When I was in college, I became good friends with a woman who was pretty severely psychotic. The "cure" depressed her, of course, eventually to the point that she piled all her belongings in my basement, said she'd be back for them someday, and took off for a med-free life on the street.
I knew her as a poet and performance artist with heavy duty talent, and searing compassion. At the end of her lucid days, she was working on a response to Union Carbide's unconscionable shrug at the Bhopal disaster. Her long harmonic rant invoked not-so-distant poisonings in other eastern places: Laos, Cambodia, Viet Nam. In one verse, she remembered being a child playing in the grass, her father watching from their big Detroit suburban deck, chain-smoking, flipping the burning butts into the yard.
"Every time I stepped on one, I was convinced that simultaneously another child in Viet Nam stepped on a mine, and I felt what she felt."
Actually, Libby said it much better, but you get the drift. And now, you will feel it too!