Heartstrings

From a Google Image Search - Reddit - From the movie War Games (1983)

Heartstrings

Heartstrings are imaginary - fictional constructs, graphic and visceral, seemingly real, representations of tragedies that touch our souls.

How many heartstrings are too many?

How far can our heartstrings stretch?

Can hearts really break?

Children in a Ukraine defending itself against brutal intruders -

Children in Israel kidnapped, raped, beaten, forced to live in underground tunnels -

Children in Gaza with nothing to eat, no housing, living in rubble as bombs fall -

Children in Lebanon bewildered, suddenly homeless, peaceful lives shattered -

How many of our heartstrings extend outward to send our compassion (such a useless thing?) to these children and their parents?

Until we imagine them as new lines of latitude or longitude, as numerous as the lines on NORAD maps in the movie War Games

Lines that taught a fictional computer that no one wins in a war.

Heartstrings connect us to Syria, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Uyghurs in China, and on and on.

If heartstrings could eventually generate enough compassion to send out to 6 million people rounded up and killed in the Holocaust,

Then I suppose they can extend to the millions of immigrants Trump plans to deport.

Is every tug on a heartstring, every sad acknowledgment of misery, simply an exercise in futility?

Do you think sympathy has any value?

Would the world be the same if events didn't engage our hearts, if our souls didn't howl at injustice?

Is there something we should be doing besides empathizing, donating, and lamenting man's inhumanity to man?

If we wrap all our heartstrings into a giant bundle, will that end wars?

Will it touch Putin, give Netanyahu second thoughts, destroy Hamas and Hezbollah, end gang cruelties.

It seems there are always monsters among us whose thirst for power snaps their heartstrings like ruined rubber bands, like over-strummed guitar strings.

How do we make the monsters stop? With 9 billion people on the planet is life everywhere becoming cheap.