I switched tabs and it pained me that I hadn’t recalled the sentiment that returned me to the keyboard.

It’s not like I couldn’t find a topic word, some search term to yield results: Palestine, children, war.

I refuse to introduce the many different ways we’ve come up with to name “conflict” — or to characterize any square foot of our earth as a sure thing, much less an entire population.

To know hurts. To heal feels. To grow shows.

We don’t arrive at our current state absent of the change. The difference. The understanding.

Pre-printing-press Kelly was one girl. Me now? I see how that movable type moves. Post-printing-press Kelly knows someone turns the press on, or switches it to go, or performs a god-awful-not-even-Google-able series of steps to start it up and complete it and deal with all the runny ink.

At every stage of human interaction, someone is pulling levers, loading type, sharing networks, receiving contracts — transacting. The world just is. But the technology we’ve embraced, from hammer to chip to infinity and beyond, has a cost and a host and someone running things. Choosing and ordering letters.

So I can’t be naive enough to think that war just happens the way the sky is blue. Or fail to notice when every means of information manipulation and control ever fictionally employed is now present and accounted for in my daily life. Memory holes, anyone?

But don’t get distracted by the unlimited distractions — foretold by Montag in Fahrenheit 451 when he just couldn’t get that goddamn gum commercial out of his head. The buses have advertisements on them, as do the planes’ bellies and the fields of farmers and the sides of barns and buildings. Inundated.

I haven’t forgotten where I was going with this, though. To care means I have to maintain focus somehow — even reserve my empathy for just one or two main targets at once. I am only human, after all, in my attention.

And they are only human, too.

Me: not defining, delineating, detailing, or dividing the differences between war and — not war.

I know that when babies die indiscriminately under the fallen bombs of failed ideas, I should feel. I closed my eyes while I typed that line.

Some unimaginative soul nearly ruined my favorite quote once. Like, how do you not get it: There’s no such thing as other people’s children.

Children — what’s fresh, possible, worth it. All of them.

I live in that world.

There is no such thing as other people’s children. This world is all of theirs. I claim them. I would never leave any baby lying on the ground.

Is it lying or laying? Don’t ask. Don’t bother.

The point is the baby and we keep missing the point.