Imagine this: you’ve been barred from your home district while those who are conducting a war got on with it. You’ve spent your time trying to find food and get on with life in the parts of your town that are still semi-functional, whilst trying to teach your kids to recognize and find shelter from missile and sniper attacks.
Imagine this: after a while, you’re allowed to go back to your home district. Along with dozens of disoriented, traumatized others, you’re picking your way through the remains. You identify the remains of your house. Now, you’re standing in a pile of junk and rubble. You automatically start poking around, trying to find any useful possessions that might have survived.
You notice that some people aren’t seeing the boundaries of different people’s former homes anymore, they’re just poking around everywhere, looking for useful items that have survived. Now, you have to make a decision. Are you going to stay here and defend the bit that was your home from opportunists, in case you find a way of rebuilding it or are you going to accept that the whole area is just everyone’s rubble now, and start figuring out how your next life and your next home is going to work?
Imagine it well
You really need to think out what you are going to do you know, and so do I because, as we completely failed to stop our insane politicians inflaming the conflicts and supplying the explosives that wrecked Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, I forget where else but, currently, Gaza, because we failed to stop them, they now know they can destroy whatever they like, wherever they like so it might just be you or me next, picking over the rubble – if we survive the bombs, of course.
A better alternative?
The other option is to keep trying to stop the genocidal politicians we are blighted by. What am I doing to stop them, what are you doing? What else could we try? Let’s keep pushing, and keep thinking of more ideas we can try. It’s better than standing there trying to pick the last of your life out of the rubble of war.
The Battle for Home
The picture at the top of this article, and the inspiration for the scenario I describe above, come from Marwa Al-Sabouni’s book The Battle for Home. She was a student of architecture and, what students of architecture do is go out and sketch the built environment around them and think about how it came to be like that, what kind of community the environment creates, and what architects might do there that would be useful.
It just so happens that Al-Sabouni was a student in Syria when the monsters of war were busy destroying it. That’s why her sketches are all like the one above. The book is her story of the experience.
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Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 