Everyone Loses

When both ends of the stick are too short | Non-Fiction | Fresh Soup

Image by Steve Baccon

A few days ago, a woman I didn’t know messaged me on Instagram to inform me that she was not going to read my books anymore because I’m a coward who is not stopping the genocide in Gaza. I replied that my stories had never been a great match for violent and capricious people, and so I’d like to ask her – on their behalf – never to read them again. As my wife pointed out, this wasn’t a very nice thing to say. She explained that the acceptable 21^st century response to threatening messages is to ignore them. Nevertheless, I continued a dialogue with the woman, who lives in Mexico and turns out to be a very humane, compassionate person. She told me she was spending hours in front of the TV, watching the shocking scenes of dead babies and displaced families in Gaza, and felt she couldn’t do anything to help. This was so upsetting that eventually she could no longer tolerate it, and she decided she had to do something. So she wrote to me – the one Israeli she knew, if only through my books – threatening a boycott and calling me names in an attempt to try and stop the suffering in the Middle East. Her message did about as much to help the Gazans as that little Ukrainian flag on everyone’s profile picture did to help the Ukrainians, but just like all those Facebook users, she felt slightly less helpless.

Is it my imagination, or does everyone seem to be on the losing side lately? Not just me and you—everybody. Those other guys, too. The unenlightened idiots you can’t stand. Yes, even the ones who stole our elections and we couldn’t understand how, and then they couldn’t understand how we stole their elections. Look around: Republicans, Democrats, Israeli hostages bombed in Gaza, Gazan civilians bombed in Gaza, evacuees, refugees—is anyone in this world satisfied with the way things are going? Putin, Bibi, António Guterres, Zelensky, Yahya Sinwar: does a single one of them look pleased?

This is a perplexing state of affairs, because I was taught that for every losing side, there’s a winning side; for every victim stuck with the short end of the stick, there’s someone else holding the long end. So when exactly did the world turn into a game in which everyone loses, or at least feels as if they’re losing? And why is it happening now, of all times, when we’re all so involved and influential and have no hesitation expressing our opinions very stridently?

We’re constantly active, in all sorts of arenas: we send support, we write posts, we “like” anyone who deserves it and shame anyone who doesn’t. There’s no question about it, we’re doing the best we can, we’re putting in the work. But no matter our opinion or which camp we belong to, at the end of the day we still feel as if the stupid world around us doesn’t understand anything, the problems aren’t really being solved, and we’ve lost again.

In fact, it’s even worse than losing. None of our struggles have decisive outcomes: wars are not won, election results are endlessly disputed. Even when it comes to an objective and seemingly unfraught scientific issue like determining the effects of a flu vaccine on our bodies, we can’t seem to reach an agreement.

The old social game has long ago devolved into a brawl, and we’re all just standing there on the field, shoving the other side’s players and cursing and spitting all over the place. As long as play is suspended, spitting and cursing seem to have become the most popular sports for us all to compete in.

If we can simply look away from the scoreboard for a minute and focus on the rules of play, we’ll discover that while we were so worked up about righteously defeating the other side, those rules changed unrecognizably. And if we don’t take a time-out and get together to agree on new ones, we’ll all just keep losing.

Translated by Jessica Cohen