Response to Anonymous

The previous post garnered a response from Anonymous. 

"Tells us why? Women and Girls: Reports from UN Women indicate that over 38,000 women and girls have been killed in Gaza during the conflict. Of these documented deaths, approximately 22,000 were adult women and 16,000 were girls.

Children: UNICEF estimates that at least 21,000 to 22,000 children have been killed, with over 44,500 children injured. Why did they have to die to make Israel safer? That would mean that every other child in Anchorage would be dead, Look around that classroom you volunteer at and every other child would be dead.

"Approximately 1.16 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes." 

Really?? What does that have to do with the genocide Israel has engaged in??

Hey but if it makes you feel better. The usual whataboutism from you."

It's easier to respond here in another post than in the comment section.  

 I'm trying to put myself in A's head to understand what he's (I'm guessing Anon is a 'he') trying to say and why. I guess I could just ignore it.  The challenge is to respond positively.  Well, at least neutrally.  Just focusing on the content.  Though that's hard because I'm puzzled at the hints of hostility.

1.  For starters, this is clearly from someone who reads my posts often enough to refer to 

• He's read here about the third grade class where I volunteer
• The last sentence "The usual whataboutism from you."  'Usual' suggests he reads enough to think that is something I often do.  
• The style and tone are similar to someone who has left other comments over the years 

2.  "Tells us why?"

•     I'm not sure what this refers to.  

3.  The stats on Women and Girls and then the paragraph on Children

• This is detail I didn't present.  I do offer data that covers children, but not women and girls specifically.  As I said in the post "Nothing in depth, just a sampling"  So, the commenter could have positively offered this information to supplement what I'd written.  Instead, I read an accusation that I left this information out, maybe intentionally.  
• "Why did they have to die to make Israel safer?  - A legitimate question he could have added 
• The reference to Anchorage children and those in the classroom where I volunteered is a powerful way to make the point I was trying to convey when I wrote "Remember each person who dies, civilian or soldier, leaves holes in people’s hearts - parents, children, spouses, siblings, fiancées, life-long friends, work colleagues.  Leaves holes in families, at school, at work, in communities."   

4.  ""Approximately 1.16 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes." 

      Really?? What does that have to do with the genocide Israel has engaged in??

• I'm not sure why he thinks this post is focused on "genocide Israel has engaged in."  The title of the post is "People Are Dying, Are You Actively Trying to End The Killing?" implying it's about death.  The first lines clarify the scope of the post: "This began as a protest against war - Netanyahu's non-stop killing of Palestinians and other Arabs, the US-Israeli war in Iran, and the various other wars going on in the world, mostly using Western weapons of destruction and death.  

  But then I looked at other death statistics - worldwide traffic deaths for instance.  A lot more people die of vehicle crashes than war."

  I'm writing about death and I mention Palestinians in the first paragraph but in the context of other wars, not that I'm focusing on Gaza.  Rather, Gaza is an example of war caused deaths and destruction.  And I further clarify that I realized that, as horrible as war is, more people die of car crashes than war.  But Anon somehow wants it to be about genocide, specifically in Palestine.  He should write his own blog.  And maybe he does, but he signs in as Anonymous so we don't know.

5.       "Hey but if it makes you feel better. The usual whataboutism from you."

• The veiled hostility we heard in the first sentence, again.  
•  "Whataboutism"?  Here's a definition form The Merriam-Webster online dictionary, which is almost identical to other definitions on Wikipedia and other online dictionaries:

"whataboutism

noun
what·​about·​ism ˌ(h)wä-tə-ˈbau̇-ˌti-zəm  ˌ(h)wə-
plural whataboutisms
: the act or practice of responding to an accusation of wrongdoing by claiming that an offense committed by another is similar or worse" (emphasis added)

I can see how Anon might think that my saying there are more deaths from causes other than war is an attempt to downplay the deaths of war.  But it ignores the whole context of the post.  First, I'm not responding to an accusation (well, I guess I am here in the comment, but I wasn't when I wrote the post).  Rather I wanted to write about the many unnecessary deaths in the world and first focused on war.  But then realized that there were more unnecessary deaths from non-war causes.  So I wrote about them as well.  The whole point  was to call people's attention to unnecessary deaths and then to challenge them to find ways they can personally work to decrease that number.. But I put that part off to a later post because the original post had gotten long enough.   

Anon seems to have focused on the post he wanted me to write, or that he would like to write, not the post I actually wrote.  He made a few legitimate additions to the numbers I offered and a poignant example of the death toll in Gaza by referring to Anchorage kids.  But underlying everything was a hostility that I don't understand.  I discussed issues he mentioned, but he's taken them out of context.  I'm sorry for the underlying anger he seems to have that caused him to focus on some of what I wrote, but not the whole context of what I wrote.   

After writing this and letting it sit, I read my book for next week's book club - The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathon Rauch.  It's pretty dense and I'm way behind.  But I got to a section that talked about the evolution of the Scientific Method.  It points to an important shift where scientists moved away from talking about the writer and focusing on the ideas.  

That, I think, is what disturbed me about Anon's comments.  They seemed more focused on me, the writer and my motives and less on what I wrote. To my knowledge he doesn't know me, except through what I write on the blog.  If he had something to add or to contest, he could have done that without attacking the person who wrote it.