When Horror Becomes Routine: The Descent Into Numbness
Refusing to Accept a World Where Atrocities Become Background Noise
I’m sitting here thinking about everything we’re seeing, everything that keeps coming out of Gaza, and I’m realizing how messed up it is that any of this feels familiar. I don’t mean acceptable — I mean familiar. Like my brain has started filing these images into some category of “I’ve seen this before,” and that scares me. It scares me because I never wanted to be someone who could look at a baby torn apart by an Israeli missile and feel anything less than full-body shock. But here we are. And I hate that. I hate that this terrorist colony has managed to make the unthinkable feel routine.
I keep thinking about how three years ago, one image like this would have broken the internet. It would have broken us. We would have been shaking, crying, unable to sleep. And now? Now it’s like, “Oh, another bombing. Another tent hit. Another family buried under rubble.” I still feel horror, but it’s not the same kind of horror. It’s not that gut punch that knocks the wind out of you. It’s like the shock has been worn down by repetition. And I hate that I even have to admit that.
And I know this isn’t an accident. I know this is exactly what the predator class — the Epstein class of this world, the people who treat human beings like disposable objects — wants. They want us numb. They want us scrolling past body parts like it’s weather updates. They want us to lose the ability to feel the full weight of what’s happening so they can keep doing it without resistance. Because if people stop reacting, they stop fighting. And if they stop fighting, the people in power get to keep killing without consequence.
I catch myself seeing an image — a father holding half of his child, a mother screaming over a pile of rubble that used to be her home — and I know I’ve seen it before. Not the exact one, but the same kind of scene. The same kind of grief. The same kind of destruction. And that’s the problem. These images start blending together, and that blending is its own kind of violence. It’s like the world is being trained to accept genocide as a normal part of the news cycle.
And I don’t want to live in a world like that. I don’t want to live in a world where human suffering is minimized to the point where we just shrug and say, “Again?” I don’t want to live in a world where a whole population being slaughtered in real time — in 4K, on our phones, in our hands — becomes something we scroll past on our way to a recipe video. I don’t want to live in a world where the innocence we had, or whatever version of innocence we thought we had, is gone because we’ve been forced to watch genocide like it’s a livestream.
I don’t know how we take it back. I don’t know how we go back to being human in the way we were before all this. Maybe we can’t. Maybe the world has crossed some line that can’t be uncrossed. But I know this: I don’t want to accept this numbness as the new normal. I don’t want to let the shock fade. I don’t want to let the people doing this — the predator class, the ones who benefit from endless war and endless suffering — win by wearing us down.
I want to feel it again. I want the world to feel it again. I want us to refuse to let this become routine. Because once we accept this level of horror as normal, we lose something we can’t get back. We lose the part of us that recognizes the value of a single human life. We lose the part of us that knows a baby in pieces should stop the world in its tracks. We lose the part of us that says, “No, this is not how humans are supposed to live.”
And maybe that’s why I do what I do. Every day, I highlight the campaigns of individual families in Gaza—whether they need food, medical help, milk, diapers, or whatever crisis they’re facing. Each of those daily pushes is personal, and it’s separate from the bigger initiative we started, the Gaza’s Forgotten Families. Maybe this is as much about saving my own soul as it is about helping them. I’m fighting against this numbness, I’m refusing to dehumanize them, and in doing that, I’m making sure I don’t lose my own humanity. It’s not just about helping them survive; it’s about making sure I stay human in the face of all of this.
So to the question: how do we go back to being human? I don’t have the answer. But I know the first step is refusing to let this numbness settle in. Refusing to let repetition turn genocide into background noise. Refusing to let the world convince us that this is just how things are now.
Because the moment we stop feeling, they win. And I’m not letting them win.
Amazing stuff Kathy.
Very heartfelt and eloquent. I’m sure the hard work that you are doing will remembered by Palestinians. I keep my spirit up with this quote from the Palestinian/American writer Susan Abulhawa from her speech last year at the Oxford Union where at the closing she addressed Israelis directly:
“You have crossed all lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses, but the world is finally glimpsing the terror we have endured at your hands for so long, and they are seeing the reality of who you are, who you’ve always been. They watch in utter astonishment the sadism, the glee, the joy, and pleasure with which you conduct, watch, and cheer the daily details of breaking our bodies, our minds, our future, our past.
But no matter what happens from here, no matter what fairytales you tell yourself and tell the world, you will never truly belong to that land. You will never understand the sacredness of the olives trees, which you’ve been cutting down and burning for decades just to spite us and to break our hearts a little more. No one native to that land would dare do such a thing to the olives. No one who belongs to that region would ever bomb or destroy such ancient heritage as Baalbak or Bittir, or destroy ancient cemeteries as you destroy ours, like the Anglican cemetery in Jerusalem or the resting place of ancient Muslim scholars and warriors in Maamanillah. Those who come from that land do not desecrate the dead; that’s why my family for centuries were the caretakers of the Jewish cemetery in the Mount of Olives, as labors of faith and care, for what we know is part of our ancestry and story.
Your ancestors will always be buried in your actual homelands of Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world from whence you came. The mythos and folklore of the land will always be alien to you.
You will never be literate in the sartorial language of the thobes we wear, that sprang from the land through our foremothers over centuries — every motif, design, and pattern speaking to the secrets of local lore, flora, birds, rivers, and wildlife.
What your real estate agents call in their high-priced listings “old Arab home” will always hold in their stones the stories and memories of our ancestors who built them. The ancient photos and paintings of the land will never contain you.
Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free; she will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic pluralistic glory.
You will never know how it feels to be loved and supported by those who have nothing to gain from you, and in fact, everything to lose. You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom; and it is not because you are Jewish, as you try to make the world believe, but because you are depraved violent colonizers who think your Jewishness entitles you to the home my grandfather and his brothers built with their own hands on lands that had been in our family for centuries. It is because Zionism is a blight onto Judaism and indeed onto humanity.
You can change your names to sound more relevant to the region and you can pretend falafel and hummus and zaatar are your ancient cuisines, but in the recesses of your being, you will always feel the sting of this epic forgery and theft. That’s why even the drawings of our children, hung on walls at the UN or in a hospital ward, send your leaders and lawyers into hysteric meltdowns.
You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters. From our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage, the fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.
Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free; she will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic pluralistic glory; we will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on; we will put an end to the zionist American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting.
. . .and you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.”