Gazan prisoners raped by dogs at the behest of whatever particularly filthy IDF unit haunts those dungeons. That one really shook me particularly hard. Just the image of Zionist scum standing by in psychopathic enjoyment , reveling at that degradation, made me physically ill.
That's true--but I ignorance can be fixed. I've had some successes. Some people are open to learning. Even some Zionists are open-minded enough to read things that challenge them. And--people who aren't on board are the ones we need to talk to most.
EDIT:
In this comment, I had linked a piece I wrote that was an attempt to explain the entire situation to someone who knows nothing. I had pushback that there were major errors in that piece, so I’m reviewing the facts. For now, I’ve removed the link. If there are errors, I take responsibility for them.
I envy you when you said that you've had some successes. I have found that 'fixing' ignorance has become quite challenging...especially when a person's beliefs and values motivate that person to remain ignorant despite reality or evidence to the contrary.
The clearest success was with someone who started out Liberal-Zionist, two-state solution by default--which sounds kind of fair if you don't know the history--but wasn't super strongly invested in that. He got back to me later and said something to the effect of 'Oh my God, they're SUCH assholes!'
This was about the West Bank settlements. I think the best strategy is starting there, because there isn't even a bad argument to make in defense. There's no 'well, Hamas did attack them,' there's no 'well, they had to blow up the hospitals because they were Hamas bases,' there's just...nothing to say.
There's no way to say that people going onto Palestinian land and beating the shit our of people and burning down their olive trees and murdering them are the 'good guys.' After learning about the West Bank, people become more willing to learn about everything else.
I have given up on the few Zionists I know who are actually former old school leftists. They got cancelled (lost friends and work) so they have bought into the Canadian conservative worldview. Me: no. Killing is wrong whether Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Burma, the Congo, the Philippines, Sudan, West Papua or Western Sahara.
Yes, I do believe that some people are too stupid for their own good. Simply look at all the Trump voters (that are not billionaires). They seem to repeatedly vote AGAINST their own self interests. And then they double down, triple down, and worse. If Trump tells them that Israel is good for America, then many of his cultish followers take his word for it. In my book, I call that a GOOD example of stupidity.
4. how much they understand about what it might mean
5. how much they value principles of justice, rule of law and human rights
6. how much they can process information regarding strangers, i.e. many people have closed minds to Muslims, Arabs, those who are not white, those who are not American and more
You cannot change the minds of others and should not try. All we can do is offer facts and rational conclusions and let others do what they will with it or not.
>>"You cannot change the minds of others and should not try"
What kind of an UTTERLY STUPID statement is that? People change other's minds ALL the time. It occurs in every relationship - between spouses and significant others, between parents and children, and even between leaders and their followers.
But Gazans were allowed to have an election in 2006. They voted for Hamas, a group with a history of hardline views and attacks on Israeli civilians. In the 1980s, Hamas had started out as an Islamic charity and then added an armed wing. Hamas’s original charter was virulently antisemitic, and Hamas had been an extremist force in the 1990s, helping to sabotage peace negotiations by detonating suicide bombs in Israeli cities. In the early 2000s, during a Palestinian uprising called the Second Intifada, Hamas was also one of the leading groups doing suicide bombings.
IN 2006 ALL OF OCCUPIED PALESTINE, GAZA, WEST BANK, JERUSALEM VOTED IN A LEGISLATIVE ELECTION. It was not specific to the area of Gaza.
Hamas won a majority of seats but was just under 50% in terms of a total vote. The colonial government in Tel Aviv, rendered the election null and void immediately so Hamas was elected to nothing. Most Hamas leaders were either murdered or in Israeli prisons and those who remained in Gaza, which Israel turned into a concentration camp, knowing half the prisoners were children, formed a quasi governing body to help try to make life bearable for the prisoners. Which, according to international aid groups, it did very effectively for the situation.
As to the original Hamas charter, and Hamas is one of a dozen factions in the Palestinian Resistance and not the most religiously orthodox, when it was formed in 1987, the Israelis who helped create it as a plan to destroy the PLO, made sure it was extreme and talked about Jews and not just Israelis or Zionists. We can safely assume Mossad helped write that first charter. After all they saw Hamas as their tool, a puppet like the PA.
Your use of the term virulently anti-semitic raises questions as to your objectivity. If Jews occupied your country with bestial savagery would you not hate them? The Palestinians have been remarkable in their lack of hatred.
In 2017 Hamas rewrote the charter MAKING IT VERY CLEAR THAT JEWS WERE NOT A TARGET, JUST THEIR ZIONIST ISRAELI OCCUPIERS.
AND
It is impossible to be genetically related to a religion. No religion can create, let alone maintain a genetic marker.
The first mention of Palestine is carved in stone by the Egyptians more than 5000 years ago. Palestine and Palestinians were ancient before Judaism was invented in what is now Iraq and Jews existed. It was ancient before Greeks, Romans existed and before Arabs existed and Christians and Muslims existed.
Yes a tribe called Judah wandered into Palestine and set up camp around 3000 years ago but they were one of dozens of tribes and religions and religions cannot claim land.
The people of Palestine, are and always have been Palestinians. There is no Israel because it has no declared and therefore legal borders. It is a military state/base which occupies the country of Palestine. There is no Israeli nationality, just religious, Jewish. It is a Cult more than anything else with a policy to exterminate goyim, or non-Jews.
Most of the Israeli dead were murdered by their own army, not by the Palestinian Resistance and until there is an independent investigation we have no idea if atrocities were committed by the Palestinians. An Israeli charge is an Israeli confession and the pot is very black. Not only was Israel founded in atrocities far worse than October 7, it has functioned in them for 79 years.
‘They massacred Arab babies’
Headline in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, 1948.
This passage stands out:
Jews saw their opportunity. Men of the army of Zion attacked Deir Yassin at 10 a.m. that day.
They easily overcame the opposition. They killed 20 Arab defenders, and entered the village, tossing grenades into houses.
They killed old men, women, and children with bayonets. For three hours the slaughter went on.
Babies were killed in front of their mothers. Mothers’ throats were slit. Some were beheaded.
A group of men and women—some of the women obviously pregnant—were lined up and shot. The bloodlusting Jewish soldiery desecrated the bodies of pregnant mothers with knives.
When they had murdered 264 villagers, the Jews called a halt. They rounded up four truckloads of survivors of all ages and both sexes, tossed the bodies of the dead into the village well, and drove off with the survivors.
The victorious Jews drove the survivors through Jewish areas as exhibits of victory while Jews spat upon them. The parade continued, with breaks, for two days.
Disagree. Western apathy, callousness, is still rampant. One only needs to go on platforms such as LinkedIn to see that. Sure, LinkedIn is a piece of shit shallow platform - but it’s a reflection of society nonetheless. If one agrees with me, the next question is if even a live-streamed genocide doesn’t wake people up, what will.
I would say it's more that just "Western" apathy. For example, look at India (a country with a population of 1.5 billion people) - it is hand-in-glove with Israel. India wants to do to the Kashmiris what Israel has done to the Palestinians. And it's ideology of Hindutva is very similar to those of Zionism and Nazism.
But this goes much beyond just India. Look at the MENA countries, Argentina, and even Russia and China. What have ANY of these countries done to help Palestine?
Fully agree with you. It’s a general human disease. Nobody cares until it impacts them directly, at which point it’s too late. Quite depressing if you think about it.
I hope that we see a rerun of the USA's 1854. The people got so fed up with slavery they started a new political party. Six years later they were in power.
At first it wasn't an abolitionist movement. Importing of slaves had been illegal for about fifty years but the law wasn't enforced. The Republicans would have used the navy to blockade slave ships. This would have caused the price of slaves to rise. The South wasn't having any of that. The war was to keep the price of slaves low.
Well put. Our leaders are still not just excusing it and providing political cover, they are still active participants in the slaughter and arresting/ prosecuted those opposing it The whole western minority world needs regime change.
Your essay hit me hard, because for the last almost 60 years I've wished for a time machine that would send people back to Mexico City, to October of 1968. There, about three weeks before my 16th birthday, my dear friend who was just two months older than I was murdered by the military in a square. If that guy who murdered Beto had aimed about a foot to his left, it would have been me lying on the ground, the light dying in my eyes, and Beto staring at the blood on his shoes. The Mexican government would've had a lot of explaining to do when they told my parents in California that their eldest daughter, an exchange student, had somehow been a terrorist or something. (BTW, we still don't know how many people were killed in that massacre. Perhaps 350, perhaps more.) So, in a way, I'm glad that people are now seeing the images of the genocide on their phones, because I don't have a time machine. Now, I've noticed, my account of that long-ago day isn't so unbelievable to the younger generation. It's fucking heartbreaking that it takes others being murdered horribly in a genocide for people to break out of their generations-old bubble.
I am a little younger than you but I remember well the hundreds killed in advance of the Olympics. Also, how the IOC, run by a Nazi, ruined the careers of Norman, Smith, and Carlos. My brother asked me if I was excited about the 2028 Olympics. I explained, simply, that all Olympics are the 1936 Berlin Olympics--a glorification of the state, the, military, and the police. I am so sorry you and your friend were caught up in the bloodbath on Plaza de las Tres Culturas. This horrific mass murder by the state occurred the day before I turned twelve and I think about it every year, especially Olympic years.
This was exactly when they realized encouraging illegal immigration into America was a cheaper and politically simple alternative than actually doing something for their own poor people.
Is it not insane that we were lectured all our lives about the horrors of fascism by the western ruling class only for them to suddenly turn heel and aid & abet a genocide?
I would say it's not insane. We (in the US) are taught that slavery is bad, that racism is bad. But look at the slavery present in US prison systems. Look at the racism present throughout the culture.
There seems to be a pattern here. When "others" do it, it is bad. When "we (i.e. the US)" do it, we come up with narratives and propaganda to justify why it is necessary for us to do it.
Thank you for this--and for being open about your own pain.
For a long time I didn't talk about what this did to my own mental health--because it seemed to trivialize Palestinian suffering to mention my own. It seemed like I would be taking up too much space. It seemed like my needs didn't matter. It seemed inappropriate to say how much agony I felt remembering being a child who ate a lot, and imagining my parents starving themselves faster to feed me, and knowing it was happening to Palestinian children. It didn't seem fitting to say, not when it was astronomically worse actually BEING the starving child, and BEING the sacrificing parents.
I went through several cycles of burn-out, where I could barely function. I'd now say that this rose to the level of secondary trauma. Knowing that Israel is starving children to death, and feeling that you can't change that fast enough, is really fucking horrible. And--it's okay to talk about that. It's okay to get help for it. It makes you a more effective activist, to feel seen.
And--let's never shut up about this. And let's never stop criticizing our OWN governments for trading with Israel. As long as their still doing this, it's our countries' genocide too. And that means we can do something about it.
أحسنت النشر والقول – سلام غزة و القدس عليكم - العزة والنصر حليف محورالمقاومة وحلفاءها والذلة والعار لمحور الشر وجماعة أبستين (امريكا و بريطانيا وفرنسا وتركيا والسعودية وقطر والامارات و دول الناتو والنازية الجديدة والماسونية والصهيونية و أسرائيل) وحلفاءه
Israel made me notice how the German Nazis were actually not bragging about their deeds.
Edit - these remarks by Amar resonate strongest with that notion:
"Gaza is a method. A Western method. Fascist, Zionist, apartheid, sadistic Israel is a pioneer, a trailblazer into yet more evil to be done from those above to those below. That is why those above will shield Israel. They are shielding themselves and their future deeds."
Growing up, we learn about history, about good and evil, and hopefully about some version of the Golden Rule: "Do to others what you would have them do to you". And when we see with our very own eyes one thing, but hear those who rule over us (almost without exception) something quite different (blaming the victims rather than taking responsibility), then hope will forever be in short supply.
But, to paraphrase Morpheus:
"We're here because we know something. What we know we can't explain, but we feel it. we've felt it our entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. We don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in our mind, driving us mad. It is this feeling that has brought us to Caitlin."
Gazan prisoners raped by dogs at the behest of whatever particularly filthy IDF unit haunts those dungeons. That one really shook me particularly hard. Just the image of Zionist scum standing by in psychopathic enjoyment , reveling at that degradation, made me physically ill.
But how DARE the UK Greens vote to equate Zionism with racism!
Yes, I agree. But added to that is the live-streamed complicity of all western governments. It’s sickening.
Most people I know are ignorant of the horror or don't want to get involved.
That's true--but I ignorance can be fixed. I've had some successes. Some people are open to learning. Even some Zionists are open-minded enough to read things that challenge them. And--people who aren't on board are the ones we need to talk to most.
EDIT:
In this comment, I had linked a piece I wrote that was an attempt to explain the entire situation to someone who knows nothing. I had pushback that there were major errors in that piece, so I’m reviewing the facts. For now, I’ve removed the link. If there are errors, I take responsibility for them.
I envy you when you said that you've had some successes. I have found that 'fixing' ignorance has become quite challenging...especially when a person's beliefs and values motivate that person to remain ignorant despite reality or evidence to the contrary.
The clearest success was with someone who started out Liberal-Zionist, two-state solution by default--which sounds kind of fair if you don't know the history--but wasn't super strongly invested in that. He got back to me later and said something to the effect of 'Oh my God, they're SUCH assholes!'
This was about the West Bank settlements. I think the best strategy is starting there, because there isn't even a bad argument to make in defense. There's no 'well, Hamas did attack them,' there's no 'well, they had to blow up the hospitals because they were Hamas bases,' there's just...nothing to say.
There's no way to say that people going onto Palestinian land and beating the shit our of people and burning down their olive trees and murdering them are the 'good guys.' After learning about the West Bank, people become more willing to learn about everything else.
Appreciate your work and success.
I have given up on the few Zionists I know who are actually former old school leftists. They got cancelled (lost friends and work) so they have bought into the Canadian conservative worldview. Me: no. Killing is wrong whether Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Burma, the Congo, the Philippines, Sudan, West Papua or Western Sahara.
Chang Chokaski,
Is it possible that some people are congenitally stupid to the extent that their ignorance can never be cured by any means?
Yes, I do believe that some people are too stupid for their own good. Simply look at all the Trump voters (that are not billionaires). They seem to repeatedly vote AGAINST their own self interests. And then they double down, triple down, and worse. If Trump tells them that Israel is good for America, then many of his cultish followers take his word for it. In my book, I call that a GOOD example of stupidity.
I think it's not stupidity, it's motivated reasoning. And some people never will change their minds, but some will.
No. But humans vary in terms of the following:
1. how much they care
2. how much time they have to care
3. how much they know about the issue
4. how much they understand about what it might mean
5. how much they value principles of justice, rule of law and human rights
6. how much they can process information regarding strangers, i.e. many people have closed minds to Muslims, Arabs, those who are not white, those who are not American and more
You cannot change the minds of others and should not try. All we can do is offer facts and rational conclusions and let others do what they will with it or not.
>>"You cannot change the minds of others and should not try"
What kind of an UTTERLY STUPID statement is that? People change other's minds ALL the time. It occurs in every relationship - between spouses and significant others, between parents and children, and even between leaders and their followers.
I read your piece.
You really need to check your facts.
You said:
But Gazans were allowed to have an election in 2006. They voted for Hamas, a group with a history of hardline views and attacks on Israeli civilians. In the 1980s, Hamas had started out as an Islamic charity and then added an armed wing. Hamas’s original charter was virulently antisemitic, and Hamas had been an extremist force in the 1990s, helping to sabotage peace negotiations by detonating suicide bombs in Israeli cities. In the early 2000s, during a Palestinian uprising called the Second Intifada, Hamas was also one of the leading groups doing suicide bombings.
IN 2006 ALL OF OCCUPIED PALESTINE, GAZA, WEST BANK, JERUSALEM VOTED IN A LEGISLATIVE ELECTION. It was not specific to the area of Gaza.
Hamas won a majority of seats but was just under 50% in terms of a total vote. The colonial government in Tel Aviv, rendered the election null and void immediately so Hamas was elected to nothing. Most Hamas leaders were either murdered or in Israeli prisons and those who remained in Gaza, which Israel turned into a concentration camp, knowing half the prisoners were children, formed a quasi governing body to help try to make life bearable for the prisoners. Which, according to international aid groups, it did very effectively for the situation.
As to the original Hamas charter, and Hamas is one of a dozen factions in the Palestinian Resistance and not the most religiously orthodox, when it was formed in 1987, the Israelis who helped create it as a plan to destroy the PLO, made sure it was extreme and talked about Jews and not just Israelis or Zionists. We can safely assume Mossad helped write that first charter. After all they saw Hamas as their tool, a puppet like the PA.
Your use of the term virulently anti-semitic raises questions as to your objectivity. If Jews occupied your country with bestial savagery would you not hate them? The Palestinians have been remarkable in their lack of hatred.
In 2017 Hamas rewrote the charter MAKING IT VERY CLEAR THAT JEWS WERE NOT A TARGET, JUST THEIR ZIONIST ISRAELI OCCUPIERS.
AND
It is impossible to be genetically related to a religion. No religion can create, let alone maintain a genetic marker.
The first mention of Palestine is carved in stone by the Egyptians more than 5000 years ago. Palestine and Palestinians were ancient before Judaism was invented in what is now Iraq and Jews existed. It was ancient before Greeks, Romans existed and before Arabs existed and Christians and Muslims existed.
Yes a tribe called Judah wandered into Palestine and set up camp around 3000 years ago but they were one of dozens of tribes and religions and religions cannot claim land.
The people of Palestine, are and always have been Palestinians. There is no Israel because it has no declared and therefore legal borders. It is a military state/base which occupies the country of Palestine. There is no Israeli nationality, just religious, Jewish. It is a Cult more than anything else with a policy to exterminate goyim, or non-Jews.
Most of the Israeli dead were murdered by their own army, not by the Palestinian Resistance and until there is an independent investigation we have no idea if atrocities were committed by the Palestinians. An Israeli charge is an Israeli confession and the pot is very black. Not only was Israel founded in atrocities far worse than October 7, it has functioned in them for 79 years.
‘They massacred Arab babies’
Headline in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, 1948.
This passage stands out:
Jews saw their opportunity. Men of the army of Zion attacked Deir Yassin at 10 a.m. that day.
They easily overcame the opposition. They killed 20 Arab defenders, and entered the village, tossing grenades into houses.
They killed old men, women, and children with bayonets. For three hours the slaughter went on.
Babies were killed in front of their mothers. Mothers’ throats were slit. Some were beheaded.
A group of men and women—some of the women obviously pregnant—were lined up and shot. The bloodlusting Jewish soldiery desecrated the bodies of pregnant mothers with knives.
When they had murdered 264 villagers, the Jews called a halt. They rounded up four truckloads of survivors of all ages and both sexes, tossed the bodies of the dead into the village well, and drove off with the survivors.
The victorious Jews drove the survivors through Jewish areas as exhibits of victory while Jews spat upon them. The parade continued, with breaks, for two days.
Disagree. Western apathy, callousness, is still rampant. One only needs to go on platforms such as LinkedIn to see that. Sure, LinkedIn is a piece of shit shallow platform - but it’s a reflection of society nonetheless. If one agrees with me, the next question is if even a live-streamed genocide doesn’t wake people up, what will.
I would say it's more that just "Western" apathy. For example, look at India (a country with a population of 1.5 billion people) - it is hand-in-glove with Israel. India wants to do to the Kashmiris what Israel has done to the Palestinians. And it's ideology of Hindutva is very similar to those of Zionism and Nazism.
But this goes much beyond just India. Look at the MENA countries, Argentina, and even Russia and China. What have ANY of these countries done to help Palestine?
Fully agree with you. It’s a general human disease. Nobody cares until it impacts them directly, at which point it’s too late. Quite depressing if you think about it.
It definitely is very depressing - for so many of us that have a moral conscience but do not have the power or resources to change things...
I don’t say “nobody” cares, but a great many don’t want to think about the reality.
I hope that we see a rerun of the USA's 1854. The people got so fed up with slavery they started a new political party. Six years later they were in power.
At first it wasn't an abolitionist movement. Importing of slaves had been illegal for about fifty years but the law wasn't enforced. The Republicans would have used the navy to blockade slave ships. This would have caused the price of slaves to rise. The South wasn't having any of that. The war was to keep the price of slaves low.
Bravo, Caitlin! Imo, the English language is (perhaps all languages are) incapable of adequately describing the absolute, total degeneracy of Zionism.
Well put. Our leaders are still not just excusing it and providing political cover, they are still active participants in the slaughter and arresting/ prosecuted those opposing it The whole western minority world needs regime change.
Your essay hit me hard, because for the last almost 60 years I've wished for a time machine that would send people back to Mexico City, to October of 1968. There, about three weeks before my 16th birthday, my dear friend who was just two months older than I was murdered by the military in a square. If that guy who murdered Beto had aimed about a foot to his left, it would have been me lying on the ground, the light dying in my eyes, and Beto staring at the blood on his shoes. The Mexican government would've had a lot of explaining to do when they told my parents in California that their eldest daughter, an exchange student, had somehow been a terrorist or something. (BTW, we still don't know how many people were killed in that massacre. Perhaps 350, perhaps more.) So, in a way, I'm glad that people are now seeing the images of the genocide on their phones, because I don't have a time machine. Now, I've noticed, my account of that long-ago day isn't so unbelievable to the younger generation. It's fucking heartbreaking that it takes others being murdered horribly in a genocide for people to break out of their generations-old bubble.
I am a little younger than you but I remember well the hundreds killed in advance of the Olympics. Also, how the IOC, run by a Nazi, ruined the careers of Norman, Smith, and Carlos. My brother asked me if I was excited about the 2028 Olympics. I explained, simply, that all Olympics are the 1936 Berlin Olympics--a glorification of the state, the, military, and the police. I am so sorry you and your friend were caught up in the bloodbath on Plaza de las Tres Culturas. This horrific mass murder by the state occurred the day before I turned twelve and I think about it every year, especially Olympic years.
This was exactly when they realized encouraging illegal immigration into America was a cheaper and politically simple alternative than actually doing something for their own poor people.
Is it not insane that we were lectured all our lives about the horrors of fascism by the western ruling class only for them to suddenly turn heel and aid & abet a genocide?
I would say it's not insane. We (in the US) are taught that slavery is bad, that racism is bad. But look at the slavery present in US prison systems. Look at the racism present throughout the culture.
There seems to be a pattern here. When "others" do it, it is bad. When "we (i.e. the US)" do it, we come up with narratives and propaganda to justify why it is necessary for us to do it.
Most countries promote their own exceptionalism.
Yep, they sure do. Each country has their own propaganda to support their own narratives.
We also learned who are the real masters of the Australian government are.
Pathetic, really.
Thank you for this--and for being open about your own pain.
For a long time I didn't talk about what this did to my own mental health--because it seemed to trivialize Palestinian suffering to mention my own. It seemed like I would be taking up too much space. It seemed like my needs didn't matter. It seemed inappropriate to say how much agony I felt remembering being a child who ate a lot, and imagining my parents starving themselves faster to feed me, and knowing it was happening to Palestinian children. It didn't seem fitting to say, not when it was astronomically worse actually BEING the starving child, and BEING the sacrificing parents.
I went through several cycles of burn-out, where I could barely function. I'd now say that this rose to the level of secondary trauma. Knowing that Israel is starving children to death, and feeling that you can't change that fast enough, is really fucking horrible. And--it's okay to talk about that. It's okay to get help for it. It makes you a more effective activist, to feel seen.
And--let's never shut up about this. And let's never stop criticizing our OWN governments for trading with Israel. As long as their still doing this, it's our countries' genocide too. And that means we can do something about it.
"It is always the right time to do the right thing. " Martin Luther King Jr.
Gaza fills their eyes
What flags could no longer hide
Conscience burns awake.
Late eyes fought the longer night
Both still reached the light.
أحسنت النشر والقول – سلام غزة و القدس عليكم - العزة والنصر حليف محورالمقاومة وحلفاءها والذلة والعار لمحور الشر وجماعة أبستين (امريكا و بريطانيا وفرنسا وتركيا والسعودية وقطر والامارات و دول الناتو والنازية الجديدة والماسونية والصهيونية و أسرائيل) وحلفاءه
I'm never closing my eyes again! (You don't know what the zionists could be up to behind your back. Keep those eyes open.)
Three years of murdering, maiming, bombing, starving and deporting children WILL change you!
https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com/p/childhoods-end-three-years-of-murdering
Israel made me notice how the German Nazis were actually not bragging about their deeds.
Edit - these remarks by Amar resonate strongest with that notion:
"Gaza is a method. A Western method. Fascist, Zionist, apartheid, sadistic Israel is a pioneer, a trailblazer into yet more evil to be done from those above to those below. That is why those above will shield Israel. They are shielding themselves and their future deeds."
Agreed 100%, Caitlin.
Growing up, we learn about history, about good and evil, and hopefully about some version of the Golden Rule: "Do to others what you would have them do to you". And when we see with our very own eyes one thing, but hear those who rule over us (almost without exception) something quite different (blaming the victims rather than taking responsibility), then hope will forever be in short supply.
But, to paraphrase Morpheus:
"We're here because we know something. What we know we can't explain, but we feel it. we've felt it our entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. We don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in our mind, driving us mad. It is this feeling that has brought us to Caitlin."