Rescuers walk across the fields of rubble, the apocalypse has come, and nothing has remained, collapsed for as far as the eyes can see. Death and destruction poisoned the air; the injured are carried away to safety, and for the unlucky, the light that didn’t pierce the dark veil that shrouded their final moments came but whose speed couldn’t outrun the black of death. Those last breaths were suffocated by the shadow of death, boxing them in, choking them out. The final moments filled with emotion too deep to put into words, impossible for any man living or that has lived. Twenty thousand souls and counting whose mouths were silenced and souls taken; for a people suffering from strife and crisis, this tragedy has only compounded and taken what little they already had and replaced it with immeasurable suffering. Has God abandoned us? Has he left life to be nothing but a cycle of misery for those who deserve it the least?
Those people who were suffering under a sky that rained upon them abominations of manmade creation and whose ground shook with from the march of men. The shaking that happened on Tuesday wasn’t of man, but from below, that trembled with the force of a thousand armies, a final betrayal from the last that hadn’t betrayed them. Have the innocent been doomed to suffer? Is it the fate of humanity to suffer? That question is far beyond my capacity to answer but to believe suffering is all there is would be to ignore what’s in front of our eyes, hope. In the abyss of night, there will always be a candle of hope; the tiniest ember of light imperceptible to the eye will emerge and eventually overtake the darkness. In this tragedy, inside the rubble, a small boy ten days old appeared with the corpses of his family surrounding him, a tiny ember amongst swaths of death. If that isn’t proof, I don’t know what is.
Now, as children of God, we’ve learned to hurt and take from each other, but we must give. Give back what they’ve lost, and show that for all our violence, there is love in greater proportion. We are all citizens of the world bound by love in the face of this crisis in Turkey and Syria.
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