No More Turning Away

(Content warnings: Crimes against Humanity, in particular violence against children. Epstein, Iran, Palestine, Ukraine, ICE. Trans healthcare.)

Greetings, my buddies and beauties. Miss Dee Jay here.

Buckle up; this one's going to be rough.

See, a month or two ago… something both broke me and woke me. I was watching a vlogger, as I sometimes do. This vlogger... he showed a pic from the Epstein Files. Heavily censored; no way it could be shown if it wasn’t. But the approximate age of the person in the photo was pretty clear… as were the implications of the photo.

And it just broke me. It broke me in so many ways, because while Epstein is horrific in a way that is impossible to fully grasp, it’s the fact that it is impossible to fully grasp that we need to address.

These things that the Epstein class did were beyond horrific; they are so horrific that we can’t wrap our minds around the sheer monstrosity of it all. There are atrocities that, for our own sanity, we dare not contemplate happening to anyone - any one. But in this case, it was far more than one; the Epstein Files contain an estimated 1000 victims of their brutality and exploitation.

A thousand victims of something so monstrous, we cannot even contemplate one.

And if you thought that was bad… buckle up, because this isn’t the only atrocity that we need to address.

Flash to Iran. The United States and Israel start launching a regime-change operation in Iran. They listen to their various intelligence that says what is and what isn’t an acceptable target, and decide the Shajareh Tayyebeh girl’s elementary school makes for a military target. 156 killed - including 120 children. This was only one incident of several in the attacks against Iran; current estimates of the total killed in the war are somewhere between 6 and 10 thousand. Meanwhile, the President of the United States has threatened that "a whole civilization will die tonight” - literally threatening genocide.

Flash to Palestine. Casualty estimates vary widely, but most estimates have the civilian casualty figures from direct military action in Palestine about 30,000-40,000 people. Noncombatants, civilian men, women, and children, indiscriminately massacred. These were only those directly killed by military operations, and does not address the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that are living and dying through famine conditions deliberately caused and exacerbated by IDF forces.

Flash to Ukraine. As with most conflicts, numbers vary widely, but tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of children have been kidnapped and deported to Russia. This is, of course, only one of many atrocities committed by Russian forces in this conflict.

Flash to the United States. It is estimated that some 60,000 people are currently being detained by ICE at this time. Of these, at least 3800 children are believed to be in ICE custody, under conditions that do not meet the Flores Settlement Agreement.

That's too much trauma; that's too much to flash to. Our minds weren't equipped to process atrocities at this scale. There's a quote, usually misattributed to Stalin: "The death of one man is, indeed, a terrible thing, but a million deaths is a statistic."

We can't think of a million people at one time. We can't even think of a thousand people at one time. Dunbar's Number suggests that the most number of relationships we can maintain at one time is around 150. In some cases, we can't even contemplate one at a time. So imagining thousands of children abused, thousands of children dying... it becomes something abstract, something bloodless, because to process the tragedy at any level means setting up an emotional relationship, however brief - and setting up that emotional relationship means instantly being overwhelmed.

Making matters worse are the times themselves. The systematic abuse in the Epstein Files is a horrific atrocity, an overwhelming atrocity. The Iran war, as well as the violence in other places such as Lebanon, is a horrific atrocity. The acts that ICE has inflicted are a horrific atrocity. Each one, by itself, would be impossible to process.

When war upon war upon war upon abuse upon genocide upon another genocide piles up, it desensitizes us to it all. One atrocity blends into another atrocity, until the entire world ends up a genocide smoothie. We can't take it all in - so we don't. If we can't bring ourselves to imagine any blood in this horror, it remains words on a page - bloodless, sterile.

So… I’m going to do something cruel, just for a couple of minutes, to make a point, so that you have - for that moment - a picture of just how bad things are. For those that have already been through horrific events - those that have worked with abuse victims (or are victims), those that were in conflict zones - I suspect that I have no need to walk you through an exercise like this. You’ve been there; you know. This is for those for whom this is all abstract, just numbers on a sheet of paper, or a bland news article.

Now... I’m going to ask you to do something conservatives have been urging for decades.

I’m going to ask you to Think Of The Children. Except, unlike those hypocrites who use the phrase like the punchline of a joke, I’m going to ask you to REALLY Think Of The Children.

Chances are, there is a child in your circle of friends and family. Maybe you have children of your own. Maybe you have young siblings, maybe nieces, nephews, or niblings. Maybe it’s a close friend who has a child.

I want you to think about that child, in as much detail as you can - every detail, in as many senses as you can muster. The beaming smile. The inquisitive nature. The innocence. The laughter in their voice. The joy in their eyes. Maybe a prized toy they have in their hands all the time. Maybe a favorite t-shirt or other piece of clothing. Maybe some refrigerator art they made.

Hold that image. Think of the promise, the hope in that child’s existence. Every detail you can.
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Now imagine digging that same child out of the rubble of their school. Face shattered, bruised. Bones crushed. Blood gushed from a wound in their chest. That prized toy still in one hand, streaked with their own blood, holding on to that toy for dear life even as life ended.

Imagine that same child, in a detention facility - a prison. Ratty jumpsuit. Toy’s long gone. The meal was moldy and wormy, made them sick, and not enough to live on. No clean water. Little sleep; glaring lights on 24 hours a day. A childhood slowly rotting away behind prison bars.

Imagine that same child, after abuse. Trust gone - completely gone. Shrinking back from any touch. Their voice is gone, stilted; they tried to tell adults, only to be called a liar. They don’t really smile anymore, and the few bits of laughter seem guarded.

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What you're feeling right now? Don't forget that.

Please.

Because what you just pictured… that is one child.

One.

There were 120 children killed in the Shajareh Tayyebeh bombing.

There were roughly 1000 victims listed in the Epstein files.

There are over 3800 children in ICE custody.

They have names. They had lives. Fatemeh Dorazehi. Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Felipe Alonzo-Gomez. These are only a few of the thousands - thousands - I could have referenced.

And each and every one of them were violated - were destroyed - in the way you just imagined.

Every one.

It's too much.

It's designed to be too much. It's designed to be overwhelming.

So the song for this entry addresses this overwhelming. I've covered Pink Floyd here before, and I will do so again.

And, in this case, the song is quite on the nose. With regard to this entry's song, David Gilmour said in 1987: “‘Turning Away’ is about the political situations in the world. We have these rather right-wing conservative governments that don’t seem to care about many things other than looking after themselves.”

Ultimately, that's what all of this chaos in the world is designed to do to us. Desensitize us so that all we can do is look after ourselves. People in your neighborhood disappearing? Not your problem, and we know what happens to those who stand up to ICE. Billionaires setting up an island where they can abuse children? Out of sight, out of mind, and they'd never see a courtroom anyway. Your government bombing a girl's elementary school, and making excuses for it? A glitch of AI; it happens.

We don't want to think about it, because it's too much.

Now do you get it? We're carefully taught to either ignore the atrocities, or - even worse - justify it somehow in our heads. And that is what Pink Floyd is calling out here.

So, I give you "On the Turning Away".

No more turning away. No more ignoring this. No more excuses.

For the love of all that is holy, no more turning away.

Please.

One more thing.

I've never been in a war zone. Never dealt with the casualties.

Never had to comfort someone who'd been abused.

I do the best I can. It's not much, and I know there's more I could do, and sometimes I make mistakes, but these times demand more.

That said, there is one area where I do have that experience.

I am a trans person.

This is a trans blog.

I’ve been to the funerals of trans kids who killed themselves because they lost hope, because the world was too hostile to them.

I’ve seen the shattered look in their mothers' eyes. All that hope, all that joy, all the light... gone.

In my youth, as I grew up, I felt the despair these children felt. The crushing weight. The loneliness. The hopelessness. This is despair that could kill - that has killed.

So to all those who say “Think of the children” to try to keep trans kids from gender-affirming healthcare, I say this:

Gender affirming care saves lives. Transitioning saves lives. It keeps trans kids from the edge, guides them back from suicide into lives that are happy, are fulfilling.

And to all of those who want to block that anyway, because you think you know better than doctors or because your twisted interpretation of religion says so or it's just not your problem?

You're killing children for your ideology, for your delusions.

There’s blood on your hands.

Fuck you.

Fuck you.

Burn.