Invisible

 Trump's campaign of extrajudicial killing in the Caribbean and Pacific has long since fallen below the top fold of the newspapers. It is no longer treated as either a major news story or a particularly urgent political scandal. 

But that's not because the killings have stopped. Just yesterday, the U.S. government murdered another 11 people at sea. The week before that, they killed 3 people in yet another strike on a civilian vessel. 

Somehow, it's like the very relentlessness and prolificness of this campaign of mass murder has made it harder for people to see it. They have rendered it "normal" and familiar. 

"As crimes pile up, they become invisible," as Brecht once wrote. 

"The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror," he writes in the same poem. "Then a hundred were butchered."

"But," he adds, "when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread." (Willett trans.)

We seem to have reached that stage in Trump's campaign of mass murder at sea. The blanket of silence has spread about us. 

Perhaps it's not that people have forgotten what's happening. Perhaps it's merely that they have run out of things to say about it. We have "talked our extinction to death," to borrow Robert Lowell's phrase.  

The first time you learn your government is murdering civilians on boats, you think: surely, this is the worst. Surely, this is as bad as it can get. "No worst there is none" (Hopkins). 

And so, you do not hesitate to expend all your outrage at once. 

You don't think to hoard it for another day. 

Only afterward do you realize that those first murders were only the beginning. That the murders would go on. That by February, the U.S. government would have murdered at least 144 people—

—well over twice the number of people killed in the worst mass shooting in American history. 

Perpetrated by our government, our military, on our president's orders. With no end in sight; no hope of political accountability or legal intervention to make the butchery stop. 

Let us not move on so quickly. Let us not go silent. Let us heed the moon's reproach, in Thomas Hardy's "I looked up from my writing"—who comes in the name of one "slain in brutish battle." 

Let us heed Siegfried Sassoon's words: "Look down and swear by the slain [...] that you will never forget."