I Don't Know What to Do With What I Saw Today

I scrolled too far again today, and I saw two things I can't put down.

One was a dog. An Israeli settler beating her — really beating her — the kind of footage that circulates until enough people have flinched at it. She has a name now. People are calling her Lucy. The naming feels like an apology we are making to her on behalf of a species that failed her in that moment.

The other was children. Gaza. I'm not going to describe the frames, because you have probably seen the same kind, and because there is something obscene about turning a child's worst moment into a paragraph. But I watched it, and then I sat with my phone in my hand in my safe house in my safe country, and I felt the thing I keep feeling and keep not knowing what to do with. How is this still happening, and why are so many people able to look away from it?

I want to be careful here, because this is not opinion dressed up as fact. The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and Israeli organisations like B'Tselem are not calling this a war. They are calling it a genocide. More than 69,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 19,000 children. I have read that number many times and I still cannot make it sit still in my head. Nineteen thousand children is not a number you can picture. You can picture one child. That is the cruelty of it — the scale is exactly what lets people look away, because the mind reaches for something that size and finds nothing to hold. Traveling with Tom

I keep thinking about the dog, too, and I am almost ashamed of how that works. She got a name and a wave of outrage, and I am glad she did. But it is so much easier for people to hold one creature in their hearts than nineteen thousand. I understand it. I feel it myself. But each one of those children was a single life, the exact size of that single dog. Not a number. A whole life, every time, nineteen thousand times.

I don't know what to do with all of this. I'm not going to pretend this post ends with a solution.

But here is the part I hold onto. Not everyone is looking away. There are people who keep showing up — here in Sydney, at Town Hall, week after week, ordinary people who could comfortably scroll past and don't. The Palestine Action Group organises them. When Instagram makes me feel like the whole world has gone numb, that is the thing that brings me back: those crowds are real, and they are made of people who decided that looking away was simply not available to them.

I don't think one blog post does anything. But I think the looking away is the mechanism — the thing that lets all of it continue. So the least I can do, the absolute least, is not look away, and say plainly that I saw it.

I saw it. A dog called Lucy. Children whose names I will never know. I don't understand how we do this to fellow creatures, human and otherwise. I don't think I'm supposed to understand it. I think I'm supposed to refuse to get used to it.