Sorry for the long thread but I need to let it off my chest. Back when we were in Istanbul and thinking of moving to Canada, one question occupied many of the nights I spent contemplating our future: what is the worth of a human life?

It wasn't an academic question. One fact that led to the depressive spiral I found myself in, and which touched my life and behavior a million different ways since, was the realisation that nobody would answer for all the crimes I had written about in course of covering Mideast

The chemical attacks, the hospital attacks, the barrel bombs, the sex trafficking, the suicide bombings, not one perpetrator was going to face justice and retribution. Not even vigilante justice and revenge. Nobody was going to pay.

It wasn't just the big things either. The activist who couldn't attend his mother's funeral because he was in prison. The journalists who lost years of their lives because of some political game. How could they ever forgive? All the missed birthdays, the broken hearts?

I felt so terribly, fucking small. Worthless even. Because I felt like everything I had and worked hard for could be stolen away in an instant and nobody could or would do anything about it. So I gave up and decided to leave.

That's why the Beirut thing fills me with nausea every time I think about it. They leveled a fucking city, and it wasn't even because they plotted to do it, it was literally because they didn't give a shit. About millions of lives.

In an instant, so many dead or wounded or rendered homeless. And again, they will get away with it. Before it Hisham al-Hashimi, like many Iraqi journalists and activists. Khashoggi before that. And all of Syria and Yemen and Libya before that.

All the parents who buried their children under the rubble. All those orphaned children, those starving to death, tortured. And over and over and the cycle continues.

The pandemic and all the shit that has come with it has made me incredibly homesick. I want to ride out the end of the world close to people I know and love, close to stories I care about. But I have a kid and I don't want his life to be worthless like ours are.

But there is great evil in this profound absence of justice. The world cannot stand like this. It will collapse in on itself one day because these sins are too grave, and there are too many of them.

Maybe God will sort it all out on Judgment Day. Maybe it's always been like this. Maybe the helplessness I'm feeling makes me see demons in shifting shapes everywhere. But it all really is broken, and the balance of justice is so contorted that only a cataclysm can restore it.