“…Many people prefer the comfort of fantasy to the harshness of reality. They seem to reason this way: ‘How can I arrange my beliefs so I’ll feel most comfortable?’ rather than arranging them to agree with reality.” [Howard Kahane]
While flipping through the TV channels tonight during dinner, I paused briefly on a entertainment channel that shall remain unnamed. A few seconds into it and I realized what it was. One of the most repulsive forms of television programming I have ever seen in my life: the show progresses on two tracks. One, speaking with and re-enacting a tragic, shocking event that touches one family’s life, and another doing the same with a different family that doesn’t know the other family but lives across town. The show speaks with the principal persons involved in each respective incident, their friends and family, and re-paints a picture of how the event changed lives forever. Woven into the background of this back-and-forth between two stunning events is a not-so-subtle message: that people from different strata of the same society may see things very differently, but really, we’re all human at the end of the day, and the grass is always greener on the other side, right?
Wrong.
The problem is that, like a couple of the similarly disgusting shows I’ve seen of its kind, one family is Israeli, and the other Palestinian. It’s so unfair and so misleading and so wrong to pretend that these families are just going through the same tough situation in a country plagued with violence. It’s so frustrating! There’s a big difference between one group of people living with violence in their lives every single day and others who are touched personally by something like this only once in a lifetime. To equate the two is just… it’s abhorrent, deliberate, and shameful. So frustrating!
In other news, the Israeli diplomatic mission here in Turkey is also really nasty. They’re always trying to get media to print their filthy pieces of dishonest propaganda. It’s infuriating. And these days the entertainment media also helps them out for free. Ugh.
