a better world

(originally published Oct 27, 2023 on Substack)

The ongoing genocide in Gaza is at its darkest moment. All of it has weighed heavy on my heart.

My first inkling of something being Wrong with the world came with my understanding of my identity as a Black person in the United States. The reason I couldn’t trace my family tree the way other kids could growing up is because it was stolen from me. My ancestors were kidnapped, raped out of their lineage, and turned into animals. I have no connection to Africa that isn’t vestigial — my nose, my lips, and my eye color gesture at a homeland I do not recognize. My family just popped into existence from soil our ancestors’ blood watered. 

Molding history in such a way requires power that is inhuman to me. To look at someone with a few aesthetic and cultural differences, then decide those differences inherently make you the arbiter of their fate, is a mentality I find inaccessible. It’s a choice to dehumanize. It’s a choice to lie. It’s a choice to erase. It’s hard to look into another human’s eyes and declare they do not have a right to exist. It’s not as hard to toss unruly animals into a cage.

The news coming out of occupied Palestine is the culmination of so many axes of arrogance. I see and read so-called “truth-tellers” and “allies” become the mouthpieces of lying regimes with documented histories of every single lie. Stories of Arab terrorists beheading babies get worldwide front page coverage while Gaza runs out of body bags in silence. Occupying Zionist forces bombed a hospital after a week of sadistic warnings, then their social media accounts engaged in cartoonish bait to distract people while they dropped another thousand pounds of munitions elsewhere. In full view of the world, the sadists in Israel toy with millions of people’s lives, and the only thing people with revolutionaries on their walls and bookshelves do is excuse it as “the nature of war”. What war? Gaza is not a sovereign state. Gaza is no-man’s-land, a legal technicality existing outside of legality, both a state and not a state according to the excuse needed in the moment to slaughter its people. If Gaza is its own state, why can Israel, a foreign power under this definition, declare it illegal for it to build its own infrastructure? If it’s not a state, then why can Israel decide to bomb the people under its administration with impunity? What war features a captive population with no army being attacked with high tech weaponry with no aid allowed? Why is Israel even able to bar humanitarian efforts to begin with? These simple questions are unanswerable to liberals outside of the usual “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

I thought that genocide would be everyone’s line in the sand. My mistake was in expecting people to recognize it at all. Liberals pride themselves on the moral superiority their “impartiality” affords them, and that means when someone says (in English) that they’re not committing genocide, that’s the end of it. They’re not like emotional leftists with their refusals to compromise, because the world was built upon compromise! Everyone must turn away from violence except for when the violence is against targets, then everything must be done to eradicate them. Poison the earth with righteous fury, not grief or pain, and when the smoke clears, always remember that “they” started it. 

My disdain for the machinery of the Western world has turned into utter disgust. I have no grace for cowards who dress up in progressive causes only when the blood has been washed out. Every famous evil in the past was conducted under their gleeful watch. I drafted this when 4,000 Palestinians in Gaza were being buried in mass graves while Anderson Cooper corrected his use of “civilians” when referring to them, now I revise it while Gaza endures indescriminate bombing without telecommunications. The US government’s official stance is that the Gaza Health Ministry collaborates with terrorists and is lying about the number of dead. It’s barbarism trying to convince others of its civility.

I’m not sure what to do with this rage I feel. I think something fractured in me and revealed depths to it that I don’t know how to deal with. Writing, creating art, and speaking about it feel like grabbing for kid tools when I’ve been tasked with digging a mine. But I know a better world is possible. I’ve been sitting with myself and praying to all who listen to decide what parts of my political education can stay or go, and I keep being guided back to Black American history and the horrors my people survived. So here’s my new mental rubric when faced with two parties in conflict:

• If one imposes similar conditions to what kept my ancestors in bondage upon the other, my support will start with the subjugated. 

• If one party is described as animals like my ancestors were as justification for their brutalization, I know the descriptors do not need me to waste sympathies on them. 

• If people are sent into diaspora clinging to fragments of old lives they will never return to, I will do everything in my power to advocate for their right to return to the same homes they left. 

Above all else, I cannot ever trust or respect people who make excuses for this current world. It is traitorous to humanity itself to collaborate with today’s status quo. Good intentions will not free Palestine, it will not end discrimination, it will not solve climate change, and it will not put an end to the structures squeezing our only Earth for more pennies in immaterial profit. Continuing to support the same evil with different faces is described as insanity in fiction. Only in the real world will people try hard to convince you it’s “rational”.

The United States looked at itself after experiencing plague, continued poverty wages, unsustainable price gouging for corporate profit, housing held hostage by petit digital bourgeoise, and crumbling infrastructure, and decided to write a blank check for an occupying force that celebrates the chance to create an ethnostate. It’s a betrayal of the highest order, yet laughably par for the course for the longest-lasting banana republic the world has seen. The anger I feel will color the rest of my life, and it will motivate me toward a better world.

Because it will exist. It must.