marginalia 🌿

week 9 notes: cognitive dissonance and despair

March 4, 2024
Categories: personal

living while watching a genocide

Some unorganized thoughts:

• The phenomenon of cognitive dissonance occurs when your brain can’t reconcile conflicting information and causes you mental distress. It’s eerie how life is so “normal” here. You go outside and people (including me. I am one of the privileged first-world people who are able to be materially unaffected by a genocide occurring elsewhere in the world) are going about their daily lives. I am also just doing my normal (frivolous and self-centred) daily routines but with a stomachache.
• To be clear, this is not about my feelings. It is self-indulgent and hedonistic to be focusing on my own comfort in this context. Nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been killed and it feels like a lot of people don’t care enough to do anything about it. Due to a roll of the dice, I live a privileged life while others get bombed and starve to death. It’s not like I am inherently different or more deserving than them. Going about my normal daily routine feels like sitting down to enjoy a five course meal next to a starving person while they can only watch.
• I sometimes feel like a common knee-jerk reaction to anyone feeling anything negative ever is “have you tried therapy?” but is it really the goal to be able to feel okay while watching people be massacred?
• It’s been expressed that Palestinians don’t want people to talk about them as already extinct or a statistic of suffering. Sometimes it feels like the media and institutions are only able to express sympathy or pity (condescending) after a population has been completely destroyed and no longer a “threat” (and don’t have autonomy or a voice). The mainstream media coverage of Arabs over the past few decades has been a faceless mass of victims of violence in a war-torn region (but who caused these wars?), but not necessarily respected and empathized with as individuals, or celebrated for their art and achievements.
• I’m in awe at the integrity and resilience of the voters in Michigan who organized and showed up en masse to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary (over 100,000!!)
• The protest suicides of US Airman Aaron Bushnell and an unnamed individual from Georgia are touching and heroic to me. I like what Bernie Sanders said about it: “It’s obviously a terrible tragedy, but I think it speaks to the depths of despair that so many people are feeling now about the horrific humanitarian disaster taking place in Gaza, and I share those deep concerns.” But the NYT (as expected) downplays his motives by implying mental illness, because it is apparently normal and fine to kill 30,000 civilians, but unfathomable for someone to want to protest this by voluntarily sacrificing their own life.
• The US resorting to air dropping food and supplies into Gaza despite being impractical and ineffective was criticized as humiliating by a former US ambassador. I also read a post on tumblr aptly describing this as the US gov “infantilizing themselves”. Since they are directly helping Israel commit their atrocities in the first place by sending weapons and “unconditional support”, but now they claim to be helpless to stop it?
• Mothers giving birth in Gaza may have to resort to having a hysterectomy to try to save their lives if there are complications during birth. It’s not the doctors’ fault (since it’s due to horrible conditions and lack of medical supplies) and they are just trying to save the mothers’ lives, but it’s another insidious way in which the genocide is occurring.
• It’s eye watering to read published articles in so-called “respectable” publications like the NYT and the Atlantic wailing about how slogans like “from the river to the sea” are actually a terrifying and heartbreaking call for the genocide of Jewish people while a genocide is actively happening that their organization actively supports. But also getting angry about these stupid articles feels like an unproductive distraction too. Not to mention that one of the NYT articles trying to show a pattern of sexual violence by Hamas that was heavily pushed by the organization was shown to have lack of substantial evidence. And how they’re seemingly unable to even make factual statements about Israelis killing and harming Palestinians.
  
• I heard Robert Evans mention how they used to arrest people who were protesting the Vietnam war so in a way we aren’t living in truly unprecedented levels of moral corruption and propaganda. I was kind of young (and also not online enough, plus social media wasn’t a thing back then) in the aftermath of 9-11 and I wonder if the cognitive dissonance (and anti-Arab racism) felt similar during those times too.
• I have been doing some things, but I could be doing more. I will do more.

Free Palestine.

media and links

• Community of Grief w/ Lina Mounzer from the Politically Depressed podcast
• Journal of an Ordinary Grief by Mahmoud Darwish
• Hasbara episodes Part 1 and Part 2 with Matt Lieb from the It Could Happen Here podcast
• Living Like the World is Dying w/ Margaret Killjoy
• The Intercept articles about the NYT’s “investigation” into Hamas sexual violence: Jan 28 Feb 28
• Yousef from the This American Life podcast
• Funds for Gaza linktree