Celebrity Status
Is it just me, or is it … weird to have a national magazine profile accompany your courageous moral stance gleaned from a ten-day trip? It feels a little bit like calling a press conference because you visited a soup kitchen twice — Thanksgiving and Christmas — and think we should all talk about it. (How dare we not volunteer more often, etc.) Never mind the fact that other journalists and writers besides the individual exist. The stance of the individual isn’t wrong, but the delivery of the stance leaves me concerned.
This shouldn't be such a story of class, but look at this framing. And, yes, I've seen the studies about the power of celebrities to draw attention to certain issues, but — at the end of the day — what should be a story about — I don't know — the fleeing citizens of Lebanon or Secretary Blinken magically denying the fact that aid wasn’t getting to Palestinians is instead … this.
Moments of moral courage happen every single day. To sell us on the idea that this individual is uniquely singular is setting him up as an item of future consumption (i.e., early Obama, etc.) Something we can point towards to justify the goodness of our collective moral standing and then ultimately do nothing about. And that’s not how this should work.