She runs so beige that the color of blood pouring down Gaza’s streets doesn’t frighten her. It did but not anymore.

Apathy and hopelessness stirred in a vat of narcissistic self obsession, she reads the news faster than she can absorb it. Between coffee and her commute, she reads the death toll in Gaza has reached somewhere around 13,000 now. The atrocities happening in the middle east, the ethnic cleansing and genocide being funded by her tax dollars makes her complicit in all of this and yet she cannot stop and take a moment to think about what this really means. This feels way too dystopic, and yet she is driving to work where there is no name or mention of an entire group of people being completely wiped out. Stay apolitical. Stay beige.

She is pretty sure there are very different realities, and thus very different worlds, everyone is inhabiting at any given instance. She gets through the day, in a half slumber. How can no one be talking about it? “I have blood on my hands”, a little voice whispers inside her. She later squashes it down with a Netflix and social media binge. The soma is so strong, she barely remembers who she is, what her values are, and forgets that she has a voice. She lost her voice a long time ago though, her real one. Now her voice is just an amalgam of a voice constructed from the cacophony of a digital echo chamber filled with falsities churned out by the Western propaganda machine. The same media whose role has been to contort, cover-up, deny and say anything but the whole truth on this matter, that the United States is funding the genocide in Gaza. No amount of distraction can distract her form the garish truth that for all the civility and cultural, “moral” and technological advancements, the United States at the heart of it is an imperialist, racist, and a war-mongering nation.

To be fair, the targeted and repeated assault and killings of black Americans, the sickening obsession with guns but bone-chilling apathy towards gun violence, the hypocrisy of wanting to save unborn babies but being okay with killing women in the process, the dysfunctional and dehumanizing health care and housing systems, have all called into question the morality and civility of the US for a while now. Still, funding an uninterrupted genocide of Palestinians through the state of Israel for 6 weeks and counting, is a new and horrific low. Unsurprisingly, what you get for living on a land founded on genocide of its indigenous people, is a carefully constructed apathy that envelopes its denizens, protecting them from the burden of having to live with the guilt of genocide, and absolving them from any responsibility at the same time.

Apathy towards “the other” here is belied by a hyper-individualistic, capitalistic, and ethnocentric veneer. Collapsing familial and community networks, the rise of social media, and an eroding landscape of news and media integrity have made us both lonely and wary. Flagrant news, on multiple occasions, incites disgust and outrage but we never really get to sit with these feelings for too long till another tragedy or disaster floods the news cycle. While Gaza crumbles another story, about two powerful earthquakes jolting Nepal killing dozens of people, unfolds. It also doesn’t feel that long ago that George Floyd’s murder shook the United States. The Taliban takeover following US pullout of Afghanistan and Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine both happened within the last three years. Now we are confronted with upwards of 13000 Palestinian and 1200 Israeli deaths.

Too distracted for our own good and too apathetic for resistance, we look around in stupor and up at the dome of our own little digital microcosms instead of the vast expanse of the universal sky, a bit too willing to be pacified to oblivion. Looking at those dead children, thousands of them, piled under the rubble from buildings flattened to the ground by Israeli-American warheads, is just too damn hard to watch. We cannot reconcile it, so we look away.

But what is the cost of looking away? Today, the fundamental human rights of the people of Palestine are under attack by the West. If we don’t pause to sit and think of how truly horrendous the operation in the Middle East is, if we raise up our hands in surrender to helplessness and hopelessness, what happens to the humanity inside us, the humanity that is supposed to connect us to other humans and help fight for the injustice faced by another?

I didn’t learn about the holocaust until I was in college and I was mortified to learn how 6 million Jews had just been exterminated, en masse, in Germany. I wondered how Germans or anyone living during the time felt about what was going on and I wonder if we feel any different now.

What does it mean when we can readily accept the worst of human atrocities as long as its not affecting our little microcosms, our vapid desires and selfish pursuits? And if we aren’t resisting, aren’t we accepting or worse, condoning, this horror? She is told to leave the topic of wars to the experts. Except this isn’t a war and one need no expert to see that predatory, colonial terrorists are painting Palestine red in a civilian bloodbath, while the rest of us can barely shake ourselves awake from this beige American nightmare.