The Trouble with Tuesday in the Gaza Strip

Written by Aetius Romulous

The Trouble with Tuesday in the Gaza Strip

The Gaza Strip is exactly what it sounds - a very small strip of land called Gaza. It's an issue of geography as much as anything else. Not 139 square miles in size, about 25 miles long, and as little as four miles wide. The southwest end of the box abuts Egypt, the North West side the deep, azure Mediterranean Sea, and everywhere else, Israel. Smaller than Barbados, bigger than Grenada, more isolated than any island.

Humans live in Gaza, as they do the lovely Barbados and Granada. 256,000 people live in sunny Barbados, and another 100,000 live in tropical Granada. Sunny tropical Gaza has a teeming throng of 1,500,000 miserable humans, the sixth most densely populated sliver of desperate land on the planet. Phoenix in a shoe box, Philadelphia in a cattle pen.

The humans in Gaza are among the poorest and most hopeless on earth. The average human in Barbados enjoys a standard of living ten times that of identical humans in Gaza. Identical humans in Israel, a "stone's throw" away, live better still. Americans live on another planet entirely.

Its high living neighbours tightly control entry in and out of Gaza. Humans have difficulty getting out, humans have difficulty getting in. Nothing of value save frustration, anger, and despair is ever produced in Gaza. Nothing of value is built, sold, or bought. Nothing is traded with the outside world, nothing the outside world builds or sells is allowed into Gaza. It is an economic science experiment, where human suffering is the measure of success.

There are of course worse places on the planet - smatterings of slivers of box like earth where other, identical humans suffer, die, and live without dreams or hope. These miserable places are a blot on all humanity, and result from bad politics, bad decisions, bad management, and bad people. In Gaza, the humans endure by design and deliberate policy, suffer, die, and live without dreams or hope by devise and engineering, and do so in full view of every other human on the earth who wants or cares to look. Gaza is a social engineering science experiment where human suffering is the measure of success.

Of course, there is politics involved. A closed loop of "he hit me first" ideology that feeds on itself at the complete expense of the people of Gaza. The issues are intractable, unintelligible, and built to last a thousand years. A parsimonious thinking of simple black and white. Policy by sound bite, video, and Twitter, kept alive in easily digested packets for the folks at home and abroad. Everybody's right and everybody's wrong. "Ball of Confusion". And the band plays on.

The folks in Gaza? They just suffer and die.

History tells us again and again that humans in this condition eventually take matters into their own hands, or events conspire to bring a speedy end to a wholly unnatural situation. Humans have to eat, and each is imbued with the fires of self-determination, common dignity, and an unshakeable sense of fairness.

These things resolve themselves, and typically sooner rather than later. Sometimes every human has to die. Sometimes, humans have to compromise. Other times, hatreds and animosities are formed that long outlive the initial injustice, rolling forward in waves of reciprocation, tit for tat and eye for eye. Each and every unnatural injustice remedied by an action that perpetuates the agony, each participant ignorant of the place they hold in a long and nasty history, every one believing that their action of the present will bring balance to the past and justice for the future. Silly humans.

Stuck as they are in an inhuman, unjust, and highly volatile public existence, the humans in Gaza will do something to change their condition. As humans, they can do no other. Short of killing each and every one (a concept not unfamiliar to many of the participants), Gaza's oppressors have the option of setting the agenda for themselves, or having one foisted upon them by events. Events, once unleashed, that are generally beyond the scope of any to contain. Simple logic - if logic were at all relevant - dictates that the first option be preferred.

But make no mistake. The situation will resolve itself one way or another.

It will resolve itself on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, while the good people of the earth are distracted by the course of common events. Despite the fact that every thinking person alive understands that something's gotta give, a rock, a stray bullet, a offhand remark...any one of a million little things festering in plain sight will begin a cascade of similar unremarkable actions that in the aggregate will be the beginning of the end. The best laid plans will come to naught and unravel in merciless unpredictability. Nature will take its course.

Until that time, be it sooner or later, the same old will be the same old. Ideologues will foment. Talking heads will talk. Folks whose lives will be upended and changed forever will sun bathe on the beaches of Barbados and take hiking trips in the lush hills of Grenada. In the shoe box that is Gaza, regular folks will suffer and die as they always have, each and every angry death a potential Tuesday morning domino. This too is silly human nature.

History is a narrative, a story with an open end. We have a brief, sharp, fleeting moment at the terminal end, perched precariously in the instant between past and present, to write that history - or be written into it. The choice is always ours. But either way, time will move forward, events will conspire, and history will unroll regardless.

Our choice is but one. Do we write that history, or have nature write it for us? We have until a sunny Tuesday morning in Gaza to decide.

Aetius Romulous

Historian, Economist, Accountant, Writer, and blood sucking CEO.

Born at the wrong end of the Baby Boom Generation - too late to enjoy the ride, too early to have missed it, and stuck in the middle with the mess.

Aetius writes and blogs from his frozen perch atop the earth in Canada, spending the useful capital of a life not finished making sandwiches and fomenting revolution.

It's a living.

http://screambucket.com/

aetiusromulous (at) rogers.com

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