How Precious is life.

I just watched a movie about Rwanda called Beyond the Gates (also called Shooting Dogs). It has made me come to the conclusion that life is not that precious. Not the way jem stones are preserved in velvet boxes or old manuscripts seen only in certain light. or perhaps we have life described wrong. Life is not living. Perhaps life is dying. People say things like we are but a breath, steam, vapor, a moment. So perhaps dying, even by machete is not THAT big of a deal.

When I wrote that last sentence, every fiber in me was revolted, as every fiber in the Tutsi dead must have screamed at repeated machete whacks. 800,000* killed in 100 days. But we do not like to think of these things. So we play with words instead. The people on the top, the people giving orders are wordsmiths, they read dictionaries, perhaps they write dictionaries. The UN (apparently based in NY) did not call it genocide. they later called it acts of genocide. Perhaps they could have used the terms genocide-like, genocide-ish. they have a nice ring to them, don't you think? acts of genocide sounds too much like actual genocide. Because if it were genocide, the UN would be legally bound to act, to take action, to not just monitor, and observe but to step in and stop the woman from being rape and killed and the children hacked to death, and the men chopped up.

*I apologize to you, 800,000 dead, that I do not know your names. I trust you are in a better place, where hopefully, there are no cliches or language barriers.

Raw bones and blood and fibrous muscle is perhaps more tender, easier to hack through than the stalks that once grew in the field. More giving, the blade just eases through.

I could not sit through the movie. I got up found the bathroom. Then cried in the kitchen, and came back when the music had softened into violins and the white subtitles of fact surfaced and faded on the dark screen.


I am ignorant. I could not tell a Hutu or Tutsi apart. And I wonder, if in 1994 a Tutsi and Hutu both won a scholarship to England or the U.S. at some all white school if they would be friends, almost automatically, or if while their brothers and sister were murdering and dying, they would strangle each other on the soccer field. or perhaps they would just be lynched by a rogue KKK crew that happened by and saw these two black guys.

If living life were really precious, it should be harder to die. And perhaps it once was and perhaps it still is. it is 12 37 at night. How can I sleep with these morbid soldiers wandering my mind.

Flip on the home-shopping network, do my part in restoring the american economy. Forget the semantics of life and death and genocide and acts of genocide. I have been wanting a new wool skirt. It is cold here. That is something worthy of complaining about, isn't?