RIP, ameen

That boy will remember that hand on his chin forever, his mother dying, going, lost to him, losing his sun, his earth. His mother looking at him with such concern, worried about him, she's dying and she knows this will deprive her son of a mother, and she is concerned only for him, and trying to give him everything she can in the little time she has left. A lifetime's motherly care ended. She won't see him grow up. The ramifications are total and unending. Wearing a smart scarf for a shopping trip perhaps, she suddenly lies stricken on the ground, her body, lifegiving and sustaining, pierced by shrapnel, by a fragment of destruction, already becoming a corpse, still with the dignity of motherhood, of being alive, and that dignity, that life ended by something, by a logic, a decision, far beneath her in value and dignity, yet raised to a position of power over her life and death by, by what, by the iniquities we know about.

The child covered in the blood of his mother.

This is what the war means, that our children can have Playstations and new clothes all the time ("our way of life is non-negotiable"); that our leaders can entertain their acquisitive, aggressive wargaming fantasies, and enrich themselves; other people's children die and become orphans.

Our death drive takes people who have nothing to do with it victims, and we watch them as part of the spectacle.