Mass Extinction Event
It's odd; for the longest time, I always thought the climate was the most important issue in the world. It makes sense, really. If we lose control of the climate, other issues simply do not matter. Human beings create a mass extinction event, likely taking ourselves down with it. Ice caps melt, sea levels rise, ecosystems are destroyed, and weather becomes increasingly chaotic. What could be more important to address?
And then, there was genocide. The whole world is going to hell, but one people on the globe is getting there first. I find that I hardly ever think about the climate anymore, because all I can think about is the suffering of the Palestinians.
My wife says it's ruining my mental health, and there is nothing I can do to stop it, but I can't look away. On October 7th, 2024, my email inbox was flooded with reports from independent journalists about the state of things in Gaza one year in. I couldn't open a single one, because it actually physically hurt at that point to read anymore.
It was my government making this happen. My Congressional representative and Senators voting for another shipment of billions of dollars in weapons, and my President signing off on it. These were all Democrats, who so many of my fellow Americans assured me were the good ones.
“Israel has a right to defend itself!” I was told by many. It seemed to me that helping Israel defend itself should look like shipping Israel a bullet for every member of Hamas, and telling them to aim carefully, not giving them 2,000 pound bombs to drop on hospitals and schools. Yet the President told Netanyahu to stop dropping our bombs on hospitals and schools, and by the way, here are some more bombs; we'll send you more when you run out.
I was raised Jewish, and my family talked often about the atrocities of the Nazis during the Holocaust. It's hard for me to understand how the descendants of the survivors of that horror could be so willing to turn around commit their own genocide. To dehumanize a people from within their own land and force them into ghettos and methodically extinguish their lives? I can't fathom it.
Netanyahu referred to the Palestinians as “Amalekites", the people God told the ancient Israelites to destroy utterly, leaving not a man, woman, or child alive, not even their livestock would be spared. I don't believe God has spoken to Netanyahu; the Palestinians are not the Amalekites, but drawing that parallel should be terrifying to anyone familiar with the book of Samuel. I know many of the people in the United States government who are supplying these weapons are not ignorant of the significance of Netanyahu's metaphor, but they continue to support him.
I still worry about the climate sometimes; it's still an issue, and it's still getting worse. However, we are creating a mass extinction event right now, on the other side of the world, quite intentionally. Our leaders are quite happy with it, it seems. The people of the world watch the death and destruction on our phones and protest, but the people who could stop it have no intention to do so. Many of them think that God is on their side. It's hard to believe in God these days, like it's hard to hold onto hope. Maybe the climate will fail us before the last Palestinian is dead in some sort of ironic justice for our hubris.
I don't have a good way to end this piece, because there doesn't seem to be a good way to end this situation.