I can't look, I can't not look

Note: distressing content.

I was 13 when this happened, 14 maybe.

When I was that age I spent a lot of time on the family computer in the spare bedroom. We had dial-up which limited what you could get up to but you learned to be patient. There used to be heaps of weird little websites running Flash games that everyone at school was obsessed with. Newgrounds, Miniclip, things like that. You’d play something like the Arnold Schwarzenegger Voice Simulator and chat to your mates on MSN Messenger while you waited two hours for a Black Eyed Peas mp3 to rip from KaZaA.

I was on Reddit I think, which was not as bad as it would become later but still pretty bad. I had been there long enough that I wasn’t really taking in anything I was looking at, just scrolling through an endless cascade of threads and 00s-era memes until I got tired enough to go to bed.

The video was from Iraq I think. It was shot on one of the earliest mobile phones to have a camera I guess, or maybe it was an actual camera with a video function because I remember the picture quality being pretty good. Whoever was holding the camera was walking up to the back of a van. People were crowded around the van’s open rear doors.

The person holding the camera found a gap in the wall of people and suddenly you could see into the van. There was a little girl or what was once a little girl. I’m not good with knowing how old kids are but she was about seven I think, or younger. The top half of her head was gone. Not evenly, if that makes sense. It was like when you try to crack an egg into a frypan but you make a mess of it. It was like that.

Her father was trying to hold her face but he didn’t know where to put his hands so they hovered over her instead. He brushed her cheeks. Her eyes were open.

He was making a sound outside the limits of my understanding. I can’t compare it to any sound I’ve ever heard a person make. I’ve been to funerals for people who died too young and not heard people sound the way he did.

I still think of him. I wonder if he’s still walking around somehow after twenty years. Surely it can’t be possible to be in that much pain and stay alive.

When my daughter was born last year she had a rough time. We spent a few weeks bouncing around different NICU wards across Sydney before they let us go home.

A few days after she was born we showed up at the NICU and the mood in the air was different. The head of the ward saw us coming up the hall and dropped what she was doing to come meet us. When she took us to her office there were other doctors from other departments there already waiting for us.

We had one of those meetings that doctors have when they feel like they have to prepare you for something bad. We sat on the couch and nodded and tried to retain the information they were giving us. They were helpful and understanding and kind. When it was over I locked myself in a toilet stall outside the ward and cried until I thought I was going to pass out.

I see a version of that video every day now more or less. I haven’t seen the latest one, you know the one I mean, but sooner or later I will. I’ll be on the couch or waiting for a smoothie or something and I’ll see it. You try and look away when you realise what you’re looking at but by then it’s too late, you put the phone down or turn it off or fling it away from you like a spider crawling on your hand but the image is already in your head along with all the other ones, filed away for when you’re in a Zoom meeting or meeting someone for coffee or rocking your daughter back to sleep in the middle of the night.

I don’t know if “radicalised” is the right word but I’m a different person now than I was at the start of October. I’ve changed in a deep and fundamental way and I don’t see myself ever changing back. I imagine there are a lot of people of whom this is not true but I find myself not wanting anything to do with those people now, maybe ever.

Fundraiser update

As of right now we’ve raised ten thousand (10,000) Australian dollars for Noor and her bub. They moved from Rafah to Khan Younis about a week ago, but the Egyptian border is still shut. Any money you can give will go towards keeping them housed and fed until the border reopens, whenever that is.

In the meantime I’m trying to run ads on Facebook for this fundraiser but because the ads have the word “Gaza” in them Meta has flagged them as political, which means they need an address on them. I really don’t want to put my home address on the internet for freaks to find but I also don’t want a post office box, so if you have one I could use for this purpose please reach out.

What I’m looking at

• The state’s “right” of self-defence

• Ireland recognises Palestine

• Arms manufacturers near you