As I watched a besieged Gaza sustain waves of airstrikes, the account of Motaz Azaiza materialized in my feed. His scenes were often blurred, their content warnings a harbinger of the images I was about to witness.
Haunting images of fathers carrying lifeless toddlers, their limp limbs rhythmically swinging in cadence with footsteps.
Pictures and videos of traumatized civilians being pulled from the rubble. Their ghostly silhouettes, a monotone shade of grey, concrete pulverized to dust. Their faces caked in blood stare blankly despite the chaos encompassing the scene.
Lifeless arms and torsos protruded from the rubble, still tethered to something below.
This is worse than anything I had ever seen, worse than I could imagine...and this was reality. Real people living through, or more appropriately, trying to survive an apocalyptic hell-scape.
Other images showed toddlers trying to sleep, huddled together on wet blankets, out of the direct rain but surrounded by mud and water. There was no warmth to be found, let alone sleep.
His images cut into me like a scalpel, an exploratory surgery exhuming emotions that had never been touched.
I followed him. Something felt horribly wrong here.
Soon thereafter, I found the solemn face of Wael Al Dahdouh staring back at me from my phone.
His posts were a chronological list of his martyred family members.
His wife. His children. His grandchildren. His losses became successively more unfathomable to me.
Despite the mounting death and destruction, both steadfastly kept reporting and sharing. The images captured and showed the world what Gaza and the Palestinians were enduring.
The more I saw, the more I clicked.
My white picket-fence social media algorithm took a tectonic shift. Crushed bodies, amputated limbs, and emaciated frames erupted from my phone, replacing the scenes of gently curling waves and sun-soaked beaches at dawn.
People, day after day, documented the horrors that they were living through. Broadcasting their own extermination while the world consumed it like a reality TV show.
The world suddenly felt like it had descended into madness.
People were being massacred. Children were being massacred. An entire culture was being erased in real-time. Despite the relentless cries for help, they barely registered as a whisper to the world.
What was unfolding was so calculated, and callous. The target wasn't any particular segment of the population, it was the entirety of the population.
Watching as this transpires, how do we call ourselves compassionate and civilized? How do we turn away and not empathize with the plight of people who are targeted and suffering this nightmare?
As the days ticked forward and bombs continued dropping, death tolls increased. 1K, 3K, 5K, 10...20...30...
Within these numbers were women and children, martyred within the “safe” confines of their homes. There were no longer any “safe zones.” Indiscriminate airstrikes, where nothing was held sacred, were leveled against an entire population. Homes, schools, hospitals...mosques, even God was a target.
It wasn't just women and children though, it wasn't even solely Palestinians. The entirety of society, doctors, journalists, artists, fell victim. The violence was indiscriminate and rabid. Humanitarians trying to feed a starving population, doctors trying to save lives — humanity itself was being extinguished.”
The perversion that I was witnessing on a daily basis, the grim reality-show of death should have served as a wake-up call to the world, but was instead met with government silence and complacency.
I couldn't comprehend the complete vacuum and silence of the moment.
Government institutions were suddenly more interested in banning TikTok than stopping a genocide. Rather than confront the moral bankruptcy that was anchored in their souls, the focus shifted to those who pointed it out and silencing their voices. Without direct U.S. control, the platform operated outside of the iron fist of control and censorship.
Go look. Click the images, force the algorithms to rewrite themselves. Witness the atrocities. Not for you, not for me, but for them, for the Palestinians. Don't let the extermination of human life happen in the shadows, but drag it kicking and screaming into the light. Let the world witness the barbarity that humanity, that we, are still capable of.
Witness it.
Ask yourself what you see. Do you see the righteous cause of liberty and justice for all? The hallmark phrase that we were indoctrinated with during our public education Pledge of Allegiance.
Go look at the children who are now dying of starvation.
Go look at the fathers carrying the lifeless bodies of their children.
Go look at the orphaned kids crying and lost.
Witness people burying their parents, children, spouses, entire families.
This is the world complacency creates.
Go look. Dig through the rubble. Help search for the people and culture systematically being erased. Go look. Dig through the rubble. Find the collective loss of decency and dignity, the collective loss of courage... the loss of our very humanity.
The aggression and genocide are being supported by the people we voted for and handed so much power to. The people who should cherish and safeguard the phrase ‘Liberty and justice for all’ are betraying the very foundation and structure of American values.
In the future how will you explain, maybe to your own children, why nobody did anything? Will you share with them the stories and images? Will you tell them that people searched through the rubble, by hand, for their families while you barely looked for the courage to see? That you ate dinner while watching people starve? Or will you tell them you didn’t know because it made you too uncomfortable to look? Plausible deniability. You didn’t want to feel bad so you turned your head and looked the other way and decided it wasn’t your problem.
Leo Tolstoy said, “If you feel pain, you are alive. If you feel other people's pain, you are a human being.”
Go look.
Who are you?
