A friend of mine shared my article about how the Biden administration is worried the pause in fighting will allow journalists into Gaza to show Israel’s crimes to the world, saying he knows he shouldn’t be surprised by how evil these freaks are but somehow he still is.
I told him I actually consciously cultivate the ability to stay surprised by such things. If you stop being surprised when you see the world’s most powerful people always finding new and innovative ways to make the world a worse place for ordinary human beings, it means it’s become normalized in your system in some way. It means that on top of all the other horrible evils they’ve inflicted upon our world, they’ve also managed to steal an important part of your humanity.
No longer being shocked by the murderousness of the empire is a counterintuitive sign that something unhealthy is happening to you, like when the body stops shivering as it sinks into the later stages of hypothermia, or when the hunger pangs go away in the later stages of starvation. It’s a sign that your system is no longer forcefully rejecting conditions it ought to reject, and has instead shifted into giving up and trying to conserve energy.
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I spend all day every day staring into the ugliest parts of the imperial machine, but I refuse to let it desensitize me. These monsters have taken so very, very much from the world, and I refuse to let them take that too. I refuse to let them rob me of my humanity like that.
I see it as a sacred duty to keep a flame lit in myself which knows what a healthy world looks like, which knows what sanity looks like, which knows how things ought to be, and which naturally finds it jarring when the sickness of this civilization reveals itself.
I refuse to accept this as normal. I refuse to let the abuses of the empire turn me into a callused, jaded husk of a human who can only respond to each new monstrosity with a deep world-weary sigh. I make sure it still brings up a white hot rage in me. I make sure it still brings white hot tears to my eyes.
You can’t let them take that from you. You can’t let them harden your heart and darken your eyes. We’ve got to keep the flame burning for a sane and healthy world, if not for ourselves then for our children, and for future generations who we will never meet.
If you’re still finding yourself shocked and shaken by the actions of our rulers, that’s a very healthy sign. It means they haven’t got you yet. It means they haven’t succeeded in snuffing out your flame.
We’ve got to protect our sensitivity at all costs. We’ve got to maintain that visceral rejection of madness, because that’s what’s calling us home. That’s what’s calling us home to a healthy world. That’s what will guide our way as we fight our way there, one small, almost-insignificant victory at a time.
If they haven’t yet snuffed out your flame today, that’s one more small win for humanity. That’s one more tiny step toward health.
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Comments
8 responses to “Never Stop Being Shocked By The Depravity Of The Empire”
Peter Gabriel – San Jacinto…
“Hold the line.”
I never liked you comments. But as a sleepwalker, i am drawn to it. . Thanks for your effort
In this tragedy of all the people in the Middle East , human, emotional reactions of the people should be spread as widely as possible. One is that letter of the Israeli hostage towards Hamas..Ot confirms that to protect others from yourself is the highest humanity one can exercise. That is the way to proceed, and shut down all war mongering.
https://philosophyofgoodnews.com/2023/11/28/humanity-at-its-highest/
If the Empire was not populated by sleepwalkers who agree when the respected media tell them that the dead babies and badly injured screaming children are regrettable collateral damage to the gallant attempt of the Zionists to stem the flow of Arab Terrorists who are intent on pulling down free and democratic Israel the system would collapse. And we don’t want the system collapsing and having to be replaced do we? It is only capitalist democracy which gives us the freedom to sleepwalkers .
Good critique by Johnstone. Anyone watching the Israeli-HAMAS prisoners and hostages release will notice that most of the released Palestinians are women and children. Israel is holding more than 10,000 Palestinians, many of them are women and children who haven’t been charged with any crimes a.k.a. (“administrative prisoners”) in flagrant violation of International Law. In its aggression on the unarmed and defenseless Palestinian civilians and hospitals, the cowardly child-killing Israeli terrorists, murdered more than 6300 children and babies, and 4000 unarmed women. The spineless UN Secretary Guterres said: Israeli Jews have turned “Gaza into a graveyard for children.”
As Caitlin Johnstone knows, powerful leaders like Biden are not simply moral monsters (which they are), they are also agents within a militarized and exploitative world system that often prescribes for them the murderous choices they make. We need a transformed world system that represents our common humanity, our common dignity, rather than the present world system premised on the wealth and power of the few over the rest of us.
The Empire has been and will always be here to rule so long as its inticement to egomanics is rewardrd with wealth and fame blindly surrendered by accepting non-critical thinkers who still need parential figures to guide them. They’ve willingly given up their right to self-determination without fighting for their personal integrity. Sad but history has shown over and over again that the masses are too easily duped by their own ignoramce.
I’m not as shocked as Caitlin is — anyone who lived through the American war in Vietnam and who knew what the U.S. was doing shouldn’t be too shocked — but that’s because I’m old and she’s not. One can still be passionate about peace and justice and not be too shocked by the endless horrors the world’s criminals — Biden, Blair, Trudeau, etc, etc, etc — pursue.