Transcript
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Juna Dawson (0:44)
Did you guys ever used to play that game on long car journeys? And it was called. Well, our version of it was called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. And the whole idea was that, like, Kevin Bacon had been in so many movies that everybody on earth was, like, somehow connected to him, even if it was by six degrees of separation. And the more you play a game like that, and you can, like, substitute basically any famous person who works a lot with Kevin Bacon, you can do Six Degrees of Jeff Goldblum or Six Degrees of Taylor Swift. But the. The point of the game isn't really about how famous these people are or how much they work. It's actually about how connected we are in a world that seems so big. But there are all these invisible connections that tether us together and actually bring us far closer than it seems. We might seem quite isolated. We might seem that we only live in our house and we know the kind of 200 people that we know. But actually, the web is far more sprawling than that. And it's like one of these things that continues to bring me, like, so much joy, particularly as I, you know, go on podcast tours and I might meet someone at, like, a show in Edinburgh who happened to know someone who was at my show in Brisbane, which is at the other side of the world. And, you know, these connections can be so thrilling. But. So I think sometimes that we forget that the connections kind of work the other way too. Like, if you can be six degrees of separation from someone like Taylor Swift, then that must also mean that you could be three or four or five degrees of separation from somebody who is, for example, being murdered in a tent in Gaza. So I've decided that if I can talk for hundreds of hours on how I feel about Taylor Swift and Sex and the City and all these movies that I love talking about and all these little things I love obsessing about. If I can go on and on about my sort of emotional and spiritual connections to these pieces of media and these artists who make them, then I can also talk about the connections that go the other way. And today I want to talk about Aboot. So Abood is 20 years old and He's Palestinian, and he lives in Gaza. And he reached out to me a couple of months ago after I donated to one of his fundraising pages. And since then, we just. We've stayed in touch and we talk kind of once a week. And I learn about what he's up to. And what he's up to, I'm sure won't surprise you at all, is surviving. He lives with his parents. He has six sisters and one brother, Mohammed, who is the baby of the family and who recently actually sustained a massive injury when he was playing in the street and some shrapnel from a nearby exploding building struck him in the head. And he's had to have surgery. Now, Abud has been responsible for essentially crowdfunding that surgery and crowdfunding the medicine that's come after it to help manage his brother's pain and manage his nutrition levels, infection risks, all of that, along with crowdfunding the food his family are eating every single day. Because as he said to me in one message that I haven't really forgotten, and that kind of broke my brain a little bit. He said, the places where I'm supposed to get help are too dangerous for me to go. And you know that line, that sentence? I was like, wow, I could write for 100 years and not write something that haunting. Because this is his experience. The UN has reported that up to 400 Palestinians have been killed just trying to get aid from Israeli managed sites. And I don't know what to do with my brain in that situation. I knew that this war had spiraled into a genocide a long time ago, but this level of brutality, this level of just blanket cruelty, I don't know. It took my levels of sort of understanding of the world to, like, a new frontier, I think. So I'm gonna include Abood's crowdfunding link in the show notes here. And maybe you want to donate to him, but maybe you want to donate to other people as well. Maybe you see these kind of just giving links coming up in your Instagram stories all the time, but you don't really know if you should donate to them because it feels more appropriate to donate to a larger charity. And for what? I do that too, you know, Like, I've done a lot of crowdfunding for War Child through this podcast that I'm very proud of. But when the aid isn't getting through and that the aid that is getting through comes with a side of butchery, all you can really do at that point is sign petitions, go to protests, and support individuals, put £20 or £5 or whatever into any crowdfund that you see that speaks to you. And, yeah, you might not see the difference today. You might never see the difference. You might never even find out whether the person who you donated to has lived or died. But you also don't know who that money is supporting and who that person is saving and who those people will save and how the butterfly effect of people helping people will eventually culminate. And I have to believe in that. And I have to. Otherwise, I think I'd lose all hope. Anyway, that's it for me this week. Enjoy the podcast. Hello, and welcome to Magical Garbage, the podcast miniseries where we talk about the enchanted trash that made us who we are. My name is Caroline, and David Bowie's codpiece may seem bizarre, but it is, in fact, intentional. And joining me is just a crystal, nothing more. It's Juna Dawson.