216) Having a great summer weekend

I've had a wonderful weekend, speaking personally in terms of my own direct experience. Love, lunches, sunshine, laughter, singing, dancing, great food at a festival.

I hope you all have as well.

But....yesterday morning, 100+ Palestinians who had been forced from their homes were literally blown into pieces (reporters on the scene reporting that not a single body could be found, intact), after Israel bombed a school sheltering displaced people, during prayer time. People trapped inside, burned alive, and those outside listened to the screams of their loved ones, unable to rescue them.

How do we live with this dissonance?

How do we have "good weekends" with a heart-at-peace, knowing our fellow humans are being exterminated as if they are vermin?

How many hours have we spent watching the Olympics, versus learning about our own countries' complicity in feeding the war machine?

I have heard more this past week about a female boxer being harassed because of illegitimate "gender tests" by a discredited Russian federation, than I have about the ongoing war Russia is waging against Ukraine. (And isn't it odd that people over here trust Russia about basically nothing, EXCEPT their insistence that two women athletes are not women?)

I have heard more this past week about Elon Musk than I have about the entire Palestinian nation.

I have heard more this past week about the wildfires that consumed Jasper, Alberta, than I have about how we will hold oil companies accountable for decades of misinformation, or how any of our political parties will turn Canada's disgraceful environmental record around. We mourn the damage and loss, while we vote for parties that SUBSIDIZE oil companies and do sweet-fuck-all about actually making a difference on climate change....

I have heard more this past week about JD Vance's apparent eyeliner-wearing, than I have about the fact that both parties of the United States are funding a genocide, and no matter what, won't stop sending $$ and arms to a genocidal nation.

This world is so beautiful. And so fucked. I am so grateful to live in it, and so enraged that I don't know what to do, not even to "make things better" but even just to stop unthinkable carnage.

So yes, I "had a good weekend" in the normal sense of things. But my heart breaks constantly, and my mind shatters with irreconcilable dissonance whenever I open my eyes to the larger world.

What can we do? Well...at the very, very, VERY least, don't turn away from the heartbreak. Be a witness to the truth of our own culture's utter control by the military-industrial complex, and don't live in an illusion that we are somehow "the good guys".

Yes, most of us are Good people. Yes, we care. But we support a political-economic-military system that is not Good, and does not care.

And THIS, is our responsibility to change.