So, I’ve been taking this class this semester and its about suffrage of Palestinian and Israeli women. It can be a pretty heavy class, and I honestly am only taking it because I signed up for classes way to late. As I was going through this weeks reading I stumbled upon this statement- “No news report can communicate the atmosphere of palpable fear, everyone tensed in apprehension of the next eruption of rage from one or both parties to the conflict. The ear quickly learns to interpret no shout as a greeting, no crackle of explosive as a care backfire; the eye learns to trust no scene as tranquil; there is no such thing as relaxing the alert, even for a second.” This is talking about a camp called Rafah in the Gaza Strip.
Through this semester we have gone through some boring to interesting to gory facts about life for women in this area. I have had to read some passages that were honestly hard to get through one because it was boring and two sometimes because it was so unbelievable. Out of all that this quote has stood out to me the most. It says “No news report can communicate the atmosphere of palpable fear.” . . . I don’t even know the feeling of palpable fear. This life, the lives of these people are so far away from my own that I can’t even fathom the realization of this quote, and this quote isn’t even the worst of it.
It just makes me wonder what I can do to actually help them, discussing their lives in a classroom, picking a side, refusing to buy a magazine, sporting a bumper sticker. These sound so frivolous, they sound like things we do to make ourselves feel like we are doing something for the greater good, but are we? We all are immune to the diluted one-sided news clips, so I know we aren’t helping with are listening ears. And even if the news wasn’t biased and watered down, what would we do… pity them? Sometimes I just feel like there are such big things in the world, things that we should all care about, or at least want to understand. I feel useless because none of my actions will ever directly help any of these people, or other people in situations like these.
I wish people cared more about people then they did about, well about other things. Recently I’ve heard a lot of news via my social networks about how life changing, astonishing, breathtaking, some musical performances were. That’s all fine and good and people can take part and enjoy whatever they please, but so much of me wishes that the passion people place on feeling ‘apart’ of a 15,000 plus rock show… they put towards changing the lives of people who could really use it. I’m all for inspiration and motivation, but some people literally have nothing, and on top of that are being persecuted for who and what they are. Can’t our motivation and inspiration go bigger than our own lofty goals, or own self worths and stem into an inspiration and motivation to just help people?
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