too awful not to post

-The first image referenced in the Vatican pedophilia.
-The second image the child sexual abuse in tourism in Thailand.
-The third refers to the war in Syria. 
-The fourth image refers to trafficking in organs on the black market, where most of the victims are children of poor countries.
-The fifth refers to school shootings.
-The sixth image refers to obesity, blaming the big fast food companies

from here https://www.facebook.com/IAAMT

cold horror. in a can.

Ok. Imagine that you were in your late thirties. And your 72 year old Catholic mother in law came up to stay for the weekend. And while you were waiting for your husband to get in from work and bring her home, she sat down with you, and instigated a little chat. About sex. Maybe asked what you did, and if there was any way she could help. Let her tell you about the sort of things she and your father in law used to do, perhaps (and remember, your father and father in law shared a first name... as does your husband!)...

Your husband comes home from dropping his mother back, to find you sitting frozen to the chair in the kitchen.

'What?' he says, when he sees your stricken face. 'What??'

And when you tell him, relate the details of your ordeal, it hits him hard. So hard, maybe, that he only tells his bandmates about it, and his brother hears it from one of them. Not him. Perhaps there are some things that should not be shared, should never be spoken of between brothers.

I wondered out loud why I never got the Talk, the zealous concern - and it was suggested, perhaps, that I was several years younger. That I hadn't failed to yet produce a second grandchild, despite recently mentioning my intent to start 'trying', and my first child already gone three.

You can hear the inner reasoning now... 'ah, sure they must be doing it wrong!'

God help us. God help us all.

nightmare

Test 300 or so, 300 or so essays on a book set in post Holocaust Jerusalem, about a people shadowed by atrocity and suddenly, the idea of Sophie's choice leaps into my head (thanks, Xbox) in technicolour empathy and the breath whooshes out of me in the full horror of it. There's an iron weight on my chest. That that must surely have been someone's true story, what would you do, what would you do? Go too, with both? Better to die all together than forsake one, knowing what you were sending them to? Or worse to condemn them both, and yourself. But how could you live?

Perhaps I should be taking a pill for this, this condition of over feeling.