People are dying, not numbers!

That is, now or later every one of us is supposed to, and certainly will, breathe for a final time in this world, and that will be it. The end of our lives. For some, the start of another, for others a complete darkness. That's not the point now. It is that there is some sort of a life, short or long, joyous or full of sorrows, for all. And there is an inescapable end to it. What is more is, for the world is a crowded place -- some 7 billion people on the face of it -- tens of thousands of people die every day, still less than many more who open their eyes to what would lie before them. Nothing unusual, nothing unnatural.

Yet there is another face to the same story. At least for a part of it. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people lose their lives in unbearable agony at the hands of their oppressors, or in fights with their neighbors over issues that they have been forced into. And that we are already used to it, hear about it, see those graphic images and go about our lives... This should in fact be taken as one of the gravest deviations, if not the gravest deviation, from what we should truly be.

These lines can be written any time for they are unfortunately always relevant but what led me to write them now is a picture I couldn't just look at and move on to the next one among a bunch of others. In that particular shot, there is a mother. In her black chador, I know a very unusual attire for women in certain parts of the world but quite the opposite for some others, she is apparently filled with a sense of devastation, for she lost her son. That mother, in the particular moment as we continued living on, was a Lebanese woman who lost her Hezbollah fighter son in a battle with Syrian opposition fighters for a key border town on a highly strategic arms supply route. I must say, I never -- nor will ever -- feel sympathy for Hezbollah's cooperation with the oppressive Syrian regime that is killing its own people, and by the hundreds every week for more than two years now. Yet this doesn't and in fact shouldn't stop me from partaking in her solemn feelings for her lost son. It doesn't matter for what, or against whom, he fought. She is a mother. Could have been any one of ours, for we were not asked where we were going to be born, and whom we would know as our parents as we grow up.

Again, I fully share the aspirations of the Syrian people who try to fight an oppressive regime that doesn't tolerate differences and all those that stand with it. But the pain in the hearts of mothers, wives, and children of those who die is all the same. And it is the people, not the numbers, that are dying. It is our humanity alongside them that is dying. Don't know what else...