here are two of my current difficulties. the first is personal. i listened to a lecture by salman rushdie recently where he said that many things are too horrific for people to understand directly, and so sometimes address it obliquely or indirectly can actually end up conveying the magnitude of the reality more effectively than you might have if you described it bluntly. in other words some things are too horrific to look at face-on. it's why books and character profiles and poetry are more effective and more mobilizing than raw data. its the function of narrative. my own problem is that i don't know if i have the ability to do so right now. which is pretty embarrassing, because it's more or less my job. like yesterday i watched a video of a palestinian man cradling his child's head. just her head. how do you address this indirectly? i know all the arguments for and against videos like this. but also that man had to cradle his daughter's head and people had to be there and film it, in a room full of dead kids. that was someone's real life. this happened two days ago, and it could be people i know this is happening to next. it could be my friends. attempting to address this indirectly feels like an impossible task. they create a reality too awful to endure, and then they demand that we reduce it so that the onlookers can endure the experience of knowing about it.

because i haven't yet figured out a way around this, here's a short documentary you should watch about israeli soldiers sniping children in the head, a phenomenon first reported from palestinians fleeing quadcopter fire, later covered in the new york times in an op-ed by american doctors who operated on these children, and now brought to you with footage directly from gaza.