It Is Freakish And Insane How Our Society Averts Its Gaze From Gaza

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

It can make you feel like you’re going mad. How phony and superficial it all is. How we’re a year and a half into history’s first live-streamed genocide and our whole society is acting like everything’s peachy.

We’re murdering kids. We’re starving them. We’re dropping high tech military explosives on them. Blowing their limbs off. Ripping their guts out. Shooting them in the head. This isn’t just being done by “Israel”. It’s being done by the entire western empire which backs these atrocities.

And yet if you turn on a TV you’ll see famous people laughing and joking about nonsense, expressing political opinions of no more depth and significance than whether or not there should have been a female Ghostbusters movie. Go read the news and it’s dominated by empty fluff about celebrities and politicians and the latest brain fart to come out of Donald Trump’s mouth. Go to a party and everyone’s nattering about vapid gibberish, yelling “No politics!” if you try to say anything about the holocaust-shaped elephant in the room.

Newer readers might not know this, but I used to have a lot more fun on my platform. Lots of humor. Psychedelic poetry. Spirituality and philosophy. But ever since the Gaza holocaust began, that kind of writing has often felt like it would be irreverent and frivolous. Almost sacrilegious. I would feel like I’m joining in with the madness of mainstream culture by turning my back on all those emaciated bodies and mutilated children.

So for the last year and a half I’ve mostly just been doing what I feel everyone on earth ought to be doing: pointing to the genocide and saying it needs to stop.

I used to be a lot more poetical and creative in my ways of pointing to the criminality of the empire, because its depravity was often difficult for people to really grasp, so I was always seeking out new ways to help people see its monstrosity with fresh eyes. Now that they’re just butchering children right in front of us, that’s not really what’s called for anymore. What’s called for is to keep drawing everyone’s attention to the terrible thing that’s staring us all right in the face.

This task shouldn’t be falling to university activists and obscure antiwar bloggers. Every news outlet in the world should be making this their entire focus.

If we had a sane and ethical news media, this is what they would be doing. All the leading stories every single day would be about the latest evil thing Israel and its western backers have done in Gaza, clearly stating in every headline our own government’s role in making this possible. Every press conference would be completely dominated with questions asking every western official why we are participating in an active genocide and demanding answers about when it is going to stop.

Instead we get “Palestinians perish in explosion” passive-language headlines, usually coupled with “…says Hamas-run health ministry” in order to let readers disbelieve the entire story. And that’s on those rare occasions that Israel’s atrocities get reported on at all; normally Gaza is seen as a third or fourth-tier issue of far less importance than some infinitely less egregious grievance in our own country. Palestinian lives are given vastly less weight than western lives, with our own feelings and comforts emphasized far more heavily than the issue of the Palestinian people living or dying.

And it can just make you feel like you’re going crazy. It’s like if we were all going around physically drenched in human blood, with blood flooding our living rooms and severed limbs strewn about our bedrooms and kitchens — but nobody was talking about it. You try to say “What’s up with all this blood and gore?” and they shush you and tell you it’s impolite to talk about politics. A dark red deluge pours out of your minivan door when you open it to pick up your kid from soccer practice, and everyone looks away.

This is happening. We know it’s happening. It’s happening right in front of us and we’re acting like it’s not. It’s so maddening and frustrating, and it can make you feel so powerless.

But we keep pointing at Gaza, because what the hell else are we going to do? The alternative is to join the lunatics acting like it isn’t happening.

At the very least, it’s a way of preserving our sanity. Preserving our humanity. Even if they do succeed in purging Gaza of all Palestinian life, at the very least we will have prevented the bastards from warping and twisting us into psychopathic freaks like them. Even if we can’t stop them from destroying Gaza, we can at least stop them from destroying our hearts.

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