on the value of life, of writing, of caring

One of the people I stand in vigil with on Fridays was asked, “Why are you so obsessed with Palestine?” I would have to ask in reply “Why aren’t you? Why isn’t everyone?” Why don’t you see that what’s happening in Palestine is showing us the kind of world we live in, where exceptionalism and supremacy have infiltrated modes of education and communication so thoroughly that regular people can accept or ignore the dehumanization, dispossession and slaughter of a large group of fellow people? Why doesn’t this seem like a moral crisis to you?

I remember learning in grade school about World War II, how the Allies liberated the death camps in Europe. What remains with me strongly is the shock of the allied troops as they discovered people starved, tortured, and haunted by death in the enclosures, and as they confronted the contents of ovens - the sickening realization of how bad it was, how extensive, how they hadn’t known what was really happening over the years of the Third Reich’s conquest.

Today, we know. We see the bombing, the forced relocation, the targeted killing and kidnapping of doctors, journalists, and thousands of people whose only crime is to be Palestinian. If you aren’t seeing it, if you don’t know this is happening continuously now for 19 months, then you’re either deep in avoidance, or believing the misleading propaganda that downplays and justifies this genocide. But you need to pay attention, because it’s characteristic of the world you’re in — there’s no place you can go that won’t be touched by this genocide and the attitudes that fuel it and arm it and protect or excuse the perpetrators.

And if anyone wants to ask if I condone what propagandists call ‘acts of terrorism’, I would ask in reply why they care more about two deaths in DC than one hundred in Gaza on the same day, why they care for the lives lost on Oct. 7, 2023 more than the tens of thousands of people whose lives have been taken nearly every day since then, along with their homes, schools, hospitals, libraries, universities, and access to water and food for survivors. Valuing one set of lives more than another is the source mistake, the mindset that is being illustrated in all its destructive potential in front of our insufficiently horrified eyes. If we value human life, then “never again” means everyone, everywhere.

This is why the sign I made says Humans Unite. It is my one wish, one thing that could take us out of this nightmare: if humans recognize one another as equally human, all precious and all indispensable, we couldn’t create and sustain this situation. It would stop.

If you really don’t know what’s happening, please look and learn. Since mainstream news outlets are participating in biased narratives, I recommend the following news sources and reflective writings: Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera English, Al Jumhuriya, Haaretz (paywalled), Fady Joudah: A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation, Henna Platform, Mahmoud Khalil Letter to my Newborn Son. And this just in: Arwa Mahdawi once again speaking truth.

This is the other side of my Humans Unite sign: Stop Punishing Palestinian People, (free Mahmoud Khalil) - I like to have a message on both sides.

I write this because I really don’t know what else to do, and it’s better than nothing. I printed up a book of poems for the same reason (mentioned and shown here) - if you are interested in the poems, please contact me. I will send you a copy in exchange for a donation to WCK or MSF or groups that help in Gaza if they are able. Please click on those two links for more real-time information on what’s happening in Gaza, unfiltered by political agendas.

Screenshot of Doctors Without Borders Instagram

on travel and respect

~~ The following was written in June 2020 ~~

I was thinking about travel. About how it's so often used as a status symbol, reinforcing the idea that the world is the playground of certain rich people. How the whole structure of tourism, as an activity - more importantly, as an industry - is a method of propping up powerful people's ideas of themselves. I was thinking about respect, about how hard it is to convey it as a traveler (perceived as, but distinct from, a tourist,) and as a white American. And then I had the though a nation founded on respect would not end up like this.

The attitudes are well-demonstrated through US domestic travel during the pandemic.

People going to beaches and summer homes as usual, or perhaps more forcefully than usual, asserting their entitlement in the form of freedom of movement, the same way colonists burst onto this so-called landscape and declared it a place of freedom while ignoring the fact that the entire place was already people's home.

A tourist goes somewhere to vacation, to seek exotic comfort (ie, pleasant relaxation that is comparable to home but purged of responsibilities) and a stimulation of the senses along preconceived channels of enjoyment: show me the ruins, the traditional dances, the things I've already seen pictures of while planning my trip.

A traveler, I like to believe, enters willingly into a situation of not knowing, seeks to learn, to see who the people are who live and think differently, and to meet them. To bring oneself in contact with someone else and share what each has to teach and learn.

Including but not restricted to the human inhabitants of a place - the traveler's teachers may be birds and animals, the sea, the air, the plants, the architecture, or the ancient markings of previous cultures. The traveler's request is please allow me to walk here awhile and absorb, with humility, what this place has to say.

Well, that's my ideal, anyway. There are not enough such travelers in the world.

Because of course the tourist brings more money, and tourism-the industry has to favor whomever is bringing in money.

Thus the feedback loop of entitlement: wealth and conspicuous consumption create ever more entitlement because they are given free reign to disregard local custom, or bend rules, or find loopholes for environmental protections. The rise of entitlement is dependent upon the decrease of respect.

Our nation was never about respect, (see black activist response to the 4th of July if you need clarification) and this has clearly led to the situation we're facing now. As many have said, the coronavirus is laying bare the rotten problems of the society and government, with inherent, enshrined inequality as the most degraded core. As with the tourism industry, in order to maintain comfort for the entitled, it is necessary to find legal loopholes and build intricate, obscuring edifices to protect the illusion of liberty and justice for all.

This inherent, inherited disrespect, with its commitment to delusion, is bringing the nation down now. It had already rotted out the inner workings and broken any systems with a pretense of fairness, and all it took was a so-called leader who is unwilling to pretend at being fair, who is simply voicing and embodying the self-serving, money-grubbing values that have risen the ranks of power in spite of language praising liberty, democracy and justice. Now the rotten fruit has burst and we are infected by its rank truth. Notably, the whitest of the white still want to deny it

- as if the virus itself were a symbol of white privilege, and to maintain the veneer of the status quo, the layer of shellac that holds it together, they have to ignore even the fact of a plague.

I think about travel because for much of my adult life I've been living outside the US, and visiting places other than where I was living. Experiencing other cultures has been a way of life. Now I'm tasked with experiencing American culture, to the exclusion of any other place, and it's forcing me to look at why there is so much exclusion in the experience of American culture, the extent to which it is defined by exclusion. Not that this doesn't occur elsewhere - but in places where it normally occurs, where xenophobia and a hierarchy of cultural purity are strong, there is usually not so rich a mix of people. To have a nation of such diversity simultaneous with an emphasis on homogenous culture made the US dangerously unhealthy, long before the virus came along. The power holders have never been able to acknowledge and embrace the multiplicity of peoples contributing to the American nation, and the struggle to maintain homogeneity of power and narrative has simply exhausted the potential that promoting a diversity of perspective would have given.

Travel within the US, September 2023 - Grand Tetons, ancestral land of many peoples

There is an urge to end on a positive note, to not say it's too late. And I will remind myself of what a friend told me: we have a moral obligation to be optimistic. My life has largely been a process of un-learning dominant cultural paradigms, and so I should be able to put my faith in this groundswell of the vocalized richness of potential in our country.

Combined with the devastation of the virus and the exposure of the ineptness of established systems, the current of Black activism can cut a new path for the flow of effort, lit up by truth.

on being 8 years old and changing schools

Note: Some of these essays will be old… I’ve added an image from early 2019, because that’s when I wrote this, during a time of ‘morning pages’ practice.

Two strands of thought, from Toni Morrison (A Knowing so Deep, quoted in Leticia Nieto’s Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment) and James Baldwin (I am Not Your Negro, film) are running through my mind with force.

He was out of the country and came back, and always emphasized the American-ness of the problem. A problem of American society, not a problem of race or race relations. He said it’s not a question of what will happen to the Negro, it’s a question of what will happen to this country.

And this deep knowing, the deep knowing of the wrongness of defining American life as white society, of equality on white terms (as long as black people behave properly) - this constant qualifying of all black Americans as a monolithic, generic entity and as a thing about which white people can make judgements and blanket statements - the deep knowing of the depth of this ignorance, this willful ignore-ance has live in me like a growing, ravenous worm for ages. For my life.

The removal of me from public school at age 8, when I had black and latina friends, when I wanted to invite black girls to my birthday party & didn’t understand why they couldn’t come, when I sat behind Lavada and admired her puffy, spiraled pigtails that ended in a narrow tip with a bright plastic barrette. When I admired double-dutch jumprope as a cultural and physical triumph that was beyond my reach. The removal of the 8-year-old from this environment (ostensibly due to the threat of ‘bussing’ - we would be put in buses and driven to another part of town to go to school, whereas I could walk a few blocks from home to my current school) and placing her in a costly private school (which required taking a bus, 20 minutes’ drive from the bus stop several blocks from home) was the strongest early message to me that a good life, a good education, meant a place of white people.

The message was you belong here, not there. And the definition of that belonging was that others didn’t belong, like the girls who couldn’t come to my party. My good life was dependent on the exclusion of others from my daily experience. People of color, people who were poor, were going to degrade my education and that’s why my parents had to pull me out. The KCMO school district was always to blame.

Morrison: “In your silence lay not only eloquence but a discourse so devastating that ‘civilization’ could not risk engaging in it…”

The subversive discourse has been bubbling in me, but it rarely finds eloquence, it rarely finds words that can speak it - partly because the discourse of “civilization” is so fortress-like and repellant: the ideas, the attempts to change the paradigm bounce off like arrows. The defensive force field has been built up at the expense of all moral inkling or human compassion, leading to the “emotional poverty” and “terror of human life” Baldwin sees in (white) America.

The fortifications, the notion of protection, justify everything (as with the NRA, the militarization of police, the unprovoked and unpunished killing of young black men) because on the inside of the fortress is one’s own “family”, purely defined as one’s own flesh & blood. Family is not a human concept, it’s a self-defining, self-sustaining, defensive concept - defined by who is not family, so that the very idea of “protecting one’s family” becomes an agenda of racial purity, of creating a color-free zone, because color is a threat to whiteness, and whiteness is the essential definition of the “family” that needs protection. Black children don’t need protecting - they are fair game for attack when venturing into areas of white dominance, or for arrest and bullets when simply existing in their own neighborhoods.

All the vocabulary used to justify the laws & systems that continue to segregate us are about protecting the idea of whiteness.

The short version is, I have always felt that my life is enriched by those who are culturally different from me, and that human connection is worth the risk of the unfamiliar.

In this respect, white America is hell-bent on impoverishment.

Feb. 8, 2019