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The absurdity and horror of everyday life in a time of genocide

7 6
15.08.2025

There are moments which send a shudder of moral disjunction through the soul. They come faster and more frequent as the tide of blood rises. We all must feel it, each in our different way.

For me, so many of these moments are about food and pleasure. My food, my pleasure. The family’s food, my family’s pleasure.

It happens with dread regularity: cooking dinner on the barbecue as the radio begins playing reports of starvation in Gaza.

My plate sickening me, revolting me.

I eat my lunch while the TV shows children with their brains blown out. I open social media on holiday and am confronted with the reality of genocide.

Human beings are being pounded with bombs, starved and then shot as they scrabble for food at aid stations. We’re witnessing live-streamed genocide. This is hell.

I don’t want to look away. I must look, because to not look is to not know, and we must know.

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I am not, I hope, a stupid man, or someone incapable of processing their emotions, but I don’t know how to fit what I see, read and hear into the plodding reality of my day-to-day life.

I’m not sure what it says about my humanity that I can look at pictures of a land levelled to ash, then get in my car and go shopping.

There’s an absurd horror to how we all - everyone and every government across the west - is responding to what’s happening in Gaza and being done to the Palestinian people.

That sense of absurdity clashing up against horror reaches from the level of the lone individual - how a plate of food can accuse me like an indictment - to the level of a society or nation.

I........

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