Unsubscribes

 Yesterday, over on my other blog, I finally posted something about Gaza. Almost immediately, two people un-subscribed from the list. And it's not like I was swimming in attention to begin with. 

Of course, there are any number of possible reasons. Maybe those people just got too many emails. Maybe they were just looking to reduce the amount of spam in their inbox. 

But I can't shake the feeling that this was simply not a topic that people wanted to hear about from me.  

And in fairness to me, I did actually keep my peace for a long time. Over on this blog, of course, I've periodically written about the conflict. But not so often; and when I do—I've usually tried to take an evenhanded, "both/and" approach. 

On my other blog, meanwhile—I never wrote about it. 

But this very fact may have been why people unsubscribed, once I had finally done so. Maybe they had come to regard my blog as a relatively safe place—where they wouldn't be bombarded with horrible information about this dreadful war that is otherwise inescapable. 

But to that I can only say—there is only so much human suffering that we can witness—daily in the news—before we feel compelled to speak out. 

I think back to Pablo Neruda's poem "I'm Explaining a Few Things." The main thing he was seeking to explain, in the poem, was why he had stopped writing bucolic love poetry—and started writing instead about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. 

His "explanation" was—in brief: you'd do the same—if you had seen what he had seen in Spain. He writes:

And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry

speak of dreams and leaves

and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.

I first heard this poem because Harold Pinter read it aloud as part of his Nobel Lecture in 2005. To my Bush-era teenage self, Pinter and Neruda seemed to me in that moment the perfect models of committed artists. I couldn't wait to "speak out" like them, when my turn came. 

But then it happens. Another brutal, murderous war takes place, in which the U.S. is complicit. And suddenly, I found it was harder to speak out than I had assumed. I held my peace for more than a year and a half of Gaza's suffering—at least over on the other blog. 

But now it's come out. It tumbled out of me. And if you ask—why? Why should we have to hear this from him, of all people? Why doesn't his blog talk about immigration and domestic policy and his other usual beats? I can only reply: 

"Come and see the blood in the streets."