What Can I Do?
[thoughts inspired by the recent disparity between Israel and Palestine]
There is an ongoing distress, reminiscent of the arbitrary, flag-waving, nationalist issues that have plagued the common people for centuries. As it happens, countries and public figures have started to advocate for their interests, creating further division around the world. In considering this semblance of war, I found myself asking a poignant question; I had to reflect on my intervention and own social activism. I had to reconsider the lengths of my activism or if I even had any right to add my figurative two cents and literal twenty dollars. I asked myself how much my donation may serve the needs of these people abroad, if I was helping fund the right side, and if I even had a stake in this event.
Deeper still, I began to ask myself about the lengths I could go in my activism. Especially in the current climate, where there are so many problems, how could I knowingly give to one cause without giving to an other? For some reason, my response to this news caused me to feel my own distress under a greater weight of futility.
I have found myself in a strange place where my activism has seemingly led to my own oppression. If I say anything, I am arguing against an entire country and others that have similarly aligned. More so, I find myself equally ostracized in my own circles as I have found opposition on both ends: I’m damned if I stay silent by one side, I’m damned for supporting the preconceived wrong system of beliefs.
My plight is not singular, there are others who have been able to step to the frontlines and practice their activism. I find myself stuck behind these monitors — my Windows to the world — trying to find my place. There must be others that feel similarly: impelled to help, but pressured to choose a side. For most, this creates a disinterest in activism because this action begins to fray individual life.
Not every cause needs involvement from every one. I, as an individual, am not responsible for activism based on every problem in the world. The human response can be empathetic but there is an equal need to act based on personal survival. Greater still, a common human response is to continually create problems, so — while it may be futile — activism is a part of the evolutionary chain. Activism is a sign of a community working towards its own success. I don’t believe we will ever reach a utopian society as there are upwards of 7 billion definitions. However, we can continually work towards the improvement of infrastructure.
It is not everyone’s place to be active in all of the world’s problems but, being a part of this world, demands some level of involvement that helps tip the scales of justice which are no longer blind. Activism is daunting because it battles a goliath and now, there is a wider pool of smaller bouts made accessible through social media and mediocre education. We are not just fighting the larger issues: we are fighting each other through millennia of thought and opinion, in an attempt to maintain basic rights that are otherwise easily held.
Oppression has new agents and a wider reach than it has ever had before but those similar tenets can be seen in activism, so we endure. We have become entrenched in supporting the idea that we are right that we’ve lost sight of the reason behind our involvement. We should not fight for what’s right. Rather, we need to fight for each other, to make sure that we are supporting life among us because that’s how we can all be successful and inhabit a place where we don’t have to worry about trivial threats. I hope that I’ve made my point in reminding you that there is something to defend and strong rationale behind that. I hope I can help inspire others by showing them that even if my two cents is no more than twenty dollars, I — nay, we — must continue our involvement as that is a manner of preservation. And in that manner, we are able to clearly remember that a society is not for the success of an individual but for the greater advancement of us all.
