These are strange times indeed, my friends. With so much absurdity in the world, it can be difficult to focus on anything at all. But each element must be scrutinized in order to understand its full impact and the treachery at play, even though such reflection creates an overwhelming feeling of dread.

Is this present our future? What is the reality that awaits us? If news is available, but consuming it only works to construct feelings of inability, isolation and hopelessness, it cannot surprise us to see how such information is rejected or ignored by everyday people. But turned-off minds are very common in our world today. Is any other explanation logical when one explores the realities of President Obama’s drone wars, or the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, or even complicit government and corporate manipulation of global finance. Something is wrong, something has to give.

Where is the heart, the compassion in all of this? Well, perhaps it’s in the people that are victimized by it all. In some places, that heart is more visible. In places where destruction is part of life, where a young girl can be playing in a park one moment, and in the next evading bombs falling from the sky. The tears of people genuinely hurt by the world we live in, that’s where our collective heart shows itself. 

What is this pain to the person a world away, catching the bus on a chilly November morning? How does it manifest in those punching plastic keys and drinking from the workplace coffee pool?

We still have heart, but it’s lost in a incredible maze of advertising, television and social networking, mortgage payments and the ongoing search for happiness. The heart is there, but it’s buried under an avalanche of consumption suffocating its brilliant light. It must be buried very deep when the testimony of an unbelievably brave nine year-old girl, Nabila Rehman, fails to stir the power of the people. The Pakistani youth attempted to relate to the American Senate the experience of running from a bomb that killed her grandmother while they were gardening.

Her victimization by aerial drones transcends distance and borders. This is the territory of the heart, our collective heart; the human capacity for true feeling. This is something that happened, for real, to another person just like you or me. We all know how wrong it is, and we also know it happens all the time in the name of democracy. Despite all the political gabbing and rhetoric used to explain atrocities away, we all know the truth. The heart of the matter is that a child witnessed her grandmother’s demise and narrowly escaped death herself, all at the hands and words and decisions of leaders elected by the people and for the people. The people don’t want this, the people have hearts – I know they do. I hope they do.

Follow your heart and visit this link to meet the young girl and her family: rt.com/usa/rehman-drone-grayson-hearing-924/

Stacy Billingsley is a freelance teacher and writer searching for some way to make a difference in this simultaneously beautiful and ugly world that we call home.

Published in Volume 68, Number 13 of The Uniter (November 27, 2013)