Ruba, I concur but this level of pain is different.
Trying hard to figure out if the general levels of our anxiety are due to an increase in moral panics, fear of pandemics, or the consistent distracting and highly manipulative noise from social media...
...and the helplessness we often feel to change any of it.
It's like we're caught on some fortification, a tower of fear, suffering from the effects of a siege mentality, where grief mans the walls beside us.
Remember thinking about the difference between grief and mourning...and getting caught between the two.
Raw and visceral, grief is an open wound. Mourning on the other hand is acceptance.
As a grieving mother once told me concerning the accidental death of her son:
"I know that the pain will never go away, I just hope that I can get better at handling it."
But what if we can't move to acceptance?
What if more and more tragedy continually keeps us from the better handling the pain of what we see and feel?
So we're often stuck.
Seeking solace from religion, often the very bastion of hypocrisy, may help bring some opiate like relief.
But what to do with Popes and Muftis and Priests and Ayatollahs and Rabbis who, as Ophelia opines to her brother in Hamlet,
"...like a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede. "
Only dear Ophelia, in 2024, its not just a path of dalliance, it's a path of willful destruction to be divinely visited upon the heretic, the apostate of course, but especially upon the other, and when it comes to Gaza and the West Bank, to the Palestinians and their children.
What about our leaders, can't they do something?
Far too many are held in the thrall of billionaire psychopaths and entities like AIPAC. Currently in the US, the presidential candidates need to spend close to $15 billion.
Cynicism anyone?
So Ruba...what can we do to move our grief to acceptance?
You are doing it.
You are moving from grief to acceptance by honouring your cousin, and
with others, you are Marching. Protesting and Demanding accountability.
Well done.
Really like the aptness of your light metaphor
The Zoroastrians have this saying:
"There is no place in darkness where light cannot grow."
Thank you.