Is 30 years too long to remember?

I used to have a sign in my office that said the average adult attention span was 8 seconds.  I put it up as a joke, but it is frighteningly real.  Even though in the time it takes to walk from my computer to the kitchen, I have often forgotten what I wanted and stick my head in the refrigerator looking for inspiration, I did not want to believe the little sign. 

I decided to check my second favorite site for inspiration, the Internet.  According to Statistic Brain website (http://www.statisticbrain.com/attention-span-statistics/) the average attention span is indeed 8 seconds.  This number is confirmed by Answers.Ask.com.  They also say the average attention span of a gold fish is 9 seconds.  I don’t know about you, but I find that insulting.

The good news is that there are different types of attention spans.  After 8 seconds we do not go wandering around in confused bewilderment, but go back to the task after a momentary thought of something else.  All right, so we don’t wipe the slate of our minds clean every 8 seconds, because attention and memory are not the same things.

That is something that mainstream media seems to forget.  They tell us about a news item, and we seldom get to see how it ends.  What were the repercussions?  Who was affected?  Did they catch the bad guys?  We get our 8 second sound bite and the camera moves on, seldom to return.

How long is memory?  Thankfully, longer than attention span, but still not very long—especially for unpleasant things that happened to someone else.  After a certain (or uncertain) number of years many of people who actually remember the worst events that happen in our world begin to disappear, and the events themselves blur into romantic celluloid [does anyone even remember what that word means?] quasi-remembrances that have lost the horror and terror, rather like ghost stories told around a campfire.  That’s fine for events like the sack of Rome, or the hordes of Khengis Khan thundering across Europe, or what happened to Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted, but I don’t want it to happen with things that I remember so vividly that reading about them still brings tears to my eyes. 

Thirty years ago this month as many as 3.500 civilians were massacred in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila located in Lebanon.  Unspeakable atrocities were committed and an Israeli investigation concluded that the then defense minister and later prime minister Ariel Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for failing to prevent them.

These deaths should not be forgotten so easily.  The men and women who believed they were under the protection of greater forces deserve better.  The babies who will never reach adulthood because they were victims of the massacre deserve better.  The orphans of this tragedy, many of whom are still in the first flush of adulthood, deserve better.  They still have images burned into their minds that will never fade—and so do many of the journalists and health workers who were there. 

Robert Fisk, one of those reporters, said, “Massacres are difficult to forget when you’ve seen the corpses.”  There are at least 583 videos on YouTube that come up when you search “Sabra and Shatila.”  These links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XbMtJhvfZ0 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4gymxY2zM8 show two of the milder videos. It is possible that all of these videos show shots of corpses—real human beings destroyed by other human beings.  Yet the images on the screen are almost as devoid of horror as they are of odor.  In one of them (not linked here), you can hear the reporter gagging as he walks through the streets counting bodies. 

No, thirty years is not so long.  “For anyone who was there, the memories are as fresh as if the killings happened yesterday,” said Robert Fisk.  How many of the children of Sabra and Shatila still wake up screaming in the night as adults?  Some things should never be forgotten.

You’ve never heard of Sabra and Shatila?  Why am I not surprised? Learn more about the facts at http://imeu.net/news/article0023017.shtml.  The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs has more information http://www.wrmea.org/action-alert-archives/11457-the-sabra-shatila-massacre-30-years-later.html#readmore2   along with a touching letter from my friend Ellen Siegel to the IDF soldiers who were at Sabra and Shatila, published in Haaretz, Sept. 15, 2012.  Ellen was working as a nurse at a hospital in the Sabra camp at the time.  She will never forget either.

 

Free Running in Gaza

Seeking inspiration for my next blog post, I came across a link to NAKBA REVIEW, an online newspaper.  http://paper.li/Satyagrahi_ji/1305447315  I was immediately drawn to it because it looked very professional and I loved the format.

The idea behind the online paper is simple.  The articles are written as lead paragraphs in a news article.  If the reader wants more, he/she can click on the article and a new window opens with the original source article.  As in a print newspaper, the articles are separated into categories.  The reader is free to jump to other categories immediately (picture a man removing the sports section from a paper while his wife reads the books section).

The source of the article is given up front, just as the location of a print newspaper article is given first.  The pictures (including videos) are amazing/interesting/eye-catching/supply your own adjective.

I followed this REUTERS picture to an article “Parkour around the World: The Art of Moving” and learned that Palestinian youth in Gaza are training in Parkour or free-running in cemeteries and in former Israeli settlements.

The point of free running is to get from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently as possible, not letting obstacles get in the way.  The only tool is the human body.  Another way the wonderful resilient people of Gaza continue to make lemonade out of the incredibly bitter lemons life has dealt them.

Sir Isaac Newton would have been proud of how these young people are defying gravity as they defy the impossible odds of leading a normal life under conditions that are anything but normal.

Watch the video.  As someone who knows the horrors these boys have experienced, I found it heart-warming.  As a mother, I found it heart-stopping.

Rachel Corrie – This is not over

Rachel Corrie, for those of you who are not familiar with her, was a young American college student who went to Gaza to help the people of Rafah whose homes were being demolished.  Sadly, she never came home.  Rachel became the first foreign national to be killed while protesting Israeli occupation—but she was not the last.  She was run over by a Caterpillar bulldozer when the driver continued on his course to demolish a family home despite the fact that Rachel, wearing a day-glo orange jacket, was standing in front of it.

After a cursory investigation, Israel closed the case.

The family filed a lawsuit on the advice of Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who, on behalf of the State Department, told the family in 2004 that the United States did not consider the investigation into Rachel’s death to be “thorough, credible and transparent.” http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/rachel-corrie-blaming-the-victim.premium-1.462179

After seven years, the verdict was that Rachel was responsible for her own death.  The driver and the Israeli army were exonerated.  Although this verdict was not unexpected, it still generated cries of outrage throughout the world. 

Former President Jimmy Carter said, “The killing of an American peace activist is unacceptable.  The court’s decision confirms a climate of impunity, which facilitates Israeli human rights violations against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Territory.” http://www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/rachel-corrie-verdict-082912.html

The Guardian said, “The case laid bare the state of the collective Israeli military mind, which cast the definition of enemies so widely that children walking down the street were legitimate targets if they crossed a red line that was invisible to everyone but the soldiers looking at it on their maps.  The military gave itself a blanket of protection by declaring southern Gaza a war zone, even though it was heavily populated by ordinary Palestinians, and set rules of engagement so broad that just about anyone was a target.

With that went virtual impunity for Israeli troops no matter who they killed or in what circumstances.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/28/rachel-corrie-verdict-exposes-israeli-military-mindset?newsfeed=true

Going even farther, the actual testimony included phrases like “there are no civilians in Gaza.”  How can a community of 1.7 million people, almost half of whom are under age 15, not have civilians?  Are newborn babies combatants? 

 

Rachel’s family founded the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace & Justice to carry on the work that meant so much to Rachel and for which she made the ultimate sacrifice.  You can learn more about their work at http://rachelcorriefoundation.org/

You can also read more about Rachel in my post earlier this year on the ninth anniversary of her death. http://www.dixianehallaj.blogspot.com/2012/03/rachel-corrie-we-will-always-remember.html