The Day The Internet United.

It was the day of Robin Williams' death.   Never have I seen my twitter and Facebook feeds so full of sorrow and of love.   Robin touched the hearts of my generation so much.  I grew up with him, Mork from Ork, The World According to Garp, What Dreams may Come, Bicentennial Man, Aladdin, Mrs Doubtfire.

He touched us all.  He appealed to our inner humanity, to the sense that there is always something a little alien inside us.  To the quirky, the people who would go to great lengths for the ones we love.  

And we all loved him.

I wish he had known how much he was loved.  It might not have helped.  But I just wish, wish, wish he had known.  

He was an incredible talent, and his movies helped me through some of the darker times in my life.

And he is gone, and the whole world, from Scotland, Egypt, India, Australia, grieves.

We grieve in part because he embodied "everyman".

We grieve for that part of ourselves that he touched.

We grieve because it helps us grieve for others we have lost.

I grieve because I saw such light, such kindness, such sadness in his movies.  He let us see his humor, but also his pain.

And I hope this, at least, helps his family.   That he was able to unite the Internet through love.  

The bright spark in the darkness.  Love wins.

And Robin, you are loved.  You are loved so much.

You have touched many, many lives.  More lives than you will ever know.

And I hope that you are looking down from a great mountaintop, and feel that love envelop you and take you to safety.   You have left us with incredible characters, part of a generation of people, and will live, in our hearts forever.

Goodbye, oh captain, my captain.  Nanu, nanu.

Anthem for Doomed Youth.

To Wilfred Owen, who would have dreamed that your poem would still be appropriate, 100 years on.  Now it truly is doomed youth, doomed children.   I have no words anymore, for the horrors I see on my Twitter feed.  The bodies of children being stored in ice cream freezers, because there is no room at the morgue.

I feel that I have to keep testifying, because our, as Americans, complicity is so strong.   We are providing the bombs that kill these children.  The deaths, oh god, the deaths.

And you never thought your words would apply to babies.

And when does it all stop? When does the hatred and the anger stop?   Israel will NEVER feel safe.  The Iron Dome was not put into place as protection from Hamas, it was put into place as protection from Lebanon.   Hamas was a nuisance, until they became a scapegoat, again.

It is complex, and there are layers and layers of hatred, of anger, of...  and some of it was the arbitrary division of Palestine into Palestine and Israel.  Without regard to where the lines should be drawn, or forethought into the settlement/resettlement and future of the land.

And we come to here, from genocide to an ethnic cleansing.  From the Holocaust to children's deaths, yet again.

And the cycle continues, and children die.


CHILDREN DIE.

And I feel so helpless.   But I have to speak up.

Imagine losing 18 family members at once.   I have a friend, who supports Israel, who has four brothers.  All of whom have kids.  Dan, if you read this, put yourself in their shoes.   Imagine losing your whole family in one blow.  Your brothers, their wives, most of their kids.   Imagine the impact it would have on YOUR family if you lost that many people at once.  I am not engaging you on Facebook, because it kills me that you seem to support this wholesale slaughter of families.

They have no way of burying the bodies.

The morgues are overflowing.   The power station has been bombed.

This morning, on Twitter, I read a tweet that said that Israel accidentally bombed the UN school because they were aiming for three men on motorcycles.  How does that possibly make sense?  A bomb large enough to obliterate a school, targeting three men who would have been a moving target?

STOP.  Please.  Hasn't there been enough death?

"First, they came for the Socialists"