the world just screams and falls apart
The compulsion of people to choose sides as though we are watching a football game, and then say things, empty things. Never fails to amaze me.
Adam told us he was scared to be on the Harvard campus. People were yelling at him asking if he was a Jew. The shit people say at moments like this... it burns, and it stays burned in the brain, for a lifetime if not generations.
There was an entire country ethnically cleansed a few weeks ago - a hundred thousand people - and nobody on social media said a goddamn thing. Including me, to be sure.
That statement hits differently, by the way, depending on what "side" of this we are talking to. But it is as close to an absolute as I can come back to. Social media simply does not care. "A quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing." That's Neville Chamberlain, by the way. See how useful that history Ph.D. is? Anyway someone on Xitter actually started their post by saying "So I started looking around about this situation and..." like that is 100% the whole problem. People do not read books anymore. Everything is absorbed from this strange glowing box.
One of the people I'm close to at minyan lost a cousin to a rocket attack in Ashkelon. This was someone who was born in a DP camp in Vienna. That's how close history is there. It's not some kind of abstraction, click into and out of.
The most incredible outrage at their government comes from Israelis. They know exactly what got everyone here. Those are the people I trust the most.
Talia Lavin wrote a wonderful piece encapsulating the Naomi Klein book I was reading. I can't say "have been reading" because I had to put it aside. What it explains very clearly is we are all living in a time of madness that is being whipped up and exploited by people who know what they are doing. And you and I are not exempt from this. We have a bizarro online existence in which everything we say is meaningless and yet we must speak nevertheless, we feel compelled to speak. Being unable to speak is torture.
https://theswordandthesandwich.substack.com/p/speech-and-speechlessness
I have to go to New Orleans on a work trip today. I really don't care one way or another.
I feel very far from being understood by anyone.