Polarized from each other, an us versus them mentality sets in and takes hold.
It’s a Tuesday night watching PBS News Hour. I sit in front of the TV, a reporter interviewing a man holding a white flag with three other men of older and younger generations standing next to him. His eyes are baggy, his round face showing tiredness, anxiety, fear. He explains to the camera that his mother and brother are still trapped in their apartment, the mother too old to leave on her own. He wants to help them get to safety as the neighborhood they once roamed is no longer open to them. The white flag keeps waving as gun shots ring out in the distance, echoing through the deserted streets.
The reporter turns around and leaves, only to hear gun shots much closer. With my hand over my mouth, my eyes welling with tears, I watch the reporter race back to where the men were, two young men carrying the body of the interviewee who only wanted to go back to help his family. Bloodstains spread across his sweater. The men yell out in front of them, moving through rubble of buildings and collapsed cement walls, telling the children to find shelter. I can’t look away, but I can no longer see the screen, my vision blurred from the tears now streaking down my face.
I breathe in deeply through my mouth and stand up, hitting the mute button: this is the media portrayal of the world we live in. Families being shot at and killed in a war that they don’t want to be in. And where do we land in the United States? Sending military aid to another government, weaponizing prejudice, stoking fear and vengeance. Communities across the country have called on their local governments and the federal government to stop the mass killings, to stop the horrendous refusal for humanitarian assistance. They are calling for a cease fire. But who will listen when there is money in politics and in the culture wars we are fighting at home?
What do we say in a space that demonizes those who call for an end to the war when the response is filled with more hate? It has turned black and white. It’s either this or that, there is no other. You are either for the war in Gaza or you are anti-semitic. And the more I learn, the more I uncover about how long this oppression of the Palestinian people has been going on. How trapped and unrepresented this group of people are.
How can we continue to stay silent? What is this fear that we have? Complicit and afraid, we say nothing because we fear it will alienate one faction of the public. A powerful faction. How can we condone a war against an oppressed people by those who were once oppressed themselves? This is inhumane. This is cruelty. This is dividing our country and our world.
Instead of accepting that history repeats itself, can the past be prologue and can we use what’ve we known as a global community, what we’ve accepted as unjust, to set the stage for a true agency to living “never again”? We have too many examples of hate-fueled atrocities across the world. When can we call something out for what it is before it is too late?