Burp plays The Middle East Upstairs on Friday. (Photo: Michael Gutierrez)

We’re more than a week removed from the staff boycott of an Ishay Ribo fundraising concert for Israel at The Sinclair on Feb. 27, first reported by The Harvard Crimson. The dust still hasn’t settled. Why should it?

The brief interval between then and now has provided time enough for more gory highlights from the bloodbath on the Mediterranean. Highlights that include more than 100 Palestinians gunned down by Israeli troops as the starving population was “racing to pull food off an aid convoy in Gaza City” on Feb. 29 and the U.S. military airdropping food and aid directly into Gaza on Saturday – presumably to avoid a repeat of the slaughter earlier in the week.

Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, remarked on the development: “We were thinking about when we have done an airlift to save a population being blockaded by a dictator. There was Berlin in 1948-1949 due to Stalin and the Kurds in Iraq in 1993 due to Saddam Hussein. Looks like Netanyahu has great company!”

Great company, indeed. And it’s company that the United States is keeping, handing out food aid to Palestinians with one hand and military aid to Israel with the other.

The American people have a right to be confused about what exactly the country stands for as our political leadership fumbles for the right words to characterize our role in perpetuating violence that has taken more than 1,000 Israeli lives and 30,000 Palestinian lives since Hamas militants launched an attack into Israel on Oct. 7.

Which brings us back to The Sinclair. What’s a venue to do when community groups partisan to one side or the other in a conflict want to host an event on its stage?

Consider at least two possible responses: Take a partisan position, take a nonpartisan position. Hard to imagine a business voluntarily choosing the first option. The second option is far and away the most popular choice for businesses who want to keep out of, if not above, the fray.

Imagine that your venue is an empty vessel, free of ideology, open and available to whoever might want to use the stage to promote their own worldview within the elastic boundaries of decency and goodwill.

Imagining something to be the case, though, doesn’t make it so. A business is the sum of the efforts of the workers who keep it operating, and those workers have minds and hearts that think and feel, just like the rest of us. Whether it’s the bartender, the coat check, the sound tech or the ticket taker – every one of them is stitched into the fabric of the ideas and emotions that make up our world. And they don’t check their humanity at the door in the workplace.

On Feb. 27 those workers at The Sinclair declined to keep the venue operating; ownership opted to hire “third-party workers” in their stead. You know, the type of workers sometimes called “scabs.” The show went ahead as scheduled, and Harvard Chabad even had to add a second concert later in the evening after the first sold out.

There are no winners in this outcome. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not going to be decided at a music concert on a Tuesday night in Cambridge. But if our community is going to find its way through its current moral and political crisis, the “bottom up” leadership on display at The Sinclair is one example of how it can be done by democratic means. Sometimes, at some workplaces, it’s just not okay to pretend it’s business as usual.

You can bet that management teams at local venues are reflecting a little more deeply about the impact of their programming after the staff boycott at The Sinclair. While there may be no one-size-fits-all lesson here for every venue, incorporating the voices of your workers into policy-making conversations is an essential condition for equity in the workplace, and just might be the solution to certain brands of moral befuddlement during times of crisis. Can the “top down” show as much courage as the “bottom up”? Time will tell.

Saturday: Otis Shanty, Dogs on Shady Lane, Number One Babe (The Lilypad, Cambridge)

Two bands coming up from Providence, Rhode Island, to play at Inman Square. Will they save gas money by carpooling? And who is going to win the battle of soft-spokenness among three bands whose pulse rate never exceeds 100 beats per minute? Our money’s on Dogs on Shady Lane, whose single “Pile of Photos,” off their recent EP “The Knife,” hits like a Xanax. And according to Obscure Sound, Otis Shanty’s lyrics “exude a self-confident vigor” – which sounds like a sticky mess, but we promise you that they’re a neat and tidy crew riding high on dream pop vibrations fit for Saturday night reverie.

Saturday: Weird Machine, Death Defier, Jiddo, Fracture Type (The Democracy Center, Cambridge)

DIY music is alive and well at The Democracy Center in Harvard Square. Weird Machine delivers dense, propulsive post-punk that knows the loud-quiet-loud game but can dial it down at will for more melody-driven attacks, such as their song “Coping Mechanism.” Death Defier is high-velocity hardcore out of Worcester. Jiddo’s recent LP “They Can’t Keep Getting Away With This” takes post-hardcore new places. And Fracture Type? A little emo-tinged change of pace. A portion of the proceeds benefits the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

Wednesday: Grace Givertz, Maeve & Quinn, Naomi Westwater (Lizard Lounge, Cambridge)

Givertz and Westwater shared a stage as recently as Feb. 11 during the We Black Folk Fest at Club Passim. If folk music is their common root, Givertz branches in the more country-influenced direction than Westwater. And Maeve & Quinn? The twin sisters from Alaska are a pair of wild cards on this bill, with a CV that skates between visual art, poetry and music. You figure they’re trotting out the music on Wednesday, if they’re on a bill with two other musicians.

Last Friday Burp headlined a four-stack slate of Lowell bands at The Middle East club. In the words of the great politician and orator Pericles, “All things good on this Earth flow into the city.” Sure, he was speaking about ancient Athens. But why should Cambridge be different?

Burp, The Peacocks, Class President, The Ghouls – all Lowell-based, and not a band among them that sounded like the other. Forget about anything so overdetermined as the “Lowell Sound.” As for the Lowell spirit, there was plenty on hand at the sold-out show with friends, family and fans filling the Upstairs to the brim.

The Ghouls delivered a close shave, Class President rocked and bonko-jammers Burp released excess air from the upper digestive tract. As one does!

The surprise of the night? The Southern rock flexing of The Peacocks, which has more Allman Brothers-style swagger than any band this far north of the Mason-Dixon line has a right to. There was a soft glow around the lead guitarist as he flew his deep-fried solos into the upper stratospheres. Let’s hope it’s not on the wings of a Boeing 720.

Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News