“Don’t let your body feel the pain. Pain will slow you down.” 

From my growing knowledge in science over these past 3 years, I could no longer read ‘pain’ as just an “ouch.” As I scrolled through the pictures and watch the preview of The Burning documentary, this was no longer a word or sentence I could speed read over. When we think about what causes pain, not the physical damage, but even on a more physiological level, it is our bodies pretty much screaming to us “SOMETHING IS WRONG.” The human instinct and culture is to treat or cure pain, but for these men and boys, their new perspective says ‘ignore the pain.’ I cannot even imagine what it most feel like to be beaten to a pulp with a wooden baton. Many people can look on this crisis and turn a blind eye because they can easily toss out the term ‘subhuman’; not deserving of fair and humane treatment because of their ‘methods.’ We even see this same idea coming up in the article written by Fernando where we see the juxtaposition of “little Aylan” and an “aggressive North African man.” Little Aylan, faceless, became the face of the refugee crisis. But sometimes I wonder, what if it was the face of one of the Sub-Saharan African boys beaten to death by a guard at the Melila border. Would he become the “face of change”? or would it be too crass for international media outlets?

Pulsing infected wounds, and bloodied hands, and they are still scaling the fence with maximum agility. Not every human is formulated that way. They may have not even been born that way, but their circumstance requires more than a normal human. Their lives and encounters requires something that is above mind and self. “Don’t let your body feel the pain” is an impossible task and probably out of body experience. It may be something some of us may face at one point in our lives, but something they live with on a daily basis. When I see all the black bodies lined across the wired fence and some on the ground in the trenches, I don’t see criminals or freeloaders, I see superhumans, defying all odds stacked against them.