Dead We Cannot Count Gaza: The world no longer counts the dead. 60,000 lives were extinguished in Gaza — reduced to a number too large for the human mind to grasp. What does 60,000 look like? We can picture four bodies, maybe 10, even 20. But beyond that, the imagination recoils, flinches, and seeks escape. Numbers grow, and humanity disappears.
What implications arise from the world’s ability to count the deceased in Gaza? Is it just a numerical exercise, or is it a step-by-step mechanism to force ourselves to come to terms with the reality that the new global order has created?
When I sit down and start to read a list of killed babies, with every name I read, I feel compelled to know and learn more about the child. Each name demands more than just a single, half-hearted glance. Every story takes me a long time to read, process, and honour. How, then, can I possibly honour 60,000 stories — 60,000 entire worlds, each extinguished?
The emotional whiplash and mental overwhelm are of a magnitude that makes it easier for us to shut down and “distract” ourselves for our own mental peace. I saw a post from a child in Gaza that said, “If you’re tired of watching our lives, we are tired of living them.” The experience can be both gut-wrenching and emotionally draining if you allow it to penetrate your spirit. We were not built with the capacity to helplessly watch people being murdered, starved, cut off, and tortured.
The Dead We Cannot Count Gaza and the Weight of Silence
If you feel any semblance of being similarly trapped in a new reality where something about the world, and living in it, feels so incredibly wrong, hypocritical, misery-inducing… And yet, if you discover yourself dragging yourself through your day-to-day tasks and what now seem to be hollow goals amidst a collapsing capitalist and consumerist society, then you’re not alone.
That dissonance — between what we know is happening and how powerless we feel to change it — is the very definition of hyper normalisation. Hyper normalisation has become our world’s default state. As The Guardian describes it, “the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working… And yet the institutions and people in power are ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has.”
This phenomenon is no accident. Israel and the USA have successfully established a world built on this disconnect. Ordinary people like you and me are compelled to take up our phones, watch videos of children breaking down over their loved ones who were killed while trying to obtain a speck of flour to eat, and continue with our 9-5 jobs or whatever other forms of corporate slavery we have surrendered our souls to.
Congratulations to Israel, America, and Western ‘liberal’ democracy: you have conditioned us to accept helplessness, to reduce 60,000 lives into a statistic – and to keep working, consuming, and enabling the very leading classes that force us to live like this.
We began by asking what 60,000 really looks like. Perhaps the answer is that we cannot imagine it at all — but we can refuse to let it become faceless. Behind every number is a life, and behind every life, a story. To remember them is to resist forgetting, and that is where justice begins.