Smoke haze hangs over Melbourne. The rim of my car-door is caked in orange dust after red rains. People post shots of the compromised view from their windows and balconies, visibility updates, rain water tank statuses: water like sweet sticky soft drinks left out on a hot summer’s day. I do not rejoice in these recent months of bushfires. But I am pleased that their traces have arrived in our capitals. I am pleased they have pressed their reality into the lives of people who have put their trust in the capacity of systems. The systems are working just fine, but we have to believe the evidence, and recognise they are not working for us.
As a Palestinian I have learned that people struggle to share in the reality of other people’s disaster. In 1967, Debord already understood the implications of the spectacle. Here was the disaster of the media-age writ large: a crisis of empathy. That information made us gods, and somehow when we saw another suffering, we turned to media for facts. They weren’t there. What was there was the fertiliser for generations of self-serving egoistic skepticism. What was there was the institutional gas-lighting par excellence of community identity and altruism, or the possibility that reality is a multiplicity and not an individual’s experience of the world. This was the co-alignment of the insignificant with the powerful. So, in the end, media transformations fuelled our crisis in empathy, not our access to information, nor the betterment of our educations.
When I look at the horizon, in smoke haze, most of all what I hope is that red-rains will be enough to convince settler-Australia to believe in the reality of their own life-changing crisis. That the intolerability of such a prospect will stimulate, at last, a capacity to empathy. I am heartened by talk of the climate-refugee, thinking surely this must inspire a reflexive consideration of the abysmal Australian policy approach to refugees. Hoping that the ordinary Australian will wake into the traces of climate crisis, and recognise with the evidence of their own dawn that another, revolutionary dawn, must be upon us.
Palestinians know cover-ups, media suppression, and institutional silence. We have lived for 72 years with double-speak, and in alternate realities. This is why in an era of climate apocalypse, you might say, Palestinians are born well equipped. We live in an apocalypse already arrived. We knew what it meant when Morrison threatened to ban climate boycotts; boycotts disrupt the system. People who run the system try and convince us that it is in our interests to protect it. It is our job to remain unconvinced.
Read the article Micaela Sahhar in the Overland journal.