"It is easier to prioritize the headlines on the front page when Israeli or American blood is taken for granted as more valuable than that pumping through brown-skinned Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi."

This week, the smoke is beginning to clear over Lebanon, where many have survived and many have not, where entire neighborhoods have been flattened into dust and where people return back to the shadows, to the wreck of their former lives, to the misunderstanding and stereotypical images and racist bylines in the corporate US and Israeli media stenographing for their overlapping governments which are more intent than ever to break the back of people’s resistance and civil unity.

A journalist friend of mine, while sitting on his balcony overlooking the Mediterranean Sea during the height of the Israeli-American assault, laughed as he told me that throughout his 30 years in Beirut, he had smelled it, heard it, touched it, saw it, but never had he tasted the city before. There was so much debris, so much ash, that it blanketed the city from end to end and crept into one’s teeth, making this war a consumable item to be rolled between lips and tongue.

"We consume wars. We consume horror stories," another Lebanese friend of mine said. Literally and figuratively, this war was consumed. Consumed in the bellies of the Lebanese under attack, and consumed in the nonchalance of the American public who still refuse to understand the extent of the damage, refuse to grasp the pages of history that led up to the egregious rampage by two of the top four nuclear-saddled militaries in the world, refuse to recognize the ongoing siege in occupied Palestine, or the relentless yawn of sorrow stretching across the pitiful occupied country of Iraq.

We consumed this war just as we consumed the last three years of war in Iraq – we take it in and either we deal with the reality or we don’t, we digest the harrowing images and tales of incalculable suffering or we change the channel and shrug our shoulders. In either case, we let it all pass through us.

Such is the paradigm of this consumer society. We are news junkies, we are food junkies, we flood the malls and the department stores looking for our next new purchase, we consume enormously and then throw it all away.

It is in this paradigm of consumerist culture that the corporate media operates fluidly in concert with the warmakers. The disposable people of the Arab and Muslim countries are nameless, faceless, generalized, objectified. Therefore, it is easier for warplanes to carpet-bomb an entire neighborhood in Beirut or Gaza. It is easier to paint legitimate resistance movements with the broad brush of "terrorist organizations". It is easier to prioritize the headlines on the front page when Israeli or American blood is taken for granted as more valuable than that pumping through brown-skinned Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi.

We didn’t see the charred bodies of young Lebanese children on CNN, we didn’t see the civilian convoys bombed by the Israelis on ABC, we didn’t see one-tenth of the footage that the Arab world was glued to. The US censors were hard at work, wiping it all away so as not to disturb us, not wanting to spoil our dinners, not wanting us to begin questioning the validity of this "operation," not wanting us to protest. The consumers should be placated at a time like this – everything’s fine, keep your eyes on the road, and, above all, keep your wallets open.

This is how we are sold into war. We become the disposable consumers, swallowing whole the lies until we start believing them, coerced into selling off human conscience in exchange for "way of life." Too often, I hear the common chatter of detachment even with well-intentioned friends – it’s all too much to handle, I can’t hear another sad story, I can’t read the newspaper anymore, I can’t think about the war today.

While we go about our normal lives, the Israeli and American kids sent off to fight these brown-skinned guerrilla resistance groups are equally disposable and dispensable in the eyes of the governments and militaries. Though heralded as "defenders of life and liberty", in occupied Iraq, thousands of young men and women have come home in wooden boxes or with half of their bodies missing, traumatized for life, rejected for health care benefits, disposed of by the military and forgotten in the corporate news headlines. They are not needed anymore by anyone; they served their purpose already.

And for the Israelis, sent off to drop their 1-ton bombs, sent off to attack rock-slinging refugee kids, sent off to harass and detain old men and pregnant women at checkpoints, they too are disposable. They are fed the lie of moral superiority, of racial superiority, of ownership to a land which they do not deserve. The torturers running Israeli prisons have been stripped of their humanity by their government, taught to think of The Enemy -- naked and tortured and hooded behind the iron bars -- as perpetual threats not only to the Jewish soldiers personally, but collectively on behalf of their infant country.

Israel is good at this; the crafted technique of consumption and disposability. Palestinian land is disposable, ready for consumption by the Israeli settlements. Palestinian culture and tradition is disposable: Arabic pop music is consumed in Tel Aviv discotheques as falafel and hummus are stamped with Israeli cultural ownership in supermarkets. History too is disposable, to be consumed by Zionist apologists who selectively choose what to see and what to ignore, failing to comprehend the squalor of the Palestinian refugee camps and unwilling to connect Balata, Dheisheh, Jebaliya, Rafah camps to the grey ghettos of Warsaw; unwilling to connect the repulsive "separation barrier" to that which once sliced Berlin apart; unwilling to connect the entrenched and systematic racism of South Africa to the current separation and exclusivity structure that is ripping Israel and Palestine in pieces along ethnic and religious lines while Israel steals away water and land and energy resources like a thief in broad daylight. We witness on a daily basis the ironic and tragic parallel consumption and destruction of Palestine and Palestinian identity, like a cancer unnoticed and unmatched in its sickened strength.

We consume and we destroy. Where do we go from here, in order to spare the future generations this cyclical, violent fate? I think about this each day I wake up and start preparing my six year old daughter for school, every time I run a brush through her hair, pack her lunch, kiss her on the cheek. What world will she settle into? What will she consume and destroy, and what will consume and destroy her?

There are those who are fed up with the consumption of lies and distortions. And we need to draw our strength – as parents, as sons and daughters, as brothers and sisters, as colleagues and comrades – from these brave souls fighting with passionate audacity to buck the consumer system and answer with the conscious truth.

I draw strength from people like Lieutenant Ehren Watada, the first commissioned US officer to publicly refuse his deployment as a yes-man cog in the killing machine of the occupation of Iraq. He is facing serious prison time, but he will not swallow the immorality of the US military anymore.

I draw strength from the millions of Latino workers, undocumented and proud yet threatened by federal officials and racist vigilante groups. They poured into the streets of every major city in the US a few months ago, getting organized, remaining vocal. They are not swallowing the fear anymore.

I draw strength from the youth growing up inside Palestinian refugee camps, the students whom I teach and learn from and grow with. Five generations of dispossession and oppression has not severed these kids from their dignity and strength. On the contrary; their tenacity and resilience shines through the indignant inhumanity of their occupation like a bright and searing flame. They are not swallowing their fate, they are not giving up or giving in or abandoning their resistance. Late one warm night last month, the Israeli army jeeps showed up at the entrance to the Dheisheh refugee camp, just as they do nearly every night, to kidnap more residents of the camp and take them away to prisons. But these kids weren’t going to take it anymore; they would not be swallowed up in their silence. Quickly, hundreds of youths gathered at the foot of the camp and blocked the jeeps, defended their camp, made it impossible for the occupation military to invade without a fight.

Hundreds of unarmed Palestinian refugee youths, commonly used as battering rams by the Israelis for nearly six decades, made a unit of the fourth largest military in the world leave Dheisheh that night.

We each need to find our creative action that will change the tide. We each need to decide, without hesitation and without apprehension, to challenge our internalized consumption and destruction. We owe it to those who have come before us, those who have been lone voices of humanity when no one else would listen. We need a new call to arms to save ourselves from ourselves, a fierce and loud and boot-stomping movement that comes from our pain and our rage, that rises up in a swelling global wave of resistance with all the work and grit that that entails, and which commits, above all, to a blossoming in full vivid color from the depths of our blazing love for this small blue world.

Nora Barrows-Friedman, born in 1978, is a mother, a writer, and the Senior Producer and co-host of Flashpoints, a daily investigative newsmagazine on Pacifica Radio. She volunteers twice a year at the Ibdaa Cultural Center inside the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, working with refugee youth to establish a state-of-the-art media center inside the camp. Nora can be reached at norabf@gmail.com.