A prompt response for ~ Inspiration Monday: THOUGHT TRAVEL
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com
THOUGHT TRAVEL
by John Yeo
The only time I ever get sunburnt from exposure to the sun is when I am actually exposed to the damaging rays of the sun.
The images just keep flooding in. My mind is overwhelmed with devastating images of poverty and suffering on the other side of the world. I have witnessed the victims of an earthquake, struggling to free themselves from buildings that have imploded and tumbled down, after the effects of huge shockwaves, as the earth moved and split apart. Wholesale death and destruction following a demonstration of the frailty of man.
I have lived through the effects of extreme hunger gnawing away at the consciousness and giving rise to pains racking the emaciated body of a child who is screaming for her Mother. The Mother who is lying dead beside her on the sun scorched earth. Hunger brought on by drought and a lack of rainfall to provide essential moisture for the crops.
Wars have unfolded before me, fought with a venomous fury. Where the bodies of the brave are heaped together; where the combatants have struggled in unequal combat. The victors revelling in the unequal struggle as their far superior weapons destroy all before them.
I have watched in horror as a river bursts its banks flooding the land with huge waves that destroy everything in their path. Leaving a huge death toll of people and wildlife in the wake. Flooding the land, filling valleys with the forceful power of water that over centuries can erode rock. Water that makes the tears of the survivors invisible as their tears add to the flood that destroys all.
I have followed a raging inferno as a tempestuous fire takes hold and rages through huge forests, the flames turning everything in their path to ash. Fire that leaves no survivors, turning all life in its path to dust. People and animals alike suffering an agonising death.
My senses then experienced the ultimate shock of a family sleeping through a nuclear explosion leaving this existence in a pile of ash. The burnt, scarred, contaminated, radioactive survivors and their future of eternal suffering.
The only time I ever get sunburnt from exposure to the sun is when I am actually exposed to the damaging rays of the sun.
Copyright © Written by John Yeo ~ All rights reserved.
johnandmargaret1607 
Interesting way you’ve bookended this with the line about sunburns, and how you create a sense of separation between the narrator and the pain he’s witnessing. We see it, we know about it, and it shocks us, but ultimately we so often go untouched.
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