The holiday season is an interesting time for people of non-Christian faith, especially during our younger years – from incessant questioning as to why we don’t have a Christmas tree, to deeper consolidation towards our othering. So here’s some things not to say to Jewish people during the holiday season.
Having gone through the otherworldly joys that are GCSEs (I’m hoping at least a couple of you would have maybe heard of those) last year, I have proudly begun the next phase of my higher education – Sixth Form. And as the first term of Year 12 comes to a festive halt, I wanted to relay the raw, the angsty and the honest first-hand experiences of what it’s like to be one of those elusive people lurking at the top of the STEAM tower.
The production and delivery of food to consumers brings with it numerous, complex sustainability issues; from giant meat produces, which emit tonnes of CO2 every day, through to the logistics behind the transportation and distribution of food. To ensure alignment with the Paris Agreement goals of ‘pursuing efforts to limit global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees’[1], the carbon footprint associated with the movement of food needs to be reduced.
In 1940, four teenage boys discovered a cave painting in Lascaux, France, when their dog went astray. When they looked for it, they followed their dog through the entrance of a cave, where there were at least one thousand pictures of various animals on the walls – one bull was nearly 17ft long. In shock, or because of the build-up of carbon dioxide in the cave, the boys began to dart around – they ‘went completely crazy,’ they said, and according to one of them the animals seemed to be moving. Imagine that you are these boys from Nazi-occupied France, you have travelled down some sort of rabbit hole to find yourself at the beginning of mankind and you are hallucinating a big dance of prehistoric beasts.
Here at Wimbledon High, some of us share views on politics, ethics, and morality and, let’s be honest, are not exactly renowned for our collective ability to keep quiet on them. So, I feel fairly confident in saying that a lot of us have similar thoughts on ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. For example, there is a large group who are, politically, slightly left leaning. I cannot exclude myself from this group of people, nor do I wish to. However, most of my political views hugely reshaped themselves since I downloaded the popular social media app TikTok, and I’m sure that many of you have also been heavily influenced by social media; be it, like me, TikTok, or your friends reposting posts on Instagram, or Twitter.
