Mohammad Abu Al Qumsan had two babies and a loving wife.

Now he has nobody.

An Israeli airstrike killed both his babies, and their mother, and their grandmother, while he was out collecting their birth certificates. 

They had just been born.

There's a video of him screaming, screaming the way any of us would scream. The screams of a man who suddenly lost everything a man could possibly lose. Screaming Gaza's screams. 

Sometimes it feels weird that we're not all screaming like that man all the time, as long as we share a planet with this nightmare. Sometimes I kind of want to.

After Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in protest of this genocide I remember reading someone say something like "I understand the man who set himself on fire better than I understand the people in my own community going around like nothing's happening." Al Qumsan's screams remind me of those words today.

It often feels like an obnoxious sacrilege that our civilization hasn't stopped dead in its tracks while this happens day after day, month after month, with the full-throated support of our own western governments. How we're still going to movies and dinners and laughing and joking while those bloodcurdling screams are erupting from Gaza. It feels like waltzing outside the extermination camp and trying to ignore the smell of the black smoke coming from the chimneys.

We look like lunatics. We are acting as crazy as someone whistling and dancing in the middle of a roaring house fire. Surely it would be a hell of a lot saner to be screaming all the time than to be going along our merry little way like this horror isn't happening. 

But that would be socially inappropriate. It would make people uncomfortable. Here, in this dystopian civilization, it's considered rude to even bring it up.