Like Spinning Plates

The photograph below is the final scene of a powerful series capturing the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, during a rally in the city of Rawalpindi on December 27th 2007. Interview with photographer John Moore, Getty Images, 1st Prize for Stories, 2008 World Press Photo.

While you make pretty speeches
I'm being cut to shreds
You feed me to the lions
A delicate balance

And this just feels like spinning plates
I'm living in cloud cuckoo land
And this just feels like spinning plates
Our bodies floating down the muddy river

- Like Spinning Plates by Thom Yorke of Radiohead

Standing silent in the Old Church (Oude Kerk) in central Amsterdam, I'd made my annual pilgrimage to remember the world unfolding around me. The sermon was strong again this year; suppression of the human condition in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Kenya and other lands so tortured. How often have we heard this parable and how often have we begged the lesson yet be learned? There was no hymn, no choir of angels to descend upon our fearful souls. We came to see, not listen, and we look until our eyes are filled with tears upon faintest realisation that THIS is happening HERE and NOW, merely outside whatever walls that we imagine line our little lands. There is no priest, except whatever voice wells up from within, and no communion except the few fragile seconds when you let slip and imagine that this man or woman or child is human, just like you.