What could I do? I was only two years old, but so were many of them and yet they were mercilessly cut down with machetes. They didn’t even know what was happening, but they knew the pain. All they knew was the pain and terror of running and running and death.

I feel it. I feel their pain. Sure, it is not as strong or sharp. I know that. I know that it can’t even compare a little bit. But I feel it all the same. It aches in my chest. It’s like I’ve been hit with a massive wave and I’m spinning underwater and I’m lost and I can’t breathe and it hurts. It hurts so much that sometimes I don’t think I can take it. Sometimes you just have to push the hurt to the back of your mind and ignore it for a little while. But eventually this is worse.

You see, it’s really the guilt that gets you. The guilt for putting the tiny suffering child away in the corner and ignoring them. You know that they hurt so much more than you and that when you feel that desperate ache, they’re hurting a thousand times as much. No, a million times as much. More. You know that it is now that they need you most of all, but you let them down and it’s terrible and it hurts. Everything hurts. Everyone hurts.

There’s shame, too. At first it tastes the same as guilt, but then your mouth lights on fire and the shame fills you with its spice. It’s like this: I’m here, we’re all here, living comfortably and happily. Our impression of pain is the echo of pain from worlds away. We don’t get it. And so, when we are thrown to the ground gasping from our guilt, we naturally ask, “Why am I here and not there? Why isn’t it me being raped or slaughtered? What gives me the right and who condemned them to hell before they were even born, let alone dead?”

First, we turn to God with this question. He seems like He would know. But, of course, we can’t really speak to God and have Him answer us. So we turn to the church, be it Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Pagan. It doesn’t matter. Ultimately we get more or less the same answer. It’s all about God’s Plan. Apparently He has a Plan for each and every single one of our little souls. We look up and see a brittle lie through the sheen of tears. How can God hand pick every little soul who has to go suffer and die and every little soul who doesn’t have to? How can it be in His Plan to hurt these people like this? How can He decide this cruel fate for us and then just leave us to blindly wander through it with no concept of why? No Plan, however holy, can be worth this unimaginable horror.

Then, we turn to ourselves. We comb through our being, looking for some special, superior characteristic that exempted us from this suffering. We find nothing. We are not worth this special treatment. This is when we are hit by a sneaking suspicion that it is not a strength that we will find in ourselves as a reason for our deliverance. It is a weakness. We are simply not strong enough to survive this rape and murder of the soul. Are we? Will we ever be able to say unless we experience it?

It’s twisted, this universal merit system. If God exists, nobody can deny that He is twisted. He twists my heart for not allowing me to take the blow for these millions of people and save them. I would do it in a heartbeat, I think. I’d like to think.

It is the worst feeling of all to think that you would sacrifice all of these millions and millions of people for yourself. I can’t believe that. I can’t. I can’t believe that anyone would do that, even though they clearly do. Genocide happens. But is it really their fault? Nobody stops them until it is too late. It’s all of our fault. Maybe they, too, wake in the night with a heart twisted and aching with pain and they’re drowning and drowning and they can’t breathe and they’re running and running and running and running and it hurts. Everything hurts. Everyone hurts.

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