The Crow's Eye

I shouldn't post. My head is swaddled in pain. I have artifacts in the corners of my vision, of cracked glass and spiderwebs, of geometrically perfect honeycombs which eat at the center of my field of view, and blue-red-yellow flashes of emptiness which linger, which have color, and are still nothing, no thing.

But, a minor thought -

Will our grandchildren one day refer as reverently to the Noble Palestinian as we now do to the Noble Red Indian, and the Noble Tibetan?

Safely defeated, reduced to stragglers, inward turned, commodified as the image of sins which have a perfect forgiveness because the victors write their victim's expiation of all offense, and then sell it to the sons of those who have never known their parents as murdered mothers and fathers, who have never walked past a grove, or crested the rise of hill and known the deep truth of expulsion, of exile, of defeat without deliverance.

The red nations fought back. Tecumseh almost pulled it off. The other enemies of Great White Father never came close again, not really. But they fought. A succession of the named, and the nameless. They fought, those beautiful bastards. And their names now they mark the high schools, sports teams and motor cars of they who inherited what their grandfathers stole.

The Tibetans fought back. They did not yield with an imaginary Buddhist grace. And lost. Lost everything. And now they serve up a totem high priest-high king, a man of perfect peace, because his is the perfect defeat and surrender; he didn't leave his life on the mountain top. He has value as a clown, a painted prophet of no hands clapping. He can smile his complete surrender, and scribble platitudes for the grandchildren of murderers - because he will no more ever be a threat. They eat it up, those inheritors of rape, murder and expropriation, because he too offers a perfect forgiveness.

 So...

One day, will the Palestinian remnant add their voices to the echoes, their memories trademarked and marketed by their captors, their land long plowed under, their names appropriated for the history of conquerors? Will they too become like hollowed out ghosts, wandering a world which needs them only so long as they persist in the perfect peace of the cemetery, the crematorium and the grave? Bereft of the edged weapon of a memory which refuses surrender, will the Palestinian become another figure of veneration?

Another smiling face of perfect forgiveness?

I think you know the answer. And it should make you reach for your own bladed response...