Time Passes Slowly

This week’s Time Magazine has a special treat. Or so I thought. I read the cover as I walked back from the mail box, my arms full of mail, eager to “crack its shell” and read its usually fascinating content. The top right corner advertises, “The Year’s Best Pictures.” I expect an amazing display of artful photography, composition and color. But that is not what I find.

The pictures are eye opening. And shockingly dismal. And hauntingly real. And mostly about war.

A whole double page shows a neighborhood, leveled to the ground and a lone figure walking through it. Israeli raids ripped an alleyway through Beirut, leaving nothing but scrap metal and dust. On the next page over, red is the dominant color, blood splattered over skin and clothing of a terrified teen who huddles crying with his mother, injured from shrapnel.

Another double page: a funeral, this time of an Israeli paratrooper, only twenty-one years old. And a truckload of heavily bandaged American soldiers, leaving Afghanistan. Iraqi women and children, huddled together, terrified, as US troops search their house for insurgents. Their faces betray their distrust. Surely the memory of the raped and murdered girl and her family is still fresh on their minds.

Refugees form long lines in Chad, hungry and cold under the ever present shadow of violence and persecution. And the charred remains of vicious attacks on human life are immortalized through photography. Us Marines gather around a makeshift campfire, seeking some kind of community. And a series of pictures show an American soldier heroically dragging an injured comrade to safety.

A picture truly must tell more than a thousand words, because I stare and time passes. It passes ever so slowly, while the reality of human suffering sinks into my very soul. I could stare at these images for ever, even as my whole being recoils in horror. I feel the overwhelming tragedy of being human, of belonging to a species with no boundaries and no code of honor. And I realize that in a pinch, we are all capable of unspeakable cruelty.

I close the magazine and leave the carnage behind, but I feel years older. I am surprised that only minutes have passed, since I first paged my way to the pictorial. For a moment I feel lost but then I recover. My child needs me and reality’s other side is calling. Life goes on, but it does so at a snail’s pace.

And the images are burned forever into my heart.