Gabor Mate' : "The world forgets too easily what it does not like to remember."
But sometimes we find ourselves witnessing and living through something that is too horrible to ignore, and, for many of us, too heart-wrenching to ever forget. It knocks down our walls and turns our civilized thinking to mud.
Vietnam was like that for me. It knocked out all my supports. All my new and old (inherited) walls came down at once. And now it is the genocide in Palestine. And, depending on the next million nano-choices we make, we can go back to being walled in and "civilized" (When and if Europe imposes sanctions on Israel that might numb us back to hiding behind our walls again!) or we can live with muddy thinking, following our heart's dictates, and then there is no telling where we will end up, but wherever it is, at least we will be human beings.
How we see what is happening in Palestine says more about us than we realize. Gabor Mate' says: "Palestine is a microcosm of the world: fragmented, wretched and on fire" And "The lens through which we see Palestine is the lens through which we see each other and everything else." If you see it as Israel against Hamas, you are delusional. (Your lens is really f-ked.)
Try switching to my lens I agree with Gabor: "Palestine is a war of the generals against the children."
Here is Gabor again with a different metaphor: Without a functional heart informing the mind "we are nothing but genius-level reptiles. It is genius-level reptiles that are running our world right now."
Can you see that? I can. And I've been seeing it since 1968.
Vietnam recovered. The Vietnamese recovered. Palestine may not. This is really the time to look at ourselves really hard and ask ourselves if we are reptiles or human beings?
If you are a reptile, and that is good enough for you, enjoy your walled-in head-space and your dinner of flies.
