It’s day 267 of the genocide in Gaza. I try to go about my day, I go to the store, to the park, drive my car, do my work. But I am surrounded by screaming. The images from this week’s bloody assaults on al-Shati camp (a decades old refugee camp) and al-Mawasi camp (a newly established refugee camp) are seared in my eyelids, the screaming just rings in my ears. I see a child in a cart in the supermarket, playing, laughing – but I blink my eye and see severed limbs, see children covered in dust and blood emerging from the rubble and the smoke. I see a baby, emaciated, bones showing through paper-thin skin, screaming and howling in anguish and pain. And I blink again and return to this side of the world, where people are going about their days, blinded, numbed, unaware or aware but feeling powerless and afraid.
Cowed into submission by bills, debt and promises. Watching with disbelief as this so-called ‘democracy’ presents us with two decrepit white bigots, both of them genocide supporters, as our only options for an ‘election’ in four months. As I went to the ATM today, I thought of something the late, great anarchist thinker David Graeber said, and I paraphrase here: ATMs are accurate pretty much 100% of the time, and they use pretty similar software to the election machines – you need it to be secure, you are presented with choices, you click through to select the choices you want. So why do we accept a certain margin of error with voting machines? Why is it ok for these machines to be so notoriously inaccurate?
Because it is not a democracy, it has never been a country ruled of, by and for the people, has never been a republic ruled by the will of the public. It has always been the facade of a democratic republic, and is instead (and always has been) an oligarchy ruled by and for the elite to maintain their power and keep all of the rest of us yoked to their carts and doing the labor so they can profit. The same genocidal corporations that are killing our planet for profit are profiting off the genocide of the Palestinian people. How long will we sit back and pretend that this is ok? Their greed depends on our apathy, on our feeling of powerlessness, on how tired we feel at the end of a day working for them, wanting only to escape to some better place on our screens.
Well, I don’t know what your screen is doing – the corporate control of the algorithms may have wiped this genocide off your feed by now – but mine is showing me the corpses of children, the burning of tents, the bombing of hospitals, the torture of imprisoned civilians until they are emaciated, amputated, hollow-eyed and trembling in terror. The hunger games are upon us, and we are seeing a would-be hero shouting at us from in front of a burning hospital full of the charred corpses of the innocent: “Fire is catching, and if we burn, you burn with us!”
Here we are, in the age of land acknowledgments and apologies for the genocide of the many Native nations that once lived on this land we now call the USA. And yet just the other day, I read in the British ‘Guardian’ news site (not in any US media of course) about a group of Cherokee high school girls in Arizona getting expelled from their Catholic high school for practicing ‘satanism’ because they participated in a Cherokee coming-of-age ceremony.
This country started in genocide, and it has never ended. It has just expanded – from this country to countries all over the world.
And now we are expected to just continue the charade and vote for genocide or genocide in November?
At the very least, we can all vote third party and actually break the stranglehold of the two corporate parties controlling Washington.
It’s a start, anyway.
