This is a very short film on Gaza made by the animator of Waltz with Bashir (which I briefly mentioned before, but hope to talk about a bit more sometime, especially in light of a critical review that has been circulating recently).

The war on Gaza that marked the beginning of this year was a deeply traumatic moment in the lives of many of us, and affected me in ways that I may not have yet fully recovered from. If I have been relatively silent on the matter, that may have more to do with psychic repression, than with mere neglect. Of course, each of us experience the world in our own ways, even as we converge, and there’s no denial that a particular set of circumstances defined my particular experience of the war–of which I am still trying to make sense. But as I had confessed to a friend one night back in the middle of  January, when the smokes were still suspended in the Gaza sky, I was feeling guilty for even being alive. How does one make sense of life, when life has torn to shreds any sense of justice that one may have grown up with? Which made me realize, that this maybe as much about coming-of-age as, say, empathy. It is as if we are still growing up, still coming to terms with a world we thought we knew, but apparently do not. Perhaps the utopia of peace that so many of us dream about and obsess over is no more than a nostalgia for a lost childhood innocence, to which we will obviously never return.

Yet we stil refuse to give up, on meaning. And are still trying to make sense of insensible wars. This, in fact, may be the very problem: that we are plagued by existential crises when the very existence of some people are denied, without negotiation–the very real people who die very real deaths, thanks to war in the age of mechanical destruction. Why them; why not us? I feel guilty to even be alive.

Earlier today, a friend and I were feeling rather strange as we left the theater, not knowing how exactly to react to the movie we had just seen: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. My friend suggested that we never again complain about getting older. But if there’s one thing I kept thinking about throughout the movie, it was the question of memory. How can we explain the curious role of memory in a life lived backward in terms of age? Or for that matter, how exactly to explain the role of memory in our own lives?

It is, of course, something that I always think about, perhaps even more so due to my academic interest in history. A few days ago, as I was walking out of another theater after Waltz with Bashir, another friend was asking about the main message of the movie, with respect to the Sabra & Shatila massacre. I responded that for me, even as the film was overtly political, it essentially had to do with memory, since the narrative was structured by the protagonist’s and his fellow Israelis’ efforts to remember their experience as young soldiers at war in Lebanon. I was deeply moved by the movie in many complex ways, but the question that continued to haunt me as I walked home that night was: what does it mean for me to “remember” a massacre that took place exactly two weeks before I was born to life.

These musings on memory were basically what brought me back to this blog today after months of inactivity. I had, of course, been contemplating a return, even as I had consciously put it off until after the end of my Fall semester. But I have often surprised myself with the realization that weeks would go by without me thinking for once about this blog, or even the blogosphere in general: which can only indicate how inessential it is to my life. But that does not mean that I have not remembered it at all or haven’t been reminded of it–as I indeed have been by a couple of friends, both real and virtual. That also brings up the one big change since my last entry on these pages, and that is that I am in school again.  As I may have written before on a similar return from hiatus, if our writings on blogs say something about the state of our lives, then our absence from them says just as much. In my case, it’s about the state of being a student: the late nights in the library, the long, often hurried, walks across campus, the meetings with more new people than you can remember the names of, the frantic efforts to finish overdue papers, and of course the worries about food, shelter, and money.

Despite the occasional amnesia, I have never doubted that I will return to blogging. I did, however, question myself. To figure out whether I really wanted this blog to continue to be a part of my life. The answer is yes, and for various reasons that don’t need attention now. But there is one that I could mention, and that has to do with the many interesting people and their writings that I have discovered through the blogosphere. I wanted to acknowledge that, because I often recall how much I have learned from here. I could not possibly recount the number of times that, in the course of a serious discussion with friends or even professors, I have referred to something I read in a blog or learned from a discussion inspired by a post either on my own or someone else’s blog. These citations can sometimes get rather awkward, when I don’t want to out the fact that I blog–anonymously, sort of.

In any case, I do hope I don’t disappear again. With school starting again in just a couple of days, that may be more just wishful thinking, but I can at least promise to try and remember. Although for all my talk of remembrance, I have to say I was struck by the irony of the fact that as I sat in front of the computer today ready to blog again, I had to stare at the monitor and think hard for almost a minute before I could remember that the website is called wordpress.com.

During the course of a conversation after dinner somewhere in midtown Manhattan last weekend, a friend casually admitted that he has disposable income, and that he wouldn’t mind paying more in taxes for the benefit of someone without health insurance. This was in response to a question posed by another friend, who is generally against paying higher taxes. While I remained quiet during much of this Saturday night banter, I thought to myself that I am in a fairly similar situation as the former friend, and although I’m usually eager to save as much as possible, I believe in higher taxes for the benefit of the community and country as a whole and of the poor in particular. I then wondered, however, why it was the case that my friend, the school teacher and I, the non-profit employee are the ones who worry about others and are willing to share our meager income with those caught in the structural violence of poverty. All this while some of our friends in finance and other profitable industries make many multiples of what we do, but seem less willing to part with a portion of their earnings.

Later that night, I returned downtown to an apartment around the corner from Wall Street where I was crashing in with a couple of other friends. One of them I had not seen yet, because he was at work all day (yes, even on a Saturday). I had already been asleep when he came back home, apparently at around 2:30am! The next morning, on Sunday, I finally got to say hi to him before he had to hurry back to work, and that was just past 10:30am. Such is the life of a recent college graduate at a major investment-banking firm. Worth noting, of course, that he probably earns more than what I might even after I acquire a PhD in about a decade, and possibly even after I achieve the coveted rank of full professor after another decade on tenure track. Even so, the woes of a starving scholar aside, I wondered if my friend is really being paid as much as he probably deserves. In all honesty, I don’t think overworked analysts at investment banks receive a fair share of the profits raked in by partners and executives. The annual compensation for the CEO of my friend’s firm ranks among the highest in the nation, and I’m talking about $50m+ per year.

It so happens that this same firm’s much revered charitable division is a major donor to the organization that I work for. Despite the grandeur of the corporation’s claims to philanthropic commitment, the truth is that the big fat checks they write to non-profits are still nothing compared to the stock options they issue to their big shot employees. And not to even bring up the question of tax breaks! By the time the money trickles down to the bottom of society, there’s barely any left to be meaningful. Charity is not justice; unless the process of charity can negate itself, its being is dependent on the very inequalities it supposedly aims to resolve.

Sometimes during lunch breaks, I walk by Harvard Square and come across the poor homeless people begging from passers by outside the bank lobbies. I rarely have change to spare, but even if I do, I don’t always give it away. I feel guilty, but also confused. I begin to wonder why I am the one who should feel so guilty.

And then I feel guilty for even thinking this way, for I really have so much to be grateful for.