we settle for serenity until it kills us
what else is there to do?
In between the videos of houses collapsing from bombs, people burning in hospitals, children being pulled from rubble, and men separated and lined up, I see videos of the people in Gaza continuing to live - people charging their phones from solar panels, making a morning coffee and enjoying a biscuit with it, going to pick up money that was transferred, chopping vegetables and making a meal, sweeping the dirt from their tents, watching the sunset on the beach. Another day.
I make a morning coffee, go to work, put away groceries, fold laundry, and watch the sunset from the window. Another day.
I can donate eSIM cards. I can donate to families connected through Operation Olive Branch. I can boycott Sabra hummus, Puma, SodaStream, and others on the BDS list. I can learn about the history of Palestine. I can attend a protest. These are all things that fit neatly into my day to day life without much inconvenience. It won’t stop the war.
Climate scientists and activists know that it is already too late. We are seeing record breaking ocean temperatures. Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. On average over the last 5 years, over a million acres of wildfires are burning in California every year. 2024 broke heat records around the world. The heatwave in Mecca killed at least 1300 people. India saw its longest and hottest heatwave on record with nearly 41,000 reported cases of heat stroke. Million of people around the world were displaced this year by flooding. It goes on and on. Another day.
Why isn’t anyone doing anything? Why are we not dropping everything to do something? We expect someone - some concerned collective - to do something about all the horror, because nothing we individually do seems to really matter. And individually, we’re mostly preoccupied with the realities of living our day to day lives.
We can’t grapple with the big picture in any real way. One death is felt. A hundred thousand is a number. A few individuals seem to have outsized power to change the course of history. Global protests seem to do nothing to change material outcomes. The climate apocalypse is abstract. Your flooded house is real.
I truly believe we only have a couple of recognizable decades left in our collapsing world. What is there to do?
It seems impossible to talk about this. What is there to say? We find ourselves back where we started - preoccupied by how we’re currently living, which is how the general population of every generation has ever coped with its particular existential anxieties. We settle for creating meaning in the specific little ways in which we can love and care for each other as we’re borne ceaselessly into oblivion. It won’t save us.