marginalia 🌿

week 12 notes: keeping busy

March 24, 2024
Categories: personal

• Objectively, not much has changed for the better since week 9 and much has changed for the worse. It’s so disturbing to be able to live my “normal” life while watching people starving and being brutally killed every single day. It doesn’t feel like anything I (or other regular people) do makes any meaningful difference. I feel like my life is pointless—how is it that I am living in such grotesque luxury, while there are kids running around with missing limbs, shrapnel wounds in their face, shrinking down to eleven pounds before dying of starvation.
• In the meantime, it’s kind of sickening to see regular entertainment carry on as usual. How can anything be meaningful or fun? I listened to a recent Politically Depressed podcast episode and the part that got to me was when he said he couldn’t understand how Contrapoints’ heart wasn’t breaking and she was seemingly able to live so normally (I’m not familiar with her so I have no opinion on her specifically). I keep thinking about the Ursula K. Le Guin Omelas story where some hidden contract stipulates that the peace and prosperity of an entire town depends on the suffering of one child, who is locked in a basement with no clothes, minimal food, beaten, and sitting in their own excrement. Everyone in the town is taught about the child locked up in the basement, and is made to understand that their happiness depends on the child’s suffering, and if anyone even says a kind word to the child, the town’s stability will collapse.
• Some more horrible news articles:
  • The Children Who Lost Limbs in Gaza
  • “Man-Made Hell On Earth”: A Canadian Doctor on His Medical Mission to Gaza

There was a quote from the doctor in the article that stood out to me:

I will emphasize this, Jeremy, that Palestinians were in an open-air concentration camp for decades. This is not new. It was a struggle, but they were still able to make their life. And because they couldn’t go anywhere, because they’re restricted by Israel and by Egypt on the other side, they couldn’t go anywhere, they put everything into their homes. So their homes were their castles, were their life, were their center of their life and their universe, and they really took a lot of care and attention to their homes. And so now all these people who are homeless, their homes are gone. So, it’s a tremendous effect, and they’re living in tents, and I can only imagine what they must go through. Only a year ago, life was normal so to speak, even though you’re in a concentration camp, but life was still normal. It was their normal, right? And they’re living and they make the best of things. They’re very grateful and gracious people, and steadfast people, and they make the best of every scenario, and they did make the best of even being in a concentration camp. They made the best of it. But now it’s heartbreaking.

• Still thinking about Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice. And also thinking about Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation in 1963. The president of South Vietnam was toppled and later killed that same year, but the war went on for twelve more years. How many more people have to die before this conflict can be ended? (I also haven’t even mentioned the genocide and information blackout happening in Sudan. How many people can die without even impacting the lives of people in Europe and America?)
• I’ve donated a few thousand dollars to aid for Palestine, but how does this do anything when the US is sending billions of military aid to Israel?
• I started doing some volunteer transcription work for The Fire These Times podcast. I’ve only done one episode so far, and it’s still pending review from their editors. I’ll probably have updates in the next weeknotes post.
• Today my friend and I went out to put up flyers around their neighbourhood. We noticed that some of the flyers were ripped down, or scribbled over (one of them had “Devil. Liar.” written on it). Earlier in the week I had put up some flyers in my neighbourhood, only to find them ripped down the next day. I guess I thought that most people in this city are passive or apathetic, so it’s been disheartening and unnerving to see this kind of hostile behaviour. Anyway, I was very grateful to my friend who came along with me. I hate asking people for things and I didn’t really think anyone would agree to it.
• I’ve had thoughts like, what is the purpose of doing this when it seems like nothing can make any difference? But ultimately I think that to be human is to feel the urge to connect to one another. Maybe my small acts show that I am still a fellow human, that I am still capable of heartbreak and tears, that I still reach my arms out to others with whispers of hope.
• Maybe I’ll end this post with Aaron Bushnell’s parting words:

Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”

The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.