What does it mean to bear witness and refuse to scroll away?

Every time I sit down to type something out about my feelings on the current state of the world, I am left at a loss.

All I can manage to come up with is that we owe each other more than this.

At the very least, we owe each other a refusal to look away.

On a daily basis, we consume information, art, culture, news, other people’s lives and everything in between.

I am guilty of having an insatiable appetite for consumption. Anytime an idle moment passes by, I pick up my phone, click on any one of my apps and begin to scroll away mindlessly—taking in information that mostly has no real bearing on my life.

Like many, I learn about complete stranger’s milestones. I see how they celebrated their birthday, their wedding or their anniversary, when they had children and how they spent the holidays.

I read about celebrity breakups and makeups, sports scores, product recommendations and anything else you can imagine

I read about news, swallowing the horrors of the world only in small, controlled doses, sandwiched between the mindless viewing of memes or “get ready with me” videos.

As of late, however, the endless stream of vacuous material has been disrupted.

The horrors of the world are everywhere and are inescapable.

But maybe—there’s a lesson in that.

Maybe, we need to be forced to take a break from the carefully curated online worlds we find ourselves in and to confront the sometimes bleak reality around us.

I recognize it isn’t enjoyable to constantly be inundated with the world’s grief and pain.

But we also can’t expect to make a change if we refuse to extend our attention to anything outside of ourselves, especially if it makes us uncomfortable.

There is so much goodness to be experienced in the world and while I implore us to find and focus on what makes us happy, we also can’t erase the real suffering of humans—in Palestine, in Congo, in Sudan, on stolen land, and everywhere in between just because we aren’t experiencing it personally.

If the internet has erased boundaries and made us even more embedded with one another and with complete strangers, why, then, do we not feel we owe each other more when it comes to bearing witness to the merciless destruction of life in real time?

When the most we can do is acknowledge the horrors of the world, to say that we refuse to stand for the willful destruction of innocent life—at the very least we are demonstrating that we are willing to stand for something outside of ourselves.

There is certainly still merit to chipping away at the horrors around us by cultivating love, goodness, and kindness in our homes and communities when things feel hopeless.

But what does it mean to be a person of “community,” a person of “god,” a person of “love and light,” if these values are not extended to the world beyond our own?

Acting as though we are above paying attention to the real ills that many face as a means to maintain our personal comfort means complicity with the systems that enable them to begin with.

I don’t know how to change the world. I don’t know how to fix what is deeply broken about the way things operate.

But in a world that tells us we can be more connected than ever yet only have to worry about ourselves—caring deeply for the wellbeing and livelihood of complete strangers isn’t a bad place to start.

What does it mean to stand for something no matter the cost to you personally?

What does it mean to stand for someone from whom you have nothing to gain?

Sign the ceasefire petition here.