Genocide Makes It Difficult To Focus

There was something I read last week, but never got around to sharing it. It was very powerful and I read it during one of those final 5 or 10 mins right before your eyes shut at night. Right before the book falls on your face and you pass out with the lights on. What I read really moved me. I’ve been distracted. Constantly. It’s like a giant fly that is buzzing 24/7. You want to squash it with all your might but you can never actually see it. Except you can. Because it’s so big and so loud. It’s everywhere. Except it isn’t.

But then it hits me: what I view as a distraction is literally an on-going genocide.

It’s unbelievable.

It is the erasure of an entire people from a small strip of land that is slowly but surely expanding, kind of like exponential growth of bacteria inside a coastal Petri dish. Just when you think it will run out of energy and its stubborn expansion will cease, it regains its footing, and the exponential growth multiplies.

Labeling this experience as a simple “distraction” is setting myself up for some sort of psychological punishment in my older years. I’m left with mysterious odd feelings screaming inside my stomach: I could’ve done more, talked to more people, donated more money, made more phone calls, remained more patient with stubborn people who wouldn’t or couldn’t understand what I was trying to say. Odd feeling of powerlessness.

I keep thinking: This is how the holocaust happened, right under the noses of the “civilized” world, except it was the civilized world all along that was committing it. Questions swirled. How could the civilized world be so uncivilized? How can such prestigious degrees at revered institutions leave such intelligent people running the civilized world so heartless? Lacking of all humanity and justice. All in the the name of material gains, incentives. In this world.

It’s difficult to focus.

Whether it’s on food for the body or for the mind. It’s difficult to focus. Chatting with friends is also difficult if they aren’t on the same page or at least reading the same book. I excuse it only because I assume they are still in the early chapters and will be on the same page sooner or later. At least that’s the hope.

It’s very difficult to focus.