The Beauty Beneath the Rubble: Stories They Don’t Want Us to Know

I hate having to admit that I am one of those ignorant Americans. I didn’t get a great education in geography, and I didn’t learn much about world history until college. I haven’t had the opportunity to do much traveling, so sometimes, my only exposure to certain places comes from the media.

Which we all know has never been more unreliable than it is now.

I didn’t know anything about Gaza. Palestine was a world away, and the only images I’d ever seen were of a war zone. It’s hard to see the beauty beneath the rubble, and they don’t want us to even know about it.

Who are “they”? Colonizers. Imperialists. People who participate in Genocide, which, sadly, isn’t limited to Israel alone. Gaza is being erased, and they want us to believe the narrative they’re spinning so that we won’t take a closer look.

Genocide isn’t just our history; it’s still happening.

It’s not the past. It’s very much present in the world. It’s happening:

Entire cultures are being wiped out, and with the advent of the Internet, there is no excuse for the level of ignorance we’re seeing.

The media isn’t unbiased journalism anymore. It’s an arm of the government, of propaganda used to support the war machine. The troubles of a people a world away are deemed less important of observation or commentary.

It makes them so much easier to erase, doesn’t it?

Erasure is an essential part of genocide.

I work part-time in a museum. Even though it’s meant to cover the history of the area, I can admit that the indigenous exhibit is sadly lacking. It’s not intentional. The colonizers did a pretty good job of erasing their existence, to the degree that only a few artifacts remain to tell their story.

In some places, they wouldn’t be included at all. It’s hard to push the narrative of America being built on freedom when we talk about the imperial war machine and the genocide of the indigenous people who lived here already. It’s hard to paint America the Beautiful when so much ugliness hides beneath the facade.

But we can’t grow if we refuse to learn. We can’t learn if we ignore all the information available to us. We have to be willing to open our eyes and look at the hard things to have a full understanding of who we are as a country and how we got here.

The thing so many people forget about genocide is that it’s not just about killing off an entire people. It also includes attempts to erase them — their culture, their history, their existence. We didn’t have to kill off all Native Americans. Instead, they were sent away to school and forbidden to use their native language, clothes, and customs. We demanded assimilation — and lost so much as a result of it.

When I say “we”, I don’t mean this generation. But we’re the descendants of the people who did this, and it doesn’t look like we’re learning from it. It’s still happening, and yet, it seems like people aren’t willing to even condemn the term genocide, much less call Israel’s leadership to account. The Congo and Sudan get even less of our attention. We might think that even if we know about it, there’s just not much we can do.

We’re underestimating our power.

The power of the people is that we can do great things if only we try. We can speak up and raise awareness. We can vote for leaders who represent our values. We can hold the existing elected representatives responsible for how they vote, what they post, and the causes they support or fail to support.

We can also become conscious consumers who refuse to support companies that support genocide. It does require research and a willingness to make a few personal sacrifices to live in alignment with our values. But we do have power — even when it seems like we don’t.

To harness and hold this power, we have to be willing to see and hear things that aren’t pleasant. We have to sit with the discomfort that comes from knowing. For me, this involved looking up pictures of Gaza from before the war. I need to see what they want to erase. It’s not hard to see why they’d covet this area, but it is hard to understand how they can justify erasing the existence of an entire group of people to obtain it. Avarice, greed, malice? Pick your poison.

I’ve learned to look at the things that make us want to look away. I’ve learned to listen to the stories that are hard to hear. And slowly, I’m learning how to be a part of the solution rather than waiting for someone else to come along to save the world. Because the truth, now and always, is this:

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

I’m still learning. I can’t say that I have the best grasp of every conflict happening out there or how the movers and shakers are involved in it. What I can say is that I’m open to learning more. I’m willing to listen, develop awareness, and then turn that awareness into action.

I can say unequivocally that genocide anywhere is wrong everywhere.

I don’t care who is involved. There’s not a group of people on Earth who deserve to be wiped out. We are not a judge or jury. We should not ever try to erase an entire culture from existence, and we should loudly object to genocide, no matter which players are involved.

An important first step is to look beyond the images of war. Go back further. Resurrect what they are trying to erase. Take a good hard look at the people before war deadened the warmth and life in their eyes. Take a long look at the places another group covets enough to wipe out the people who live there. Just witness it.

Then, act.

Even if it’s just a scream into the void. Even if it does nothing but express the pain we feel when we develop empathy for someone whose lives look nothing like our own. Even if it’s futile. It matters.

There’s beauty beneath the rubble and truth beneath the lies. We just have to be willing to look beyond the smokescreen and see what it is that they don’t want us to. If we can do that, we can change the world.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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Photo credit: fauve othon on Unsplash