Vent Diagrams and a Year of Apocalypse

You all, I have started to write this a dozen times. I’ve started and stopped and the right words just don’t seem to be coming out. I think a lot of it is because there are no right words after a year of horrors in Palestine which were started by a day of horrors in Israel. 

I feel so saddened by the complicity of our country in the genocide of Gazans and now an expanding regional war. The answer feels so simple: stop sending money and weapons; stop the killing; every life is sacred. Alas, here we are, a year later.

At this moment, with a loss for words, I go to simple visuals that hold important meaning for this moment. Specifically Vent Diagrams which is an Instagram account that is designed to show the overlap between two seemingly contradictory concepts. The seemingly simple venn diagrams hold a whole lot more than what they might seem—it activates your brain to think beyond the binary.

There was nothing more resonant than their post recognizing the October 7th anniversary of what the post describes as “a tragedy still unfolding.” 

One of the posts felt particularly essential: “The scale of Israeli + Palestinian death is vastly different” overlapping with “Every life is precious every death is a tragedy.”

vent_diagrams

A post shared by @vent_diagrams

The founders of Vent Diagrams, educator E.M./Elana Eisen-Markowitz and artist Rachel Schragis–who are “two queer white jews on turtle island”–note that they intentionally don’t label that overlapping middle part of the two statements that “that appear to be true and appear to be contradictory.” That unlabeled space offers a place for reflection.

It’s a powerful visual that “helps us recognize and reckon with contradictions and keep imagining and acting from the intersections and overlaps,” says their website.

In the vent, it holds humanity for all people. It shows the necessity to hold multiple truths at once and recognize that they are not mutually exclusive. For me, I think of the fact that calling for a free Palestine does not mean calling for the destruction of Israel—rather humanity for both Israelis and Palestinians (and the Jewish and Palestinian diaspora for that matter) have equal right to living fulfilling and happy lives. Yet it seems like there is a tone of mutual exclusivity in the wider political conversation. Yet the binary is an illusion.

All of the vents shared on their Instagram are thought-provoking, but I appreciate the ones shared yesterday because there is no black-and-white here.

So today and all days we can hold these seeming contradictions and also engage with them when have the inevitable difficult conversations with the people around us.