on a full year

a year of slaughter. a year of bombing orphanages and schools and hospitals. a year of being told that we do not in fact see what we see. a year of but actually have you considered.  a year of redactions and metaphors and new ways of saying the same thing. a year of what’s a synonym for killed, what’s a synonym for stop, what’s a synonym for relentless. a year of cagey journalists and elaborately fashioned headlines. a year of children begging for their mothers, their siblings, their lives. a year of calling a child anything but a child. a year of billions in military funding and a year of blocked aid routes, destroyed infrastructure and bad water. a year of can you believe who spoke, can you believe who stayed silent. a year of marching and chanting and representative scripts and teach ins and vigils and not looking away and looking away. a year of massacres absent perpetrators. a year of confessions cloaked as accusations. a year of soldiers wearing lingerie, blindfolded men, assaulted prisoners. a year of bad apples. a year of war criminals lecturing on victimhood, of bombed evacuation routes, shredded babies, mass graves. a year of watching or living or dying or all three. a year of waiting for the powerful to tell us how many dead Arabs is enough dead Arabs. we are still waiting. we are still waiting. there is nothing noble about any of this, nothing magical or just about the steadfastness of those on the ground. the metric is simple: the world we sanction is the world we get. a year of that world.