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“Shame has never stopped a massacre, a war, a genocide…”.
This comment by a fellow Substacker under my recently restacked note1 on the ongoing genocide of Palestinians made me pause. It seemed like a brutal, but undeniable truth. Was shame truly a futile emotion?
A voice inside me begged to differ. I decided to sit with it to gain some clarity. What I found was that, like most things in life, shame is not all good, nor all bad.
Yes, shame can be toxic. It has often been weaponized to make us fit in, to silence our truth, to keep us small. Maybe that’s why we only see it through a negative lens. But there is another side to shame.
Shame as a pre-cursor to courage
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke
When I first began raising awareness about the genocide in Gaza, Palestine, people called me “brave” and the situation “sad”. But when I asked them to take a simple action, like boycotting certain products, they told me how that’s not going to make any difference. Some of them even posted pictures showing the very products we were being asked to boycott.
These were the good people in my life. I saw Burke's warning play out in real time. People around me had convinced themselves that their inaction was a form of self-care, a way to protect their peace and to manifest good things. This led me to write my very first post on Substack (Link below):
Even though I was disappointed in my people, I continued educating myself and others through social media. After some time, Instagram started to ban me from commenting, liking, and sharing any content related to Palestine, and eventually, it suspended my account permanently. I created a new account and continued to share the news coming out of Gaza, news that cost the journalists there their lives. I promised myself I would not let the people around me pretend that everything is normal. And besides, it was helping with the algo.
The deafening silence around me sometimes made me question if I should tone it down a little bit. My close friends had started to tell me how life is already challenging enough, and that I am expecting too much from people who only get one day to rest and recharge every week. But then I would come across another image of a baby in Gaza, targeted by Israel, and would feel a deep sense of shame for all of us in the West. When did we become so disconnected from the suffering of others?
I understood even then that the system is built to exhaust us, so we no longer have the energy to care. But that does not change the fact that there were some simple things that we could all have done. We just chose not to.
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