The singing woman has a sweet, slightly off-key voice. It’s charming. The song sounds like a lullaby. She should be singing it to a fat toddler she’s rocking while strolling around a garden with sheets drying on a clothesline. “Boom boom boom boom boom boom!” she cutely sings.
Instead, the video she’s recording shows an IDF bulldozer violently, callously shoveling a pile of dead Palestinian bodies. It’s worse than what the most dystopian cultural products — my gold standard is The Hunger Games and Black Mirror — terrorized audiences with.
I think we’re underestimating the significance of this historic moment, as people do. Eventually, starving kids on the nightly news recede into a UNICEF ad you mute. All rubble pretty much looks the same. And we’re already somewhat inured to rubble, after the massacre in Syria, which I naively thought would be the worst war in my lifetime. Eventually, officials can sell pieties like “Unfortunately, there are casualties in war,” and these casualties become statistics that are unfathomable so everyone stops trying to fathom them. Global tragedy white noise.
But there’s social media images and videos coming in from both sides that you can’t unsee, as well as dissemination of news reports from sources that do better reporting than the hasbara most US media pipes out. This is literally the first time in history that a massacre was beamed into everyone’s brain in real-time.
You might spend your weekend rock-climbing instead of doom-scrolling social media (as this writer definitely does. I’m writing this from a rock.) but no matter what, you’ll come across images and videos like a woman singing a lullaby while dead humans are treated like a pile of garbage. Or of soldiers bombing universities, homes, hospitals, children, set to techno beats on TikTok. No one under 100 has 0 contact with all and any social media.
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