We college students love our music festivals. The Tribe of Nova trance music festival, an all-night event with over 3,500 attendees, looked pretty cool to me. Maybe raves aren’t everyone’s style, but we should at least agree that getting dressed up for an event is a common Yale phenomenon. In our case, it’s often for formals and the like. You get the picture.
Help me out. Imagine being at the festival. You’re dressed up. You’ve traveled from afar with your friends to the desert. You’re singing. You’re dancing. You’re happy. You see gray dots in the air and start to hear booms. You’re confused. Why is the music so discordant?
You’re running. You’re screaming. You’re being chased through the open desert. Men with guns are running after you. You have nowhere to hide. What will you do? Play dead? Hide behind a body sprawled on the floor? Keep running? But where will you go?
This is precisely what happened in the Israeli desert this weekend. Except you weren’t there. You weren’t one of the 3,500 present, and you fortunately weren’t one of the 260 murdered. You fortunately weren’t abducted by Hamas fighters (if you’re a woman, child or elderly person), or shot or beheaded or killed in some other creative way on the spot (if you’re a man). You certainly weren’t Shani Louk, the young woman with a bullet in her head depicted stripped to her underwear with her legs “bent at unnatural angles” in the back of a pickup truck driven by the men.