Fly, Flee, and.. Be Free

I read somewhere that “The important thing in life is who stays, not who leaves.” And it got me thinking – people come and go. Family, friends… No matter how much you try to keep them close by, there is no telling when they will be taken from you. It is out of your control. …And yet, God always remains. He did, is and always be.

And more importantly, that I misread the directions on a final and realized this with 10 minutes left to finish..

                        Take risks. Make love.                         Be realistic. Yet exercise the imagination.

She was in love with places she had never visited and people she had never met, yet she loved every place she had gone to and every person she already had the pleasure of meeting.

                        They all had contained things she couldn't have learned otherwise.

She was full of contradictions, yet everything she felt... Made sense.

– I am either 10 years old or 28. – I look like a teenager in Pre-K Zero, which has a lot of crafts and actually a lot of hard stuff. And they give SO MUCH of college homework. But they have candy, so that's good.

Losing hair, and I’m taking no treatments. No scissors, no chemo. 

This is what stress does to you.  You lose your appetite, your ability to sleep more than an hour at a time.

Life becomes a blur, yet a blur that remains a containment of images that take hours to process. To figure out. To comprehend.

On a journalistic level, social media is able to give attention to issues in ways mainstream media may not. Mainstream and independent news agencies have been uploading photo and video footage onto the web. And even people of the affected regions are able to upload their own media for the world to see.

Concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict, many sources have shown footage of: viewing parties of dropped bombs, houses destroyed into piles of rubble and bodies being carried to ambulances. 

In some cases, journalists have been brought back from Gaza for their tweets and posts in support of Gaza, like NBC reporter Ayman Mohyeldin. There has even been media attention brought to children being abused by Israeli police, like Florida teen Tariq Abu Khdeir, or even killed, like Tariq's cousin, Mohammed, age 16.

On a human level, Israel and the U.S. have justified that Israel has the right to protect its people. The concern makes sense, but do Gazans not have that right? 

The fact is: as of today, 896 people have died since the most recent conflict that broke out roughly July 8.

39 have been Israelis. 857 have been Palestinians. 

And this is according to The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/gaza-counter/?clsrd

Money talks. 

"Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II." Until April of this year, the U.S. has provided Israel with $121 billion.

http://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

Just this Tuesday, the U.S. Senate approved $225 million in extra funding for Israel's Iron Dome rocket interception system (that also cut $1 billion from President Obama's request for $3.7 billion to deal with thousands of undocumented child immigrants).

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/22/us-palestinians-israel-irondome-congress-idUSKBN0FR2MF20140722

One side is overpowering on every aspect– resources, the advantage of the media, weapons and even giving well-in-advance warnings for its citizens to evacuate. The one thing that it’s not outnumbering the other side on is casualties.

Living in this country, we are not getting balanced coverage on the issue. And we have to understand why.

As a student journalist, I find it interesting to see how the media has shaped the perspectives of people all across the world.

But one big thing I’ve learned along the way is that we have to do our research. If we have doubts about something, we need to look it up, and more importantly, cross check the fact with several sources. A variety of sources. And not being hesitant to use sources from different continents, from different perspectives. Sources that will help us make, all in all, educated opinions.

Here’s just a source that can help on understanding the Israel-Palestine conflict:

http://thrivalroom.com/understand-israeli-palestinian-apartheid-11-graphics/