I know Mastodon is designed to keep everything nice and to shield us from the horrors of the world, and that it is good for us to only look at cat pictures all day and cheer each other up, but honestly: sometimes i also think that that is just a lot of crap and everyone who turns away and continues with their nice privileged life as if all is ok is complicit #Gaza
Not just Gaza. Ukraine, South Sudan, Myanmar, Mexico etc. Not just war either. Modern slavery, conflict minerals, sex trafficking, poverty, famines, etc...
Humanity was able to build this complex world of global supply chains, but showing compehension or empathy of such a big system is too big of a task for our small brains, I fear.
@jackofalltrades yes, i know. Of course not just Gaza. It’s just that in this csse our governments are so obviously complicit as they are funding and endorsing it all. And it is pretty bad all round. But yes, so much more, of course. I think about all this a lot. Like, how much should you care for the suffering of strangers? How much should you talk about it?
• How much should you talk about it [the horrors of the world]?
We don't have to. I would preserve #mentalHealth first.
• How much should you care for the suffering of strangers?
We should care. Avoid "being sad and angry" but do something about it. Some #doing feels good (be it conversations, demonstrations or acts).
You Pauline and others already make good in the world.
(Personnaly i watch subduers.)
@pvonhellermannn
The text pointed below may help. Sarah Aziza, through a stirring mix of personal reflection and philosophical reckoning, disabuses the Western witness of its self-gratifying power, instead – amid Israel’s openly broadcast yet unimpeded march towards genocide in Gaza – unmasking the impotence, deceit and hollowness that witnessing currently entails. More than a collective indictment or last-gasp scream of defiance into the void, Aziza’s own testimony guides the reader towards a form of witness no longer elevated in angelic, uncompromised distance, but instead manifest in the embodied, intimate, ego-displacing position of “sacrifice, mourning and resisting.” https://jewishcurrents.org/the-work-of-the-witness
The word #شهيد, #shaheed, "carries connotations not only of seeing, but of presence and proximity. To be a #witness is to make contact, to be touched, and to bear the marks of this touch.
"Shaheed is the word Palestinians use to describe those lost to Israeli violence, a word which has drawn condemnation from American universities and press, who once again presume to know the meaning of Arabic-rooted terms, without bothering to investigate. They allege the word #martyr glorifies death for death’s sake. But in this context, it should be read as honoring the truth these brutalized bodies speak. Their flesh, marked by colonial violence, makes visible the wild injustice they endured. Which is to say, their martyrdom tells us the truth about our world."