At a Jewish Wedding…

[u/jryan102]

I’m currently outside of the wedding venue. I had to step out because they handed out little Israeli flags on the dance floor as party favors. The utter disregard and nonchalance these people display when celebrating a genocidal nation is baffling. It made me so physically ill and upset that I had to step out. Maybe I’m dramatic or I drank too much but it brought me to tears. There are real, innocent people dying and these people are celebrating their killers at some random party and for what?

[u/redpandarising]

😔 sorry you're dealing with this. My cousin cut me off "from serious conversations" for being "pro-terrorist". We're not even Jewish, or Christian. Crazy-making times for sure. Posting/sending solidarity 🤝

[u/isawasin → u/redpandarising]

Your cousin is afraid of her own shadow. The shadow of her responsibilities and her own complicity.

It's going to be maybe a strange way to argue my position, but this period of 'body positivity' and 'sex positivity' that we're working through right now feels very intermediary to me. Like, it has to be. It's a reactive position. Oppositional to a well-entrenched "negativity" that absolutely deserves to be opposed, but it can't be the end point. We have to want to reach a place of neutrality. Where beauty standards run a very distant second to the recognition that they are as subjective as musical taste and have zero bearing on worth as a person. Where the idea that you can look at a fat neckbeard in a fedora or a woman who's inflated her lips and tits and seriously believe you have a right to infer whether or not they're someone your life would be richer for knowing is an indictment of self.

Anyway, I say all this because what's happening in (not just) Gaza feels like a very stark turning point, universally. The 'information age' has given way to the 'age of complicity.' We're too connected for ignorance to be an excuse, and we all implicitly know this.

We know Israel, the US and their partners are doing to the Palestinians. What Israel, the UAE and their partners are doing in Sudan. What is happening in the DRC. What Indonesia is doing in West Papua. And maybe you're not actually familiar or well versed in each of those endemic injustices (I'm not posturing as an expert of any of them) but we all - here - acknowledge the rationale that make petty much all systems of exploitation and injustice: profit. An economic system where the wealth does trickle down, whether we are willing to admit it or not. Because you either live in the part of the apple logo where the bite is taken out, or you don't. And, in that analogy, the logo should be 80% bite.

The 'developed world' can't contribute to turning things around without being willing to make what will feel like massive sacrifices. And if we can't work through this age of complicity without living up to our own we deserve everything we get.

This desperate position is made all the more tragic in that the vast majority of us hold little to no power. At least individually, there's very little we can do. But the least we can do (what we have to do first in any case, and what your cousin and so many people are too weak and afraid to do) is be honest about what we're facing. About the world we've built. The world we were told was being built for us.

We can't be honest because it complicates things to a terrifying degree. It challenges everything people feel they know about themselves. Who they are. An identity that is so inextricably wrapped up in political/national, etc. identities whose implicit appeal lies in the fact that they come pre-packaged. You don't need to think. You don't need to engage. Just vote (in the US sense) for who you're supposed to every four years, and you're good, everything else is taken care of.

Taking actual responsibility. The work of actual agency. The reality that these things (fucking genocide!) that we don't actively oppose and frustrate are the things that we acede to benefiting from, if even only tangentially, this is what you're cousin would rather demonise you than face.

I don't know. I've seen the insides of too many dead babies.

[u/redpandarising → u/isawasin]

My cousin is an idiot, and a man (perhaps that's redundant... J/k I'm just being a radical for a second)

I agree with all of this. Palestinian freedom is a threat to global capitalist hegemony, and so is stability in the DRC, West Papua, Sudan etc. Personally I am ready to throw off the chains.