The Israel-Hamas War is Culling Our Friends Lists
Not since the pandemic have so many of our friends & family been this stupid
A silver lining of the global pandemic, albeit a painful one, was the tranparency the scourge brought to our personal relationships.
Otherwise sane and compassionate friends, family, and colleagues revealed their true colors: COVID was a fiction, vaccines contained microchips, the bodies piling up in hospitals were fake news, we should let the old and fat people die, check out my booming stock portfolio…
Now the Israel-Hamas War is performing a similar socially hygienic function, all the folks we didn’t unfriend getting another chance.
Otherwise sane and compassionate friends, family, and colleagues reveal their true colors yet again: Collective punishment is the strategy of both sides, everything Israel does is justified, Hamas is a peace loving group, historical atrocity X makes current atrocity Y right…
WTAF is wrong with you people? I mean, seriously, have you lost your fucking minds again? Or maybe you never had them? Unable to hold two ideas in their heads at the same time, any semblance of human empathy out the window, people we thought were cool are actually fascists.
The biggest challenge seems to be one of perspective. Most people start with an “emotional truth,” which is, by definition, emotional, and in practice, not true. For example: “Israel doesn’t practice jihad” — a statement that when uttered inexplicably justifies blowing up Palestinian kids by the thousands.
The other challenge is one of creativity. Because Israel needs to destroy Hamas, the way they go about destroying Hamas is the right way to destroy Hamas. And anyone who doesn’t agree with their way of destroying Hamas is anti-Israel, an antisemite, or a stupid liberal who doesn’t “get it.”
And central to this stupidity is a problem with empathy. Our dear friends and family are so caught up within their own bullshit that they look at the killed and the killers and see only their own bullshit reflected back. All humanity is lost. Seems the dumber the ideas, the less compassion.
Oh, well. I unfriended a bunch of good friends a few years ago. This round I’m not reacting to the tsunami of idiocy. See? Growth is possible. Booyah.