The Blind and Merciless Sky Above

The post immediately below this one still has me unsettled. I spent the remainder of the week last week wondering about the whole thing. For those of you who made the decision not to expose yourselves to the horror of that film clip, let me just say that neither what happened to the girl, nor the insane act of covering her nakedness that I talked about in my post were the most lasting image I carry with me. It is the crowd of frenzied attackers, many of them with cell phones in their hands, crowding around her, beating her, all the while holding those hideous glowing cell phones up to record the unfolding horror.

I always wondered who it was that took pictures like this

during the holocaust. I suppose that in some deep recess of my heart I had dared to harbor the hope that at least some of those photographers might have been trying to record the horror so that future generations might know and work to prevent such things from ever happening again. It was my naïve hope that the man in this picture might have been glancing up to see a sympathetic figure, a figure who wanted to make his final moment one that would live in human hearts and help to improve them. That despicable film has taken that silly, fragile hope from me.

The girl in that film clip died, as this man did, under a blind and merciless sky, in the savage hands of atavistic murderers, without a hope of any redemption. It is only by freakish accident that you and I, dear reader, have had the opportunity to feel as though we were with them in their last instants of life. The blind enthusiasm and fatuous immorality of their tormentors have preserved those moments for us. We owe it to them to carry their images in our hearts and to make sure that we do our best to prevent such things in the future.

If we allow Western Civilization to lose heart and give in to the bloody advance of the Caliphate, every sky will be blind and merciless for millennia to come.