Civilization
Gaza Asks Us A Question About What Kind Of Future We Want To Have
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/c117f06a0e72713465ff84c581c3509c/href
The main reason I’ve focused so hard on Gaza these last six months isn’t so much because of how evil and horrific Israel’s mass atrocity is in and of itself, but because it’s so intimately intertwined with all our world’s other problems, and with the future of the human species.
In a very real way, the destruction of Gaza appears to be a moment in history where humanity is collectively mulling over whether it wants to keep behaving in a crazy, self-destructive way and continue along its trajectory into dystopia and toward self-inflicted extinction, or abandon this madness and push for something better. Whether it wants to keep buying into the lies and propaganda and tacitly consenting to the psychopathic murderousness of the powerful, or let the light of truth shine in.
A live-streamed genocide happening right out in the open forces a civilization to start asking questions about itself. If something like this can happen in plain view of everyone, and the people in charge not only do nothing but actively facilitate it, then you have to start wondering if everything about your entire nation is deranged, and if everything you’ve been told about the world is a lie.
If something so nakedly evil — undisguised by anything besides a thin veneer of Zionist gaslighting telling us we’re not seeing what we’re seeing — can be allowed to stand by those we’ve entrusted to run things, then it means our entire society is diseased. Our government. Our political systems. Our media. Our education systems. Our worldviews. Our culture. It’s all rotted and corrupted, right down to the core.
The future we are being shown through the window of Gaza is dark. Dark, dark, dark, dark. They’re currently using artificial intelligence to create kill lists and to determine when its targets will be at home with their families to ensure maximum civilian deaths. We used to worry about a dark future where humans send machines to go kill people indiscriminately, but it turns out it’s actually happening the other way around — we’re programming machines to tell us who to kill. The horror in our present dystopia isn’t so much autonomous murderbots as ethical decisions about killing being outsourced to AI.
We’re being asked to accept this and move forward in this direction into the future. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for our governments to knowingly support an unforgivable act of mass slaughter upon the inhabitants of a giant concentration camp. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for the mass media to lie and distort and misinform the public about a matter of such urgent importance day after day, month after month. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for a blatant genocide to take place right in front of our faces, and then move on as though nothing happened.
And right now we’re collectively ruminating on the question of whether we’re going to decide to do those things, or if we’re going to decide to do something else instead.
The Gaza genocide is such a massive thing in and of itself — the injustice, the murder, the loss, the unfathomable suffering. But what’s happening in Gaza is also about so much more than Gaza. It’s a moment in history where humanity is thinking seriously about real revolutionary change, and weighing the options between that and continuing along this tired old blood-soaked path we’ve been travelling on for millennia.
Gaza proves that our entire civilization is cancerous, and that everything we’ve been doing has failed. When you come across information which blows apart your worldview in your personal life, you can either collapse under the weight of cognitive dissonance until you find some way to plug yourself back into the comforting lies, or you can set about the hard work of forming a new way of looking at things. That’s the sort of moment we’re being collectively offered with Gaza. We’ll either accept the invitation, or continue our slide into darkness.
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Featured image via Adobe Stock.
Ghost Town
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/678ee38fd897c6de6b233365c35630b8/href
Walking the streets of this ghost town, watching ghost people laugh and play and indulge like Gaza isn’t burning, like children aren’t starving, like people aren’t dying slowly trapped under rubble next to the corpses of their loved ones, like IDF troops aren’t merrily picking off civilians with drones and snipers while children get their limbs amputated without anaesthetic, with the full support of this ghost civilization and its ghost leaders.
This ghost town full of ghost cars, ghost buses, ghost trains, ghost pubs, ghost concerts, ghost theme parks, ghost cinemas, ghost festivals, ghost laughter, ghost feasting, ghost shopping, all going on just the same as it was before all this started. Little children running around with flesh on their bones and their organs inside their bodies like they’re supposed to be, supervised by ghost parents with heads full of social clout and gossip.
Last month a man set himself on fire before the Israeli embassy and screamed “FREE PALESTINE” as he burned. He was not a ghost. He was flesh-and-blood real. He saw it. He responded to it. He treated this nightmare like the thing that it is.
We don’t do that in this ghost town. We stare at screens and shovel snacks and booze into the gaping void within ourselves and flail our attention around looking for anything that will keep us from an even momentary encounter with the real. We do not look at Gaza. We look at everything except Gaza.
So we keep the charade going. Frantically keeping the gears of this ghost town turning like hamsters on a running wheel, running faster and faster because we can feel the wet mouth of authenticity nipping at our heels. It’s like a giant theater improv game we’re all playing together, where the whole instruction is to keep the scene in a constant state of frenetic motion.
Because we all know what will happen if we are still, on some level. We all know that stillness allows the smoke to clear and the mud to settle in the water, and from there it’s only a matter of time before we find ourselves in the tyrannical grip of clarity. And then it will all bubble up. The lies. The phoniness. The discontentment. The feelings. Shame. Guilt. Truth. Gaza.
But there’s only so long you can run from yourself. There’s only so far you can flee before you get exhausted and fall down and find yourself staring up at the sky you’ve been living under your whole life. This fraudulent ghost town can’t keep up this charade forever. None of this is sustainable. At some point and in some way, truth inevitably comes crashing in.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Jonathan Cutrer (CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)