This is an excellent point, thank you. I think this is a crucial and overlooked component to fascist movements and their appeal to the disenfranchised, like the amorphous concept of “great”-ness that the MAGA crowd espouses.
I haven’t read Fanon, would you recommend a place to start?
That’s true! And I don’t mean to sound like I’m making a “bad guys on both sides” sort of false equivalency here. Certainly the weight of the imperative should be directed toward those who sit atop power structures.
Honest question: how can one inspire empathy via rhetoric in an incredibly polarized and emotional situation? There seems to be a bit of a chicken/egg problem in that there must be empathy in order for the violence to stop, but the violence has to stop before the empathy can begin.
Yes, and the assumptions that make up this artificial“it’s us against them”ultimatum tend to dissolve when placed under an empathetic lens.
The political justification for the genocide of Palestine, much like that of US slavery, requires that people are dehumanized. It’s not genocide because they’re an existential threat, slavery isn’t a grievous violation of human rights because non-whites simply aren’t human in the same capacity, etc. These assumptions don’t hold up long if you perceive the “other” as motivated by a similar humanity to your own — everyone else is just trying to put food on the table and keep their family safe too.
Of course, there are many bad-faith actors to be found. But my point is that, broadly speaking, we all need to chip away at toxic “us vs them” narratives from the bottom up
“They will send women and children as undercover terrorists. If we continue like this, we will reach another October 7.”
He’s not exactly wrong — why won’t the West realize that terrorizing the terrorists doesn’t make them less radicalized? To justify one heinous act of violence with another is an investment in more of the same.
Obviously it’s a big messy situation that’s too complicated for simple blanket statements (and what do I know?), but it seems fair to say that history repeats itself unless we can reject this flawed zero-sum premise that my suffering can justify yours.
Do I condone Hamas? Absolutely not. Would I condone attacking Israel if they bombed my home and murdered my family? I bet I would…
It’s easy to espouse aggressively simplistic moral principles from the privilege of safety. Much harder and more important to root those principles in a foundation of empathy.
I’ve been on both sides of this and it really depends on what management is expecting at the time. If “cart run” is a considered a task unto itself then it can be bliss, but if you’re short staffed then management starts to look at “cart run” as a means to an end. When the expectation becomes that you’ll be back on register in 10-15 minutes (but all the corrals out front are now full and no customers are complaining about it), then all those wayward carts mean you gotta hustle.
When I eventually found myself in a supervisory role, I remembered that and tried to equitably rotate between everybody that I knew liked doing carts (or offer when I could tell someone was getting burnt out/long day and needed to go outside for a while) and just let them do their thing. Mostly people really appreciated that and in those cases it was gratifying to be the cool supervisor, but I hated that my responsibility had become to ensure that the front carts were acceptably full at any given time rather than to gather the carts – all it takes is a random rush and suddenly there are no carts and a micromanagey shift lead is chewing you out because they only appear at moments like these (or immediately after the rush while everyone is catching their breath to ask why you can’t find something to do) and your guy outside was just standing in the back of the lot smoking a cigarette, the shift lead doesn’t care that there were carts mere minutes before they arrived on the floor, nor that the cart runner only just started that cig after gathering all the carts strewn into bushes and discarded between cars or down the sidewalk…
god I don’t miss retail lol
I’m not saying I have answers either, but my concern is that those grassroots struggles don’t work in the face of a huge imbalance of power. The Palestinians do not have the capability to forcefully counter the IDF, so if Israel is to be compelled forcefully rather than from inside-out, who provides that leverage? Is it the benevolent dictator problem, where the only way out is to have an absolute power in control which you trust will act altruistically?
The struggle of black folks in the US is an interesting example because, while the Civil Rights Movement made great strides, in the modern political sphere it would be absurd to conclude that the problem is solved. People didn’t stop being racist and hateful just because the law made it illegal to discriminate. People do stop being racist and hateful when they have a humanizing relationship with the black family down the street and empirically change their worldview.
It is naive to think that love will indeed conquer all and that force is never justified or appropriate. But so too is it naive to expect that being forceful alone can instigate the sort of healing necessary for lasting peace.
Perhaps the answer is to use force to get to the “peace treaty” phase, which becomes the foundation for gradual empathy. But I do see dangerous irony in the notion of “righteous” violence. Israel should be stopped, with force, but until minds are changed and hearts are swayed, the violence will resurface eventually.
I guess I’m really just arguing that violence should never be taken for granted.