To a Starving Orphan Who Died Alone in Rubble 

Tales of infants and young children dying because they can’t get enough to eat and distraught parents robbed of their dignity because they can do nothing for their kids (or themselves) are too numerous and ghastly to detail here. But just for a moment imagine that all of this was happening to your loved ones. –

– Andrea Mazzarino, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse?, TomDispatch, July 7, 2024 

Since Oct. 7, I have been posting articles daily about the Gaza War on Facebook (even earning myself a demerit for quoting a source FB management disapproved of), talking to people who could care less or worse, with growing frustration as the numbness set in.  Except I didn’t get numb to the death of hundreds of thousands of children. The trauma deepened and I had to ransack my memory for the reason until I found it in the Stanislaus County Hospital Boys Polio Ward, in the hot summer of 1953. 

The little boy wailed at night in the ward, sometimes nearly all night, keeping us all awake. Only the deep voice of our eldest resident, a boy of 13, had any hope of calming him in his misery, his despair, and what seemed to him his complete separation from his parents, although they drove 100 miles a day every day to see him in the summer of 1953 during the last worldwide polio epidemic before the Salk vaccine arrived and soon caused people in the wealthier nations to forget polio entirely.  

“But don’t they see,” he seemed to say through his sobs, “that I need them here now, in the night, when I am all alone in the dark and scared?” 

As I remember it, they let his parents into the ward. The rest of us visited our parents through the blue tinted, south facing windows. Sometimes, my father, a doctor, came in bearing new comic books for one and all. I was 10. You cannot imagine how important the touch of a parent is to a child until you are without it and you saw the envy in the eyes of your fellow patients, who sometimes went for more than a year without it. 

We didn’t know until that night that the little boy, only 4, was sobbing out his life, his whole, short life. 

I am obsessed with telling this tale. It is my small way in my small life to relate to the figure Lancet, the British medical journal, came up with this week, of 186,000 dead in Gaza, not the 40,000 generally spoken of. Numbers mean so little these days that it means even less to say how little they mean. How does a number, any number, express the reality of the death of a child or several or many or many more every day? 

In the polio ward, the little boy’s crying grew fainter in the night until he stopped and we heard the rustle of nurses’ starched uniforms, their hushed voices and the deeper male voice of a doctor. around his crib.  He died in the relative dignity of a hospital, without his parents but surrounded by nurses and all his older polio-ward brothers, motionless in our beds, silently praying. 

The children of Palestine die in a bedlam of cries of pain and despair, lamentations, screams, exploding ordinance, buildings falling around them, and I cannot imagine what other sounds of bedlam. They lie starving, wounded, without much medicine if any, and their eyes, at first shocked by the pain and torment, desperately seeking outside for help, are eventually sucked into the vortex of pain. Their eyes no longer attempt to focus, but turn toward the tunnel of torment at the end of which is the light of infinite distance.  

They each die alone, although if in the remnants of one of the few remaining Palestinian hospitals, they die surrounded by relatives that are still alive, perhaps a nurse or two, a harried, despairing physician, and, of course, the sound of bombs, missiles, mortars, and automatic weapons.  

The sparks that were their lives fly off through the bombed out roofs of the hospitals, schools, or houses, and whirl around in the dust above the rubble of the neighborhoods that were their entire worlds, cut short by homicidal maniacs who live in other neighborhoods whose mothers applaud the evil they do and wish only that their strapping young child killers will come home safely to the land they imagine  is theirs in fee simple absolute, guaranteed by the bought-and-sold US Congress and the Zionist G$d of “a land without people for people without a land.” 

According to UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Adele Khodr: “Horrific images continue to emerge from Gaza of children dying before their families’ eyes due to the continued lack of food, nutrition supplies, and the destruction of healthcare services.” – Juan Cole, Informed Comment, June 12. 2024 

The powerless have always  begun to regain their power by telling the truth. They stop giving in to despair. They give up self-pity. I remember the boys beside me in a poor county hospital in miserable summer heat without air conditioning. I remember we tried to be friends despite pain and fear, struggling against nearby death. 

We can always bear witness to the sparks of innocent lives flying upward from the rubble of our worlds. In this act of letting ourselves tell the truth, our lives begin to make the limited sense any life makes after we remove ourselves from the terrible shadows of ideology. The Zionist G$d is just a source of political campaign donations and no more innocent children should be sacrificed to it. 

Sometimes, telling the truth begins with No. Just because, to a significant extent, our country is founded on genocide, doesn’t mean we need to repeat it endlessly. Although this is our history, we should not agree with this statement in 1851 from the first governor of California, Peter Burnett: “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.” 

Nor should we agree with President Andrew Jackson, who said in his fifth annual message, December 3, 1833: “They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.” 

I deny the power of this long US tradition and am completely opposed to the nuclear armed, “exceptionally” narcissistic neo-Indian Killers who now dominate our foreign policy and bring the world closer every day to total destruction. I know that many of us feel for the Palestinian people beneath the various sick ideologies that divide us from our hearts and each other in this society. On behalf of the Palestinian orphans dying of starvation in the rubble of Gaza, I will continue to oppose those ideologies, beginning with the ultra-racist slogan: “a land without people for a people without land.” 

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