The Cost of Dreaming

    Ever since October 7, we've been watching Israel push Gazans as far as they can, and now it looks as though their final plan is coming into fruition; bombing Gaza until not a single person is alive. A million people, dead, the image burned into our minds for all eternity. In my mind I remember a video I saw about a month ago on X, the corpse formerly known as Twitter, of a Democratic senator saying that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza didn't matter, that by the time of the next election, we would have all forgotten. A million people, killed, by the hands of the country that financed this "war". A war between those with guns and those who have done nothing but run for their lives. A war between the media and the journalists desperate to get the truth out. A war between those who want to live in a virtuous nation, and those who believe that as long as we don't televise the death, we don't have to face the consequence for murder. 

      What angers most people is that our country could be this openly cruel even the fascists aren't (technically) in power. What bothers me is that there's nothing we, the people, could have done to prevent it. It's openly known that we're funding Israel's genocide, and yet when we screamed at our politicians to do anything to stop this, all we could get them to do was to pause the fighting briefly. They had months in which to stop what's clearly going to happen, but they didn't. You can't tell me they didn't know this was coming. They had access to the top military data in the country. If an idiot like me could see that Israel wouldn't stop until every man, woman and child was dead, they could see that too. Yet we, the people, the one who elected our politicians to office, can do nothing but sit back and watch. Even if we were to seize the means of production now, it would be too late. 

   The reasonable voices in our world are telling us to keep things in perspective. Any price is adequate, if it means keeping us safe from the Infinite. Then you realize that the world is expecting you, an average citizen, to shoulder the burden of a million deaths in order to keep your world going. That’s when you look around and see that most of your friends and family are perfectly willing to accept this price, assuming they will still be alive when this is over. Everywhere you look, you see people not talking about this, assuming they can’t cover the nuanced issue of a world leader butchering a bunch of innocent people just to throw his weight around. At best you hear people mention that Israel has oppressed Palestine since its inception. Mostly you don’t even get that.

     There will be those in the months ahead, as we are treated to picture after picture of people dying preventable deaths, who will claim the fault lies with Egypt for not opening its borders. As if the fault would lie with anyone who doesn’t lie down to authoritarianism. Even if Egypt were to open its borders now, that would solve nothing. The problem isn’t that we as a society killed millions of people, the problem is that we decided that the death of millions was a reasonable price to pay in order to protect ourselves from seeing the Infinite. If that’s true, than I must ask; what will it take for our world to change? Is the death of our country enough to scare you? Is the death of our planet enough to scare you? Is the potential death of our Universe from breaks in reality, preventable only through understanding of how our physics were created, enough to scare you? All of these and more will happen if we don’t agree that seeing the Infinite is a small price to pay for keeping our world alive.

     Ever since October 7, I’ve been watching people fight with all that’s in them to keep this from happening. Now, upon seeing they can do nothing but watch as a million people die, many are breaking. This is not awakening them to the Infinite. This is the moment they realize that as long as our world is alive, they will never be safe from the Infinite. Our leaders, safe on their mountains, refuse to believe that we’re in trouble. I’ve had enough. We’ve all had enough. All we want is to live in a world where we never need to see the Infinite, and no matter how hard I look I can’t find one anywhere. Should we be surprised, then, that a new world is being born?