“You have to live, you have to cook food, to make yourself, your children and your grandchildren happy,” says Zoia, a Ukrainian woman who looks like a large bunch of white flowers and red flowers that runs towards her son’s grave. Along the asphalt road that leads to the cemetery, runs a red -style wall. Ukraine, makes the flags seem larger than they actually are.
“Oh, life goes on,” Zoia sighs. Her voice, which has been high in the throat for a while, really breaks now. Everthing okaya tender documentary by Petra Lataster-Czisch and Peter Lataster (Human, NPO 2), showed last night how Ukrainians were going to arrive in the Netherlands, after they fleeing the Russian aggression. There was a piano in the reception center, a former office space in Weesp. A boy played the tune of ‘Baby Shark’ on it. An older couple was shown their room in the shelter. Mrs. burst into Sobken, Mr. said nothing but tried to radiate gratitude.
Another older woman, with orange hair, also had to cry very hard. “Everything is ok here, nobody is aiming for you here. Why all those tears?” Was asked. The woman leaned against the wall and lowered her head. “I want to go home.” The French thinker Simone Weil wrote Reject (1949) that are rooted somewhere “the most important and misunderstanding needs of the human soul [is]. A person roots because he […] Participates in a community that keeps certain treasures alive from the past and cherish feelings about the future ”.
Attention
By Eight -hour journal The ‘Sit-in’ protests on more than thirty stations throughout the Netherlands were discussed, against the genocide and starvation in Gaza. The sit-in is an appropriate form of protesting, because sitting is a fairly literal form of Verworteling. It symbolizes steadfastness: we do not leave here, we will stay sitting until the Palestinians can sit and be able to root again.
News hour (NPO 2) broadcast a fierce report of the brave Palestinian journalist Amer al-Sultan, about the equally brave Achraf Herzallah, father of four children. During the infamous ‘Flour Massacre’, in which more than a hundred people were shot by Israeli soldiers in helpers in helpers, Herzallah was already injured. Last weekend he ended up in chaos again, this time eighty Gazans were killed. Sitting on the ground in his heavily damaged living room, with his emaciated child on his lap and an empty look in his eyes, he told Al-Sultan: “They are fooling us with ‘agreements’ and ‘peace’. These are lies. I no longer believe in those stories. I no longer believe in the world and people.”
In On photography (1977) Susan Sontag points to a paradox: shocking images attract public attention and have political impact, but if we see too much, they can also make us tired and insensitive to suffering. To prevent this, human stories should be told in the images, ‘narratives’, according to Sontag to continue to activate our moral compass. I don’t know if that is completely right, but News hour In any case, an honest attempt, as well as Human, made about the war in Ukraine.
But it’s not enough. After years of reporting, reports and documentaries, it has simply proved not enough to prevent the radical uprooting of whole peoples. Moreover, there will soon be no journalists such as Amer Al-Sultan who can tell the stories because they can no longer work because of hunger. Achraf Herzallah has therefore given up the world and her people. And yet it is our duty, although it sometimes seems sisyphus labor, to keep telling those stories undisturbed. As much as possible, because, Simone Weil writes, “attention is the rarest and pure most of the generosity.”