I've prayed more in the few weeks since the Iran elections than I've prayed in the whole rest of my life. I keep finding myself wanting to somehow tell the people on the streets and the ones afraid to protest that they are not forgotten. Their government has so shut off from the world that they fear nobody can see what is happening.
Before anyone (if anyone even reads this) jumps on me for being sucked in by all the Twitter and the rest of the internet coverage, and by implication deems me heartless for not caring about all the deaths in the other countries around the world, all the time:
Humans can only recognise a certain number of other humans as distinct people, everyone else gets lumped together as "the rest of the humans" and are not regarded as being as real and human as the people we know in our everyday lives.
I saw a man die in a video on YouTube a few days after the election results were declared. It was posted probably within 12 hours of it happening. I think he must have been one of the first to die from a sniper shot. I felt my body try to make me feel what he was feeling as the life left him. I saw a man become something that looked for all the world just the same as he had moments before, except for far too much blood where it should never be. Some part of my awareness was in denial. It sounds simplistic but the only way I can describe it is a little voice saying "No. No, that looks wrong." Even that doesn't really capture the feeling.
If I felt them all as much as I do (and I have a very all or-nothing brain) I would soon be as good as dead myself. I don't believe it is possible to survive that depth of sadness, and it certainly isn't a good idea to try.
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