I am swamped with work and life right now. Not in a bad way; a very good way, actually. In fact, I don't think work could be going any better. I wake up looking forward to sitting at my desk and accomplishing something more, and hopefully, something useful and important, if even in just some small way.

As I sit, working away, I can't get this out of my head. It resides there; the fact that I am simply fortunate by the luck of birth, to have been born into a country without recent conflicts. North Americans have this way of creating and perpetuating an "us" versus "them" mentality. "Those" poor people in Lebanon, we think, and then chase the fleeting thought away, shooing it like a pesky fly. What if we didn't shoo these thoughts away, and instead of putting them at the backs of our head spaces, we allowed them to come to the forefront. What would we all do?...is allowing Israel to continue to bomb Lebanon the answer right now? I'll let you answer, should you feel motivated to do so.

To top things off, there is an environmental crisis in the works, which is nearly getting lost in the bigger concerns at the moment:

"BEIRUT: At least 10,000 tons of heavy fuel oil have been spilled into the Lebanese sea, causing an environmental catastrophe with severe effects on health, biodiversity and tourism, environmentalists and the Environment Ministry said Wednesday. Two weeks ago, Israeli bombs targeted the Jiyye power station, located on the coast 30 kilometers south of Beirut. Part of the oil in storage tanks has been burning ever since and the other part is leaking into the Mediterranean.
"The pollution has affected around 70 to 80 kilometers of both public and private rocky and sandy beaches from Damour, south of Beirut, through to Chekka in the North," Berge Hadjian, the Environment Ministry's director general said Wednesday. Another 15,000 tons of oil are expected to leak into the sea, he added. " Beirut Daily Star, July 26, 2006.

There are no images; it is an invisible blight to the rest of the unknowing world.

If you were living in southern Lebanon right now, a complete innocent, with a family of young children, well into your second week in a bomb shelter, with scarcely enough food and water and no knowledge of what tomorrow might bring, what would you want the average person a world away to do? Their voices can not be heard by us, but we can imagine what they must be thinking. Their thoughts, expressed as voices, pervade the spaces in my head. What shall we do?...