So what is the other response?  Tell me please.  Parts of the world containing millions of people are going to hell in a handbasket, and I skip merrily along like a girl in a Spring dress distributing depressing little vignettes as though they were flower petals.  But what's the other response?  ...the one that does not dwell so tenaciously on tragedy?

(Let's see if i can do this without 'dwelling tenaciously on the tragedy.'). 

Focusing away from the point-at, gasping, horror may not be the same thing as denying it is there, but it feels that way to me.  Pretending everything is OK is charged for me, supercharged emotionally.  As you may know, when I was two years old, I experienced a horror that has not yet ended.  But that event in itself is not the point.  The thing that makes it difficult for me not to scream (figuratively), even when screaming has been done to an annoying excess (like I have done in this blog), is that the two year old's screams were deliberately ignored.  The choice was made to ignore what happened, to pretend everything was OK, because in 1961 nobody wanted to put my father's brother in a mental institution, which would have been the course at the time, and nobody knew how to handle the rape of a child; nobody even wanted to admit that it had happened. 

So it didn't.  My screams all drowned in the sea of denial around me.  And my reality rejected my experience.  My going-on-three-year-old life in Northboro, Massachusetts became stunningly and tragically unreal when parents, family, extended family, and even family friends, all rejected my experience as if my story were the problem, instead of the horror it was reporting.

So, the image of skipping merrily along like a girl in a Spring dress distributing depressing little vignettes as though they were flower petals, captures in some way the absurdity of my experiences—perhaps the absurdity of everyone's experiences. 

And screaming, ...well, I don't know when to stop because I have been taught to believe that I make no sound at all. 

I don't know where to start, this article tells of so many crimes and inhumanities.  Like rocketing and bulldozing homes while civilians still occupy them.  Like using prisoners as human shields.  Like extrajudicial executions and disposal of bodies in unmarked mass graves. 

Are the Israeli's allowed to do this because of the Holocaust?  We need to get over our gentile guilt.  I have only skimmed the surface of that genocide's horror, like lightly touching the numbers etched in glass, and even that was overwhelming.  But nothing justifies repeating that behavior.  Nothing.  I acknowledge the base urge of the Israeli people to return horrors and inhumanities for the horrors and inhumanities which have been inflicted on them.  But civilization, by definition, means that such atrocities are stopped, not perpetuated.  Sharon, in everything he has done his whole career, has sought to perpetuate the insanity of hatred.  Israel, stop him.

Where are the tears?  Where have our hearts and souls gone?