I’d been fighting back tears all October long, and had managed, quite successfully, to keep the tempests in their tiny bottles despite the highs and lows of this eventful month. Then some footage of a young man from Sidon emerged.
This man is a metalhead, from what I could glimpse of his t-shirt in the aggressively framed video; the cinematography directs your eyes elsewhere—to his bloodstained teeth, to the fear in his eyes.
“I didn’t mean it,” they have him say. Once more, with feeling.
And the bottles fell off their shelves.
And here they are, still falling—for this young man’s stolen dignity, for his family and friends’ broken hearts, for the state of impunity that will bring them no justice, and for the legions of foot soldiers ready to rationalize his pain away.
We didn’t mean it, we’ll say, one day, when the whole earth has been strewn with broken glass, and there’s nothing left to bottle up. Then we’ll all walk home with bloodied feet.