A couple weeks back, while writing briefly about the horrors in Israel and Gaza, I noted that “people should consider staying silent, listening, and learning”. Since that post, I’ve seen contradictory suggestions that failing to speak up is anti-semitic. Alternately, it could be anti-Palestinian.

This is nonsense. We are not all required to performatively express grief proactively about each and every terrible situation in the world. That way lies madness.

Related to this, Rachel E. Greenspan recently had a great piece on why she has no expectations that others will make social media posts about Israel, or anything else.

We are all battling our own demons daily, and we don’t necessarily expect our peers to post on social media to show us personal support. And when we do choose to post publicly about personal tragedy, we almost never expect others to participate. Why, then, is there the expectation that everybody demonstrate the exact right support for large-scale human tragedies?

I’m not sure how we got to a place where some folks expect that everyone must comment on the awful occurrences in the world. I do know, however, that such an expectation is neither healthy nor realistic.