Sabrina Carpenter & Gaza

 

When I first got on to Instagram a few years ago, I went to the "search" page and the company already offered me lots of images to look at.  Apparently some people or things are "trending" and they're presented to you even if they're not the sorts of things you post or that you'd have otherwise shown an interest in.

At the time, there were lots of pictures of a WWE female wrestler named Rhea Ripley (who has impressive shoulders) and, also, pictures of a female singer named Doja Cat.  I don't know why Rhea Ripley was trending, but Doja Cat was then currently on tour.

Over the years, along with my searches for cartoonists and friends I notice brief waves of images of various celebrities coming and going.  And, for the past couple of months it's been this young woman named Sabrina Carpenter who has had a big hit with the song "Espresso" which I still haven't listened to.  She appears to be a tiny thing who likes to have a lot of fun and is automatically friends with lots of already established pop-culture celebrity giants.  Some unasked for pop-culture headline on my browser homepage described "Espresso" as enjoyable, meaningless fun.

Good for her.

I like a good time as much as the next person.  We can't spend all our time on doom and gloom.  We don't all have to be saints wearing hair shirts until peace and social justice have been achieved.  So, I personally have nothing against Sabrina Carpenter.  It's just that watching all these pop-culture figures and events going on while Israel is perpetrating a hideous genocide of the Palestinian people, and our own political leaders are providing Israel with diplomatic cover and (especially in the case of the USA, financial and military support without which the genocide couldn't even be carried out) makes me a little nauseous.

Why You Should Care

 

Caitlin Johnstone makes an eloquent case for empathy and connectedness and morality:

Why should you care about Gaza? Because we can’t keep living like this. Our species cannot continue living on this planet as though what happens to other people and other organisms around the world has nothing to do with us. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.

For better or for worse, we now live on a planet with eight billion humans who are no longer separated by distance in the way we used to be. This species which spent so much of its development relating to itself in units of small tribes is now an intimately networked global community whose behavior is literally altering the face of this planet, and we need to start acting like it. We need to start doing what Einstein called “widening our circle of compassion” beyond our small tribal units of people we personally know and like, or we simply won’t be able to survive and thrive on this planet.

The inability of ordinary people to think globally is directly affecting our lives in the here and now.

I agree with everything that she says there.  Unfortunately I believe, and have said so many times at this blog, that there are large numbers of people (perhaps the majority) who are simply not wired to care about things beyond their immediate circles of self/family/friends/community.  Which isn't to say that they're callous and indifferent about human suffering.  If they become aware of it they'll probably respond in a decent fashion.  It's getting such people aware of things in the wider world that is the challenge.

People who don't read.  People who watch the news but who are so zoned-out that it hardly registers.  People who are so incurious about the world they live in that they can't find their own country on a map.  People who for all intents and purposes imagine that people drove cars in the Middle Ages.

Which is what makes it so criminal for the CBC to have such limited coverage of a live-streamed genocide.  Right-wing shlock outlets like SUN Media or The National Pest will cover Israel's genocidal policies and the protests against them from a pro-zionist, pro-genocide perspective because they're scum.  The people at the CBC know better but, nonetheless, have a job to do in the propaganda system.  So they ignore or downplay the genocide.

Johnstone's article shows the serious consequences of business as usual.

This image search led me to something personally interesting.