Where Is the Outrage?

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State of Siege: Israel is conducting its largest mass expulsion campaign in the West Bank since 1967

More than 40,000 Palestinians have been forced from their homes in a violent Israeli rampage that at times has been aided by the Palestinian Authority.

(Dropsite News, March 6)

After 16 months of genocidal warfare in the Gaza Strip, Israel has turned its attention to the West Bank with the same objective: expel or exterminate the Palestinian population and illegally annex the territory.

At the beginning of the war, there was discussion among integralists, including myself, on this site about October 7 and the Israeli response. Since then I have seen no further conversation about it. How come? It’s no longer a pressing issue? Those who defended Israel in the beginning are now too embarrassed to revisit the topic? I challenge those defenders of Israel to come back to this site and tell us where you stand on the issue now. In particular I would like to see Corey Devos and Mark Fischler conduct a webinar on what an appropriate Integral assessment of the current situation would look like.

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Outrageous as it may be, I don’t think anyone is going to go to war to protect Taiwan, Ukraine, or Gaza, and nothing is going to stop Netanyahu short of that. When it comes to security, Isreal is Blue, and Blue steals whatever adjacent territory it can, and permanetly eliminating the threat of Gaza and its Palestinian residents is the end game. In the end, my answer is that no one really cares about 40,000 Arabs (other than to post some stuff on the internet about how unfair it is). And it is unfair.

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Outrage is considered one of those “moral emotions,” being a combination of surprise, anger, and disgust. My sense is that people are no longer subject to the surprise factor, given the history now, and perhaps anger has given way to disgust. And what’s the typical reaction to a disgusting thing, but to turn away. Maybe also for some, ontological sorrow is the primary feeling, humanity’s separation from the Wholeness/Spirit, and from itself.

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Nice, LaWanna. I want to add to your combination of emotions, “helplessness,” and the helplessness of helplessness. The “turning away,” for me, comes insidiously, not knowing how to carry such things inside. Becomes a process of navigating grief, sorrow, mourning … being human, a messy business…

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Maybe you think the people your broadcasting too, have the propaganda machine in there heads. You can be intelligent and brainwashed at the same time. It’s a long historical propaganda event. How to dominate the Middle East. Keep them unable to develop. How do you do that? Promote Zionism, ( 1867) and keep the pressure on till they are gone. Enjoy

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I’ve hesitated in posting this, but the weight of silence in this community - particularly around what is happening in Gaza - has become harder to bear than the risk of speaking up, quite frankly.

Based on the available evidence: the scale, intent, language used by Israeli officials, patterns of killing, displacement, destruction of infrastructure, and the deliberate targeting of civilians, aid convoys, journalists, and hospitals, these are absolutely consistent with the legal and moral definition of genocide. And not just in a technical sense, but in the visceral, undeniable reality of annihilation. What we are witnessing in Gaza is genocide.

I’m writing from a place of devastation. Beneath the ordinary rhythms of work and practice, many of us are watching this genocide in real-time, live-streamed by our fellow human-beings, who desperately scream for the world’s collective intervention while they gather their loved-one’s perforated and exploded limbs in plastic bags for identification and burial. Whole lineages and families buried and crushed in rubble. Children starved and riddled with curable disease. Hospitals bombed. Journalists, surgeons and aid workers executed. Surgeons raped with literal impunity, sanctioned by Israel’s courts. Entire neighbourhoods and towns reduced to ash. The world watches, and for the most part, carries on. Business as usual. Integral as usual.

The question of Zionism and of Palestine is not complicated in the way that moral cowardice prefers. Based on international legal frameworks and the overwhelming evidence available, what is happening to Palestinians is a genocide. And yet, here - among people who speak of second-tier consciousness, compassion, and global awakening - there is near silence.

I feel heartbreak, rage, and a deep psychic dissonance. As a psychotherapist, I continue to show up for clients, to hold their pain with presence (my client base includes Jews of all persuasions, including Zionist, post-Zionist and anti-Zionist individuals). And yet, I do so with the knowledge that an entire people are being exterminated in real time. The psychic split is enormous. The cost of silence even greater.

To practice ‘Integral’ consciousness must not mean bypassing the moral clarity that atrocity demands. It must not mean waiting until museums are built and textbooks are written to acknowledge what is already unbearable (and beyond outrageous) in the now. If our frameworks cannot respond to genocide while it is happening, then they are not integral - they are misshapen. Or, if I’m being generous, perhaps the Integral Framework for genocide acknowledge and prevention are themselves in development, somewhere.

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One way of looking at the situation is as an inset on a map of Big Atrocities in the world: unless it’s a place you are particularly interested in visiting, you don’t pay much attention to it. I think many people lack interest. I am interested, and tend to view it as genocide indeed. Consider that as early as May 2024, only 6-7 months into it, Boston University’s School of Law’s International Human Right’s Clinic had investigated and concluded genocide was happening. Six months later, the UN’s Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices drew the same conclusion, based upon only the first 8 months of the conflict, and determined that starvation was being used as a weapon, along with everything else, including AI-assisted targeting. A month after that, in Dec. 2024, Amnesty’s investigative report called it genocide. Numerous human rights experts have made similar declarations, although some speak of “slow-motion” genocide or genocide limited to specific periods or events. And then there’s the International Criminal Court in November 2024 issuing a warrant for Netanyahu as a war criminal over the use of starvation against the Palestinians. Which brings us up to date, for just this past week, that same Court asked Hungary to arrest and surrender Netanyahu during his visit to Hungary, but instead, the far-right leader of Hungary simply withdrew from membership in the ICC, with the Israeli leader in country. So it’s not like there hasn’t been any attempts on the larger world stage to address what certainly smells like genocide, so one has to wonder what it will take to gain more support. For another perspecive, the American Jewish Organization has issued it’s 5 reasons why it’s not genocide; one can google that and judge for yourself.

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I strongly agree with the views posted by Daniel Stewart and LaWanna. I, too, have been disappointed with the silence on this pressing issue from Integral heavyweights like Corey DeVos, Mark Fischler, Keith Martin-Smith, and others who conduct interviews and webinars. On March 30, I posted this message to Corey urging that the integral community get directly involved in the worldwide protest movement against the genocide. Please offer your own suggestions.

"Hello, Corey –

I haven’t seen any discussion lately on the website about the war in Palestine. It is clear to everyone who pays attention that Israel is inflicting a genocide on the Palestinian people. The Netanyahu government doesn’t even try to hide their intention. The mainstream media in the US and Europe should be reporting on the slaughter every day, but out of fear of the Israeli lobby and the complicit Trump administration, they do not.

My fear is that Israel will be allowed to succeed and the catastrophe will begin to fade in our collective memory. This will result in the normalization of genocide. We cannot allow that to happen. We must do all that we can to prevent these outcomes.

Of course, individuals can send letters, sign petitions, and attend rallies, but collective actions have far greater impact. One must admire the thousands of students who have organized protests against their institutions’ complicity and suppression of free speech. My question is whether integralists as a group can be mobilized in this battle for peace and democratic rights. We are a pretty big community, and if we could all be brought together in some kind of protest campaign, our collective voice might make an impact. At the very least, we would not have stood by and done nothing.

What can be done? I look forward to hearing your ideas.

Best regards,
Charles Marxer"

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“Outrage”: The very word implies an emotional state too hot to be corralled by reason. Being outraged by someone’s lack of outrage at someone else’s outrageous behavior, etc.

As the entirety of the species is in a mostly unacknowledged survival mode, I suppose outwardly projected rage is one way of coping, but rather a means of avoiding inner stuff. I still say UL (Upper Left Quadrant) is the locale for the lion’s share of transformative work.

“The world is on fire,” to quote Krishnamurti. Maybe jumping into the holocaust is one solution. Not so sure about judging others because they don’t want to jump in …

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Heres the thing -
My sister has kind of adopted a small village in Africa. She was outraged enough about their conditions when she visited to take action.
She is often upset that the world isnt outraged about the conditions on an entire continent.

I could just as easily ask corey “Where is the outrage about (insert any one of a hundred atrocities)”

One could live in a state of constant outrage about any number of thousands of different issues.
Or perhaps one could even attempt to gain moral supriority in ones own mind that one is more outraged than others about one particular topic while ignoring the thousands of others.
“My topic of outrage is more significant than your topic of outrage and that makes me feel better about myself” is a very common coping mechanism

Yet at some point we do have to leave unhealthy Green and look at what is practical and efficient. Expressing moral outrage has never solved any problem without including healthy Orange. At some point one has to look at the two or multiple parties in a conflict and ask if they are even willing or even desire a reasonable resolution. Oftentimes, particularly in Southwest Asia, the parties to a conflict benefit more from the outrage than they do from solutions and that is why the conflicts persist

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I’m truly appreciative of the discourse here, and have a few follow-up thoughts to the material brought so far:

I’d like to clarify something that I feel has been mischaracterised in this thread, and that’s the nature of outrage, moral clarity, and political engagement.

Outrage is not the problem, per se. Outrage is often the appropriate response to atrocity. It is not the opposite of consciousness - it can be its activation. Perhaps some of you remember that moment in history class when you were shown black-and-white photographs of the starvation, cruelty, and annihilation inflicted by the Nazis on Jews, disabled people, gay and bisexual men, Black people, resistance activists, communists, and the Roma. What emotions did that evoke? Disgust, horror… likely outrage - that the world allowed it to happen on their watch, to the tune of six million dead.

There’s a long history of framing outrage as immature, egoic, or “unhealthy Green” so to speak, but I would challenge that framing here. In my experience, what may be dismissed as emotional reactivity is a refusal to numb, dissociate, or intellectualise abject horror.

I’d also add that naming genocide is not a performance. Nor is it an attempt at moral superiority; it is a moral act. The suggestion that those who speak up about one atrocity are ignoring all others is a red herring. We can’t speak to every injustice at once, but that doesn’t invalidate the one we are actively bearing witness to (and writing about specifically in this forum topic). If anything, not naming what is visible, documented, and ongoing only ensures its continuation. It’s not about saying that the issue of Palestine matters more than others. It’s about refusing to ignore what is right in front of us: systematic extermination, starvation, and collective punishment on a scale that is being documented in real time, by human rights organisations, journalists, lawyers, and survivors alike.

The notion that both sides must be equally willing participants in dialogue or peace is an old centrist reflex that does not apply when one side is being starved, bombed, and annihilated (nor when one power, specifically Israel, is funded by the most powerful country in the world and also has nuclear weapons and is renowned for developing the most sophisticated weaponry “battle-tested” on civilians casualties). When we avoid naming genocide in the name of ‘complexity’ or ‘developmental altitude,’ we’re re-enacting a colonial logic - one that psychoanalyst Lara Sheehi (2022) shows lives in the clinical and communal field through silence, misattunement, and the refusal to take sides when one side is being annihilated.

If we use the Integral model to avoid grief, avoid action, or avoid naming violence in real time, then, in my humble opinion, we are misusing the framework.

@Charles_Marxer Your letter to Corey above moved me and I hope that we can come together as a community to, first of all, accept the objective reality of the present circumstances and then truly Witness the suffering at hand.

In short, this isn’t about “my topic is more important than yours.” This is about witnessing a genocide happening in plain sight, and choosing whether or not we push into shadow or embrace the burgeoning sacred rage inside of us. And channelling this sacred rage into flourishing conscious action.

I’d also like to add here that Zionism is not only a political project - it is a psychic formation that shapes how Western discourse is allowed to feel about Palestinian life and existence. The Integral community is not outside that structure. Our silence is a symptom.

Also, Krishnamurti’s “the world is on fire” wasn’t a call to retreat into self-regulation - it was a call to awaken to the full intensity of that fire without flinching. May we honour the courage to do just that.

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Good stuff Daniel. Point of clarification: I’m the guy who quoted Krishnamurti’s “the world is on fire,” seeing it as his injunction to see clearly what is, and not “a call to retreat into self-regulation,” although the two connect. Flinching is also permitted.

The “outrageous” hills we choose to die on:

I’m glad this topic is being investigated. Juicy, uncomfortable, for me anyway. For starters, I don’t know if there is such a thing as an “Integral Community.” I get that people have been interested in Wilber’s stuff in varying degrees, sometimes coming together for conferences, etc. There seems to have been a hay day once upon a time, then a dissipation …

(Checking different sources, Daniel, I get upward to 17 million deaths attributed to the Nazis).

For me, "outrage" is a choice, maybe a reifying choice that congeals as a reason for being.
I personally don’t know how to access “outrage,” as a thing, and then go out and motivate myself to leap into the flames of a species that from the get-go seems to have been bent on self-destruction.

I do seek “equanimity,” also maybe a reifying choice that congeals as a reason for being.

“The hills we choose to die on”: Kind of a dramatic appeal to it, no? “Values-we’re-willing-to-die-for-as-a-statement/contribution-to-the Universe” is really the subject at hand (for me).

Since we’re all gonna die anyway, maybe individually, maybe cataclysmically, natural or man-made, I plan to strive to die on a hill of “equanimity” (with vigilance and concern about the whole “play,” and not indifference), and hopefully not become “outraged” myself, by others who may dismiss equanimity as complacence.

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Two points here:
It is also useful to look at actual meanings of words, and how their various meanings. As an educated man, I believe the OP had at least a hundred words available. Probably more. To pick a word that could be construed various ways is a particular literary choice amongst the educated. It would not do the OP justice to assume the OP was just being intellectually sloppy.
It’s therefore completely appropriate to look at the range of uses a chosen word has, and apply it’s various meanings.

Second - I think it is my point that “activation” of consciousness about an outrageous act without follow up action is either pointless, or in the case when it is used to shame someone to take an unreasonable position, unhealthy Green. There is absolutely no “right side” in this conflict and consequently there is no correct action to be taken by third parties. The public can be outraged and protest, but this will either be a pointless action and ignored or worse try to implement a simple solution to a complex issue that will create more and worse problems down the line.
People who are just discovering their outrage in 2024 regarding the Arab / Palestinian / Israeli conflict honestly are not the sharpest tools in the shed and will not provoke an informed course of action. I’m sure I had at least a chapter exam on it in my Freshman History Course way back in 1990. Any “outrage” I may have experienced as an 18 year old Freshman has since been tempered by observation that the Palestinians are hardly good guys and are not above commiting “outrage” themselves.
So then we are back to pointless “outrage”. When this leads to “consciousness” without action it is nothing more than a bunch of privilidged people patting themselves on the back about how informed they believe themselves to be about a topic that has been a multifaceted problem for dozens, hundreds, even thousands of years - but they only discovered recently. This is what I call “unhealthy Green”.
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Indeed.
Yet selecting Zionism as the topic is making a selective choice to recognize only one perspective while ignoring all other equally valid perspectives.
Here is another perspective:

Approximately 3/4 of Palestinians believe that the attack of Hamas on Israeli civilians was correct. So we have a situation where 3/4 of a population condone rape and killing children and other innocent civilians.
This is after at least 50 years of at least 40% of the population supporting terrorism in general against anyone around the globe, really. Hundreds of terrorists acts were committed against nationals of dozens of nations with the goal of “bringing awareness” to the plight of the Palestinian people. If you were on a flight anywhere in the world that just happened to be the target of a terrorist attack, oh well. Your life was worth nothing to most Palestinians - because Israel occupied Palestine. The fact that you had nothing to do with that did not disturb them in the slightest.

If we are discussing moral cowardice, then we must also discuss the morally ambiguous position of selective outrage. The tenured elite of Educational Institutions have determined that it is morally acceptable for one side to commit “outrage”. Palestinians good, jews bad. In other words; four legs good, two legs bad.
The tactics involved in this are “unhealthy Green”. Tell people they are immoral if they look at an entire issue and that the only morally correct postition is the narrow issue as they define it.

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Thanks for the thoughtful response, @Sidra . I appreciate the clarification around the Krishnamurti quote. It’s a powerful line. I also appreciate your compassionate reminder that "Flinching is also permitted".

I also really respect your honesty in saying you don’t know how to access outrage, or outrage that leads to something worthwhile rather than destructive. That’s touched me, and feels like an genuinely grounded and authentic statement. I hope it helps us opens a space for dialogue here (as many others may feel similarly) and maybe something actionable, and not “performative” so to speak.

Personally, I don’t see outrage and equanimity as opposites. To me, outrage in the face of genocide isn’t about ego-identification. It seems more like our nervous system’s moral reflex when reality becomes unbearable. When held with care and grounded in compassion, it can coexist with equanimity. I guess both are ways of staying in relationship with the real.

For me, staying in contact with the horror of this genocide (and letting it touch my body, my speech, my actions where possible), is the way I’m trying to honour life. Not because I believe my outrage will single-handedly shift the geopolitical machine, but because it keeps me from going numb. It keeps me tethered to what I believe makes us human: namely the capacity to feel pain that isn’t our own, and to bear witness without dissociating, and to grieve for strangers, and to feel that sacred rage when life is desecrated.

To me, that’s not the opposite of equanimity - it’s its foundation. I wonder if an equanimity that has not first passed through grief or sacred rage risks becoming a kind of spiritual anaesthesia. But equanimity that emerges after contact with suffering, like through Vipassana, that’s the kind I trust.

So yes, I choose outrage sometimes - not as a posture as such (although I’m aware that this is my first time posting in the Integral Life forums and so it can certainly be interpreted that way!), but as a way of refusing to let my nervous system adapt to atrocity. It’s certainly how I’m trying to stay human in a world that seems hell-bent on actively encouraging us to become less so.

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Thank you for your reply, @raybennett. I want to be clear that I do not deny the existence of violence within this conflict - on all sides. But my post was not about defending violence against civilians. It was about naming what is happening now: a documented and systematic campaign of annihilation against Palestinians in Gaza.

The argument that criticism of Zionism is “selective outrage” implies that unless we speak to all atrocities at once, we cannot speak to any. I’m afraid that this logic breeds silence and apathy, not justice.

The acts of Hamas - or more specifically, its armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades - or any past actions attributed to Palestinian groups, simply do not justify mass starvation, the bombing of hospitals, the execution of journalists and doctors, nor the collective punishment of over two million people, half of whom are children. This is not about who is “good” or “bad.” It’s about what is happening, in real time, to a people with no escape.

As a therapist and writer, I’m interested in how language, ideology, and silence shape our psychic field. When Lara Sheehi (2022, I highly recommend her book Psychoanalysis Under Occupation) describes Zionism as a “psychic formation,” she’s naming how Palestinian life has been rendered disposable in dominant discourse. That is not antisemitic. It is a political and psychological critique of a system of dispossession.

If outrage at genocide is labelled “unhealthy Green,” then perhaps it’s not Green that needs pathologising, but the frameworks of moral development that fail to hold grief, rage, and justice in the same breath.

I welcome conversation and dialogue, @raybennett. But not at the expense of clarity. I will not equate armed resistance from a stateless, occupied people with the systemic and state-sanctioned destruction of a civilian population. That is not nuance but moral collapse.

I also want to point to something that complicates the dominant narrative of the tragic events of October 7th. Israeli sources (including Haaretz and the Times of Israel) have reported that IDF officers re-invoked the defunct Hannibal Directive on that day, which effectively permitted lethal force even at the risk of killing Israeli hostages. This raises serious and painful questions about how many civilian deaths were caused by Hamas - and how many may have resulted from Israel’s own military actions.

I share this not as a provocation, but with full awareness of how uncomfortable and disorienting this information may feel, especially for those whose understanding rests on clear moral binaries. These aren’t fringe claims. They’re coming from within Israel’s own investigative journalism. And if we’re to engage this conflict with real integral integrity, then that discomfort has to be part of the conversation too.

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While reading and reflecting on some of the responses in this thread (and from general discourse in general) I’m sitting with the awareness of a pattern I’ve seen emerging across spiritual and more integrative spaces - something that what we might call cosmic resignation.

By this I mean a kind of transcendental flattening, where atrocity (like genocide) is placed within such a wide, mythic, or metaphysical frame that it loses its immediacy. And so we hear things like:
“Our species has always been bent on self-destruction.”
“There have always been atrocities and we can’t respond to them all.”
“Outrage just perpetuates duality.”

These perspectives might offer a kind of temporary stillness, but for me, they carry the risk of spiritual anaesthesia and maybe even bypass. What I see in them is not necessarily wisdom, but a kind of cosmic resignation: a gentle-sounding, often very eloquent form of dissociation. A way of stepping back so far from the unbearable that it no longer asks anything of us.

And that for me, is a problem. Because the unbearable does ask something of us. Although, I’m not sure what that is for me right now (and that invitation may well be unique for every individual in accordance with their own limits - if they’re willing to sit with that tension).

I’d also like to offer a different pole in this polarity, namely: embodied responsiveness. This doesn’t mean reacting blindly in rage, or burning out in some kind of activist urgency. For me, it means staying in contact with the world’s pain and letting atrocity touch us, emotionally, spiritually, somatically. And choosing not to become desensitised to suffering, not because we think we can fix it, but because staying human means refusing to look away.

In Integral terms, perhaps we’re looking at a tension between transcendence and immanence. The shadow of transcendence is detachment that veers into resignation. Whereas the shadow of immanence is a kind of reactivity that loses perspective. But the integrated space (which I’m aspiring to reach toward) is the ability to hold the cosmic view without sacrificing the particular. To stay present with both the eternal and the immediate. The stars and the blood, so to speak.

To return to the original theme of this thread: if we cannot let the genocide in Gaza into our field of awareness because it feels too complex, too overwhelming, or too emotionally charged, then we have to ask: ‘what kind of “integral consciousness” are we actually practicing?’

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Greetings Daniel. I’ve long held the view that much that gets posted here is a function of personal catharsis. With that in mind, “self-vetting,” “didactic,” “patronizing,” “critical,” is how you’re presenting yourself, to me anyway, and for what it’s worth. As a proclaimed therapist I have to imagine you’d appreciate the feedback (my mentor used to admonish me to “always be kind,” so I can feel him critically leaning into this).

The original post by Charles Marxer was about inviting Corey Devos and Mark Fischler to conduct a webinar on the topic and then further on in the thread, Charles solicited feedback from the “community.”

Admittedly a work-in-progress, as a personal guideline I try to present a “how I see it,” perspective, and try to investigate things internally when my brain starts fidgeting over someone else’s lens.

Respectfully, here’s to our blind spots :slight_smile:

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Thank you Daniel.
I will add a point which I never see in these discussions. While I can suspect it is widespread, since I never see it expressed I can only say it is what tempers any possible “outrage” from me.

Its not just an intellectual and disconnected theory to me that a large portion of the Palestinian population would cheer if i was dragged through their streets and hung from a lamp post. I can imagine worse fates because i have seen them happen to people for no other reason than they were from “the west”. North America / Europe.

So yes, if a community that overwhelmongly supports commiting atrocities as a means to solving their problems, they dont get my “outrage” when the tables get turned in them. Nor do their children. There is even less possibility of outrage from me when these populations support atrocities against - me.

Note Im one if the few Americans who did not go completely insane in the decade following 9-11 and never supported the wars following it.

With both 9-11 (when Palestinians danced in celebration in the streets) and with atrocities comitted throughout the past centuries by all sides, i withhold my “outrage”. Instead, I understand and sympathize. I get disturbed by events, but i am not naieve or ignorant enough to be provoked to unilateral outrage.

Unilateral outrage and taking sides just leads to perpetuation of atrocities. What i see in the arguments of people who support Palestine is quite a lot of poor logic. For example, the fact that Israelis may have accepted collateral damage is not a valid argument against 3/4 of Palestinians supporting the atrocities comitted by their side. Its an invalid point in my mind. The position of accepting civilian casualties is just as valid as doing nothing and allowing rape and torture to continue, or capitulating completely and rewarding those who commit atrocities. That is only one of many arguments by the pro-Palestinian side that I do not see as valid.

And yes, despite saying they are not taking sides, I observe the “pro Outrage” proponents doing exactly that. I dont see measured and balanced points, but actual taking of sides.

My position is far from detatchment - its judging and discerning the roots of peoblems and accepting that solutions do not lie with me, but with the peoples involved. Its seeing various degrees of manipulation and bias in arguments and trying to look through those.

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Thank you for your reply @raybennett (and for sharing something that I imagine wasn’t easy to write). What you described - this visceral fear that, if the situation were reversed, you might be dragged through the streets, harmed, humiliated - felt deeply personal, and I want to honour that before anything else. That’s not something to dismiss.

I can hear how this fear doesn’t feel abstract to you. I imagine it’s shaped by more than singular events, something that may live in cultural memory, family history, or personal associations that are hard to fully name. It carries weight. And if that’s something you may well live with, quietly in the background, or maybe even surfacing for a time in these moments, then I just want to acknowledge and to say that sounds like a very real and painful thing to carry.

What I’m trying to speak to is something else. Not a denial of that fear, not a dismissal of violence on the part of Palestinian actors, but a refusal to let that fear justify, or numb us to, the wholesale destruction of a civilian population. What we’re seeing right now is mass starvation, the bombing of homes, schools, and hospitals, the burial of entire families beneath rubble. Whatever fear we may feel, it cannot eclipse our capacity to care.

I’m not invested in taking sides in the way that word is often used, and I’m not denying complexity. Instead I’m choosing to stay in contact with the horror that’s unfolding now, rather than looking away because the victims don’t feel morally pure or politically convenient.

I don’t believe outrage is the enemy. I believe outrage, when it’s grounded and metabolised, is the nervous system’s way of staying human in the face of atrocity.

I appreciate that you’ve engaged with me here, @raybennett . And I recognise that we may not agree on the framing, but and I’m grateful to be sharing this space with you, even if we see things differently.

For me, I guess I’m writing from heartbreak, some moral fatigue, and from a commitment to not let that turn into apathy. These aren’t easy things to sit with, and I’m grateful we’re trying to.