cannot even be given the dubious justification of realpolitik. It is as unwise as it is wrong.
Does Evil ever turns up in pure unalloyed form? I think we wish it did, which is why we personify it. We want it simple but it never can be because we are not simple. The United Nations continued to give support to the Khmer Rouge up into the 90s, despite knowing what they did. Kissinger told the Thai foreign minister, "You should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs but we won't let that stand in our way." By the Cambodians he meant the Khmer Rouge and their allies.
In the 70s, a KR excursion across the border into Vietnam had predictably horrible results. The Vietnamese government did not wring its hands but retaliated with invasion, and brought down one of the most brutal governments on earth. Still, the remnants were given succour precisely for use as a buffer against the Vietnamese, after all the coalition allies used the magic bullet word 'democratic,' in their party name. This seems to have been enough.
This extraordinary year. At the pinnacle of a temple, lying full of meds on a gurney, laughing with music close by, walking in the night's silence. I have been taught, and though I leave 2024 behind, the lessons will stay alongside new ones to come.
Woken again, thinking, restless. I will never forget 2024, because the fates of my life said 'Debbie, this year you will go to school.'
I studied and helped to create a tool which may help local people determine what happens to the place around them, how to argue for more schools and medical facilities, how to preserve places of beauty and happiness. I helped fight a good fight and win.
One of the important principles of this year has been a meeting with Evil.
Only not really. A meeting by proxy, a meeting with other people's memories. We went to S-21 and Choeung Ek, as we might visit Auschwitz or Dachau, a mark of respect perhaps, to seek understanding of what it was like, to open ourselves out across time and be there, wish it were otherwise, pray maybe. But of course, one cannot really feel yesterday's reality. One can only imagine. Yet even that imagining, poor though it is, will reach down into one's bones and shake one in the darkness.
And again, dreams that are not dreams of the adversary, visions of a stranger with stern mien who turns and in a terrible voice says 'blame me? How dare you?'
What has lit this cold candle tonight? Thoughts of Sarah Sharif and all that cruelty, so terrible I can't even hold it in my mind. Thoughts of Israel and Palestine. I know seemingly kind people who repeat endlessly how Israel has no right to exist and should maintain a spirit of repentance and self-hate in awe of Schrodinger's Palestine which manages to be innocent and defenceless as well as powerful and unforgiving all at the same time. They do not trace their own passionate beliefs back to the possibility that they hate Israel because they see it as the proxy of America which they hate much more, or that their anger might be born out of older uglier customs.
But for all that, it is beyond wrong to harm civilian populations. We all know this. Hamas powerbrokers are unlikely to be hiding in the rubble, would one not look beyond the border? Find the money; how much more money has poured into their coffers courtesy of the recent action? How many more recruits look to them? This cannot even be given the dubious justification of realpolitik. It is as unwise as it is wrong.
Does Evil ever turns up in pure unalloyed form? I think we wish it did, which is why we personify it. We want it simple but it never can be because we are not simple. The United Nations continued to give support to the Khmer Rouge up into the 90s, despite knowing what they did. Kissinger told the Thai foreign minister, "You should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs but we won't let that stand in our way." By the Cambodians he meant the Khmer Rouge and their allies.
In the 70s, a KR excursion across the border into Vietnam had predictably horrible results. The Vietnamese government did not wring its hands but retaliated with invasion, and brought down one of the most brutal governments on earth. Still, the remnants were given succour precisely for use as a buffer against the Vietnamese, after all the coalition allies used the magic bullet word 'democratic,' in their party name. This seems to have been enough.
This extraordinary year. At the pinnacle of a temple, lying full of meds on a gurney, laughing with music close by, walking in the night's silence. I have been taught, and though I leave 2024 behind, the lessons will stay alongside new ones to come.
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no subject
Date: 2024-12-19 01:18 pm (UTC)Most people who go through what you went through in a single year go, This year sucked! I can't wait to forget it!
no subject
Date: 2024-12-20 09:00 am (UTC)Let's hope the fates don't say 'right, that's enough for her,' and land a piano on my head before 2025 😀