Children predicting the apocalypse, Australian reality TV grimness + pro-Palestine censorship
some thoughts, links and recommendations from my week
I’m gathering my thoughts/breath/balance following the Margaret Wheatley two podcast chats last week and the big, brave conversation over in the subscription community.
To everyone who chimed in - many of you for the first time (welcome!) - thank you for all the smart, emotionally profound contributions. I have read every one of your contributions.
If I had to sum up the vibe of things in that thread: Surreal relief.
Somewhat continuing the conversation, here are a few other provoking and important ideas for us to chew on this week:
Eerie: Kids in 1966 had a vibe for what was coming
Have you seen this video from a BBC documentary, aired in December 1966? The school kids were asked to predict life in the year 2000.
Too hot, automation taking jobs, battery farming, technology affecting the weather and life being dull, boring, “the same” and reduced to a whole heap of stuff we can’t fit in our houses…
My loose, immediate thoughts and questions:
Are collapse behaviour and outcomes so inevitable that kids can intuit it 50 years in advance? Like, is the patterning just that obvious (and we adults all somehow miss it)?
These kids were Baby Boomers…did they grow up to feed into the collapse or resist it?
The boring/dull/ “same” fear that several of them refer to - it picks up something, right?
We fear that kids today have to live with so much fear, but perhaps kids have always detected the risks and perils (and are better at fathoming it than we give them credit for)?
Your thoughts?
This Ukrainian journalist says: “I refuse to compete for your attention”
With everything going on, I’ve paused several times to worry about what’s happening for Ukrainians and whether they are suffering from our diverted attention. Then I reflect on the role we play as privileged Westerners living in relatively safe zones with access to reshare buttons on our social apps. And then I read this essay by a journalist who has been desperately trying to keep us all engaged, because Western interest does have influence. She says she can’t do it any longer (“I refuse to compete”) and invites us to just be adults instead:
To captivate capricious and yet lifesaving international interest, Ukrainians film TikTok videos in the trenches and award-winning documentaries on the sites of Russian war crimes. One moment they show breathtaking bravery; the next they show their wounds.
And yet this high-stakes storytelling infantilizes Ukrainians: It turns us into children vying for the adults’ attention. Our allies play the role of easily distracted, perpetually fatigued spectators who cannot face the unadorned truth of the invasion.
Read children’s books when the world is on fire
Given the huge concern from many of you here who are parents, I felt I should share this op-ed by a Yiddish author who is reading Palestinian children’s books to her son at the moment (she lists a bunch of both Arab and Yiddish books in the article if you’re interested ).
Children’s books, which present subtle truths in simple terms, offer a valuable tool in retaining our moral bearings, especially amid a maelstrom of grief and rage. These books, in their simplicity and brevity, can grant polarized communities access to each other’s stories, reminding us of our shared humanity and common interest in finding a way toward peaceful coexistence.
In the books I read with my son, I saw the Palestinian children’s authors of today doing something I recognize from my research on the Yiddish children’s literature of the previous century: striving to help children make sense of the world they stand to inherit while writing a better world into being.
All fairytales and myths have done the same throughout history. I wrote this in a note recently, and I’m thrilled to be able to share it somewhere 😎:
Fairy tales are hero’s journeys. The protagonist goes out into the world, faces a series of ordeals and returns home to tell the moral story. But in fairy tales the characters are mostly kids or women. They don’t have superior powers and tend to start out 50 yards back from the starting line – poor or marginalised (Cinderella), locked up or isolated (Rumpelstiltskin), undersized (Thumbelina and Peter Pan) and neglected (Hansel and Gretel). Their ordeal is overwhelmingly unfair and cruel. And so, to survive, to bring the journey home for the reader, these little undervalued characters don’t tend to conquer or slay things. Instead, they must form alliances with other underdogs – invariably old women with fairy-godmother vibes, small animals, elves and the like. Heroic journeys teach us to be strong and brave. Fairy tales teach us to cooperate, be kind, innovate, listen, trust, and to rewrite the story in tough times. And to make us feel just a little bit better that life is shit for others, too.
I also make the point (to myself!? 😅) that the modern-day “Disney versions” of these tales are often watered down:
The OG (orally conveyed) Hansel and Gretal saw the kids cast out by their mum and dad. There was a famine and plague at the time it was penned and the story is said to make sense of the abject hardship kids face. In contemporary versions they simply get lost in the woods and I don’t think Grandma gets her head shoved in the oven any longer.
A Noam Chomsky quote for our times:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
My ongoing wrestle with wading in on the Middle East
I shared here how I think “picking a side” publicly (and posting it on the suck-hole of bifurcation that is Instagram) is not helping the current situation. And I also shared in the Meg Wheatley post about the flack I copped for sharing this image:
But TBH, I continue to struggle with the dilemma that the Ukrainian journalist points to above - do we Westerners have a responsibility to share information that might be useful? And what exactly is useful right now? (It’s this second question that is the quandary for me, never the first.)
I’m not completely sure calling for a ceasefire is useful. But my thinking has gone beyond this now. There is a more overwhelming truth: We lose our humanity and we fail at our humanity if we don’t cry out for one.
I feel this video by my friend Benjamin Law treads all the lines very well:
Plus, here are two more tiles I found that speak to this sentiment:
I’m also paying attention to claims that pro-Palestinian news is being censored. The strident anti-cancel culture advocate
covers this here. (I am not on board with his particularly strident cancel culture take, BTW.)Enfin, a moment of Australian depravity…
Love your thoughts on any or all of the above,
Sarah xx
Hi Sarah - are you familiar with Substack Cosmopolitan Globalist? Claire Berlinski recently touched on the diversion of global attention to Israel/Palestine at the expense of not only Ukraine, but similar ongoing conflicts in Sudan and Yemen. It's a good read. https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/is-democracy-doomed-revisited
I think what bothers me the most is where have all these people been who are suddenly rallying to the Palestinian cause? And by rallying I mean attending protests really unaware of the history of the region, hellbent on blaming the Jews, and basically working on the my way or the highway. This has been especially prevalent on US college campuses. I feel like many are on the bandwagon without seeing a broader picture or context.
Last week I attended a friend's son's bar Mitzvah just outside DC. There was a police presence outside the synagogue for the duration of the three hour service. In the 21st Century how is this even a thing? I believe in innocent Gazan's and think the actions of Hamas AND Netanyahu are driving all of this. But how can either of them be stopped?
Nigel Farage - this might be up there with the Vogue cover of Jeff Bezos and his fiancee. Have you seen it? *shudder* As a former magazine editor I am sure you will be shaking your head at how downhill the industry has gone (even though I know you are glad not to be a part of it anymore and it did cause you a lot of stress).
Thanks as always for the thought provoking links, articles, and discussions. This is one space in the WWW where it feels OK to have discussions.
Kids always know what’s up and it bewilders me how we as adults choose to ignore our own intuition and wisdom. They grew up like we all do and then seem to forget.
They did grow up through and then out of the era of fear regarding atomic apocalypse, and then into what could be described as a mini golden age though. So we can forgive them for getting carried away with it all 😅