Try to imagine Gaza 

Dear Editor,

Try to imagine Rutland City without its New England steeples and Grace Church’s organ parts strewn all over Court and West Streets. Imagine a flattened parking garage down the street and Walmart a charred pile of plastic poisoning the air.  No running water because the water treatment plant no longer exists, little food, the odor of rotting bodies, no banks, no phone service and no toilets.

Try to imagine the daily sound of F-16s or F-35s in Burlington zooming overhead and dropping bombs all over Rutland County with broken marble blocks all around Rutland City.  The carnage is everywhere with dead bodies and moans and groans of disappeared people heard under the rubble.

It’s really hard to imagine such a grim scene but graphic images from Gaza make it easy.

Our tax money pays for this kind of devastation to support the ongoing slaughter over there. Our hypothetical signatures are invisibly etched on just about every device of destruction used to flatten Gaza.

Try to imagine the suffering you would feel without knowing whether Grandma is alive or dead or having to carry the warm lifeless body of your child wrapped in plastic.

Try to imagine this preventable situation … it is happening at this very moment somewhere in Palestine/Israel.

Try to imagine some of our billions for bombs put toward homelessness, drug addiction, healthcare and poverty in our hometown.

Try to imagine making that happen by removing the agents of death in Washington, D.C. who vote to blow people up and the war machine lobbyists on K Street who bribe them to do so.

In spite of what is happening, try your very best to be enraptured with your gift of human consciousness, and the sacredness of being alive for anyone in our profaned earthly paradise.

Nick Santoro, Rutland