Bearing witness

Photo: A woman stands at the entrance of her house, near a damaged vehicle, after a raid by U.S. soldiers in Baghdad's Sadr City September 11, 2007. (Kareem Raheem/Reuters)

I just finished updated the Faces of Grief blog. I am actually quite behind in that blog, and not because it takes some time to download 50 pictures, save the captions to the pictures, and then post them to the blog. I am behind because it makes me so sad, so angry and so torn with guilt. It also makes me so very tired, so very tired.

I am a taxpayer here in the US. I believe this is evil to pay taxes to this government that is so intent on killing innocent people who happen to live where the oil is. The work that I do requires either a government or non-profit to run it – I test the hearing of young children, and help them get the services that they need. There is no profit in this, and I could make twice as much money by selling hearing aids to the wealthy retirees in this area. I want to help children – other people’s children. I purposefully chose this, and keep choosing it. It is a wonderful way to earn a living. I am blessed that I had the chance to get all this education and do this work.

I am comfortable in my job, and it pays the bills. I find it very hard at times to treat some of my coworkers with respect, because they are complicit and supportive of this mass rape and murder by our US military. Some of them, however, are wonderful. Most of them are just blind, or lazy, I don’t know.

If I decided to stop paying taxes, they would just garnishee my wages and get even more money for the war machine. So, my choices are – don’t work in this field or move away to another country. I am thinking seriously about moving back to Canada.

But for now, I bear witness. The photos are horrible. They are just a small sample of what is happening in Iraq, but it is clear that a lot of the death and violence is either directly from the occupying troops, or directed at them. Here is a poem by someone else who was a witness to the horror the US has inflicted on the country of Iraq over the decades. I imagine he is as tired as I am, and every bit as angry.

I Did Not Look Away

No, I did not look away
from the things I went there to see.

In a land where hunger had become rare
until sanctions and war joined hands in prayer,
I saw women in black begging at street corners
and boys too poor for school
hawking cigarettes and kerosene
to keep their families afloat.

I saw parents rushing into hospitals
with children in their arms,
and emergency rooms flooded with patients
holding in pain on bleeding floors.

I saw ambulances on cinder blocks
rotting away in a parking lot
because ambulances are weapons of war
and can't be repaired in Iraq.

I saw oxygen tanks standing in line,
waiting for valves that never come,
and hospital hallways stripped to the bone.

Everything gone, lugged off and sold
for even the simplest supplies --
a light bulb, a pail, a bag of diapers.

I saw an infant named Amani Kasim
curled up on a filthy blanket,
her face confined to an oxygen mask,
her body shriveled and discolored
from severe malnutrition.

I saw a fourteen-year old girl named Amira
who could not stand and could not speak
and was dying from cancer.

"Two maybe three days more," the doctor said.
"We do not have the proper drugs
so we give supportive care only."
She was so thin, so weak
she could not lift her head off the pillow.
I caressed her brow and cheek
and the damp ringlets of hair
fallen about her face.

A collapsed blood bag froze above her.
Mother and grandmother softly wept
and prayed to God for mercy.

I saw other mothers tending incubators,
that didn't have thermostats
and might overheat.

I saw the blood and urine
on beds without sheets,
the nimbus of flies around bottles of formula,
the sadness in the doctors' eyes
as they told me which infants
would live or die.

No, I didn't look away.

I caressed each brow,
whispered through my touch,
"Your life is a part of me and when you go,
I shall weep."

I saw a generation of mothers
keeping watch on their children.
I heard them ask me for medicine
and felt their hands open then meet
the emptiness of mine. - George Capaccio