Palestine In My Head
BY Sheila MacGregor.
January 22, 2024
We live in a world now where we can almost constantly connect to the world via our online presence. We go through our daily routines, logging off and on as quickly as we used to pick up our rotary dial telephones to call friends for a chat or as leisurely as we picked up our rolled-up newspapers off the front porch.
This new normal has its own double-edged sword, as I see it. On the one edge, we are now unlimited in our outreach. We go beyond our physical neighborhoods, and newer neighborhoods appear on our horizons like magic. We have opportunities to learn about the rest of the world’s cultures and can compare their similarities and differences to our own. The friends we make in our cyber world become as accurate and dear to us as those on our physical plane.
The other edge is getting painfully sharp. As most people in the world use Facebook or other social media now, it becomes more difficult to root out stories that are false and misleading from what is real. We can no longer afford to let our minds become numb and accept everything at its face.
Click-bait headlines and satire commentary that doesn’t post a disclaimer can, if we are not diligent, take us down a rabbit hole that poses the risk of eating up our entire day. Before we realize it, we come up for air, wondering how that time got stolen from us!
Also present in this new normal is the menu of causes to fight for that is offered. I don’t know how everyone else’s Facebook feed or Google search looks, but mine seems to overflow with causes to pick from, almost like looking into your closet and wondering which shoes you must wear today.
No matter where you look, someone is marching for or against something. You can’t scroll through the feed for a minute without seeing a post with a petition or a fundraiser for someone’s urgent need.
What is expected on this menu of causes is that so many are worthy of attention! From climate change, fracking, devastating wars, and famine to the political stories about the rise of fascism and dictatorial despots that refuse to let go of their powers to rape and pillage the countries they plant their wicked roots into. The list is so profuse that it boggles the mind! And it’s exhausting to try and sort and choose. Do you find yourself wanting to take them all on? Well, you can’t. And that is the sharp and painful edge.
We may be overwhelmed to the point that we have given up fighting for anything. So we sit at our computers, and we look at the world. We agonize until, in self-defense, we either escape into a rosy cloud of our preferred mind-numbing agent, or we turn off the noise and turn back to our physical world and try to fix and contain the things we have control over.
Only those things in my physical world that I can control and fix get fixed. I take care of them. And then it’s back to my phone or computer and the heartbreaking images of the genocide in Gaza and the Occupied Territories of Palestine. That is my chosen cause now.
So I have questions. Why is Palestine so obsessively important to me? Why do I feel such companionship with the people there? Why does it capture my attention, my day, and my prayerful alters more than Syria, Ukraine, or Yemen? Why am I not more worried about global warming and the destruction of our planet? Those are important, but do they need to have me staying up late at night scouring the news feeds for anything about Palestine? I don’t even feel like a patriotic American as much as I think my roots are connected to Palestine. But as far as I have learned from my family history, my ancestors came mainly from Scotland and Ireland.
The belief of living past lives or probabilities differs from the myth many claim it to be.
With every image I see on my screen, with every video I watch, or with every journalist I listen to, I am triggered to recall and actually feel the pain and anguish, the fear of some past experience that hides in the shadowy depths of my mind. A dark memory that might startle into physical existence, locking eyes of recognition with me if it hears that old, heavy, rusty, hinged door creak open, letting the light penetrate its dust-covered shroud.
