The Numbers
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Remember throwing a stone into a lake when you were a child…watching that stone soar…seeing the splash and discovering how the ripples returned back to the shore.
Remember if you tossed more than one stone at the same time…(as you might have expected)…the pattern became jumbled as the ripples intersected.
Every bomb that’s dropped…every bullet fired…every person killed in time of war…is a stone tossed upon the water…sending ripples back to shore.
In war, however, with a multitude of bombs, bullets and people killed at the same time…(as you might expect)…tragedies become jumbled as their ripples intersect.
When the ripples of one death wash over us they immediately flood our heart…filling us with sorrow at a world tearing itself apart.
But when we hear of another death…and another…and another…when the numbers become so great….the intersecting ripples become hard to discriminate.
So many people die every day in war…so many with each blink…so many ripples washing over us…we don’t have to me to think…
To think about each individual death…how life itself is rare…
to think about how personal each death is to somebody…somewhere.
To think how a war has no true winners…no lasting benefits…
To think how each person’s death has its own love story attached to it.
I imagine this is just one of the many inevitable tragedies of war…
whether or not it’s ripples ever reach our shore…
How families and friends are left in sorrow…angry…disenchanted…
How with every death created in war…another seed of hate is planted.
Copyright © Jim Yerman | Year Posted 2022
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