2024 has brought about a tectonic shift in how many perceive the world. Many of the foundations we've taken for granted for most of our lives have been shaken and shattered. The inefficacy of International law, the lack of morals in our peers, the silence and apathy of our friends and family, the corruption of our world leaders, and the complicit gaslighting of the media. Like many, I have experienced a profound disappointment in humanity. It's been a year of awakening to not just an ongoing genocide but to the systematic injustices that have allowed the cataclysmic events in Palestine to unfold. The system has been revealed for how broken it is and how the unrestrained avarice that fuels the Western world.
For me, it's been a year of realizing the power of change and action. Opening up from seemingly nowhere, discovering the world's horrors could have broken me. It should have. Seeing the images of dead children daily for the last six months, seeing their parents in utter devastation and disbelief, watching videos of kids hugging each other, hoping to make it through the night bombings - that changed me, but it did not break me. Instead, I became angry, so goddamn angry. I am furious at the complicity I feel in these things happening, not just now in Gaza but for generations where violence has been enacted upon the weak by the strong. I decided to let fury fuel me and empower me to act. I joined movements, started writing social media (I drove away colleagues and friends with my rhetoric), and started changing what I support and consume (I've stopped eating, drinking, and buying groceries, products, and services that implicitly or explicitly support Isreal or has an active presence there - it's not hard, just do your homework: https://boycott.thewitness.news/browse/1).
The imagined rock leaves no ripples, but the thrown pebble does.
Let 2025 be the year you start acting.
