(From 9 October 23)
Sifting through headlines on the escalation of the Israel-Gaza conflict has sent me down deep. I know that one inevitably runs into distressing footage when trying to keep up to date with cataclysmic events like this via the internet, but some of the imagery I've come across has been singed into my mind all day.
In one Independent article I was reading about how Hamas ducked Israeli intelligence to launch their initial attack, a video embedded in the text that was deemed “unauthenticated but plausible-looking” showed an apparently captive woman being yanked out of the trunk of a Jeep being driven by militants in the middle of a Gaza street.
As she unfolds from the rear of the car, hands bound behind her back, an armed man drags her by the hair to the side of the vehicle and shoves her back inside through a passenger door. It's extremely difficult to stomach all of the visual information conveyed in those few seconds where she's visible to the camera. Her face is panic-stricken, blood snakes down the back of one of her arms, her hands and bare feet are stained red, and the seat of her pants looks soiled with either blood, feces, or both. Multiple men pile into the car after her once she's pushed in, and that's the last time she's visible in the video.
There was a time, maybe three or four years ago (my dark ages), when I used to seek out this kind of visual trauma. Borderline snuff in the deepest recesses of NSFW Reddit, that sort of thing. My chemically confused brain's twisted logic reasoned that continued exposure to this sort of stimuli would make me a warrior in the face of life's most brutal truths. The King of the Desensitized.
What it actually did, however, was scar me in a way that still stings when I read news centered on violence and death, of which there is obviously quite a bit each day no matter where I look.
I'm not mentioning this in an attempt to recuse myself from actively engaging with what is going on in the Middle East right now, but rather to note that the once-familiar feeling is back. The inescapable undertow of all that races through my head after witnessing brutality. How numbing it must be to feel your fate land in the sinister hands of evil (a hostage pleading as she's whisked away from the Supernova music festival on a motorbike). How many milliseconds you have in your bedroom to comprehend what is happening before Nothing (rockets hitting an apartment building in Gaza). Or how exactly it is that at the end of this sentence I will close my laptop, brush my teeth, and slip under my freshly cleaned sheets to try to get some sleep.