The Responsibility of Caring
by Cynthia Taylor

I am in a fight with one of my friends right now over whether I am required to have an opinion on Israel versus Palestine.  My feeling on this is: Both sides have some valid points, both sides have done some fucked up shit, it’s not like I am going to be able to fix this thing anyhow, and I would rather look at pictures of kittens on the internet than read about suicide bombers.  My friend feels I am being “aggressively ignorant” and it is morally reprehensible for me not to pick a side.   (He is rooting for the Palestinians.)

In my heart of hearts, I think my friend might be right.  I am choosing to be the ugly American here, selecting ignorance over knowledge because, well, knowledge is fucking depressing.  But man, it’s not like I could really do anything about it if I did know where to stand.  (The last sentence is, of course, a lie.  There are lots of things I could do, starting with donating money to the right causes and ending with dropping out of school to join some sort of humanitarian relief effort.  What it should say is, “But, man, I am too lazy to even read up on this shit, you think I’ve got the time and moral stamina to actually make a difference?”)  

The politics I am good at getting involved in is the stuff that affects me and my immediate environment.  I find it easy to be a feminist because, hey, I want to get paid just as much as the boys do.  Veganism makes sense when you figure out the relationship between cute little fuzzy animals and the dairy and meat industries.  Gay rights?  Yeah, I’d like my friends to be able to get married, and I’d prefer not to get beat up if I walk down the street holding hands with a girl.  I’m concerned about global warming because I live in San Diego, and I’m going to be under water if it keeps up.   But this other stuff, these things that happen on other sides of the world, where it’s not clear who’s wrong and who’s right, these things are harder for me to feel passionately about.  Which probably says bad things about my moral character, but also probably puts me in the same boat as most humans.  

But as much as I’m beating myself up over not wanting to get emotionally involved in this, I think that where American foreign policy goes wrong is when it gets involved in stuff like this, in countries and wars where we have no business and generally have no idea what we’re doing.  I wish that we as a country had no opinion on Israel versus Palestine, so why do I feel like I should have one?  I think one of the problems with this country’s outlook on the world is too many uninformed opinions, the way we try to fit everything into our little box of democracy and Christ, the way we like to be aghast whenever a nation has values that differ from ours.  This is how we got into our current mess, because we somehow had enough hubris combined with naiveté to believe that surely no one could resist the siren call of Democracy.  

Do we have a moral responsibility to pick a side in things like these?  Or is it really just like choosing which football team to root for?  Does it matter?  I am against all human suffering, no matter who has the moral high ground.  Would I be a better person if I could make myself read all those New Yorker articles about people dying far away from here?  The truth is that these things make me wish that someone out there had a magical answer, that there was someone wise and professorial with a tweed jacket and a pipe and a twenty-step plan for fixing the human condition, but lately I doubt it more and more.

January 23, 2007