--I DIDN’T CHOOSE MY RAPIST
…The sun is shining and the eagle is flying around the lake. It’s Wednesday,
a good day to be alive.
Unfortunately, there’s still so much evil in the world.
…This happened two days ago and barely made the news…
Hundreds of bodies
remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria amid an ongoing attack described by
Amnesty International as the "deadliest massacre" by Boko Haram.
Mike Omeri, the
government spokesman, said fighting continued on Friday for Baga, a town on the
border with Chad where Boko Haram fighters seized a key military base on
January 3 and attacked again on Wednesday.
"Security forces
have responded rapidly, and have deployed significant military assets and
conducted air strikes against militant targets," Omeri said in a
statement.
District head Baba
Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could
not run fast enough when fighters drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled
grenades and assault rifles on town residents.
"The human
carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,"
Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defence group
that fights Boko Haram, told The Associated Press news agency.
He said the civilian
fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies.
"No one could
attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by
now," Gava said.
An Amnesty
International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many
as 2,000 people killed.
A million displaced
"This
marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko Haram's ongoing
onslaught," said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty
International.
Boko Haram violence has
killed more than 10,000 people last year alone, according to the Washington-based
Council on Foreign Relations.
More than a million people
are displaced inside Nigeria and hundreds of thousands have fled across its
borders into Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria.
Emergency workers said this
week they are having a hard time coping with scores of children separated from
their parents in the chaos of Boko Haram's increasingly frequent and deadly
attacks.
Just seven children have
been reunited with parents in Yola, capital of Adamawa state, where about 140
others have no idea if their families are alive or dead, said Sa'ad Bello, the
coordinator of five refugee camps in Yola.
...Unbelievable, unspeakable...
...I just thought people needed to know, though it's not like everyday citizens can do anything about it.
...Not to leave things on a dour note, here are some lighter notions to consider:
“The
unreasonable man attempts to adapt the world to himself. The reasonable man
attempts to adapt himself to the world. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw
"We are so good at finding
the distance between bodies
and then measuring it,
as if the most important thing
were how to enforce the unit
the distance between bodies
and then measuring it,
as if the most important thing
were how to enforce the unit
that underlies each system.
the apple inside
the gravity
the tree tries not to believe in.”
-Christopher DeWeese
“Your present
circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you
start.” Nido Qubein
that underlies each system,
“There are
hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” Rumi
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