A hundred years ago one writer identified antiwar work as a difficult and lengthy business
It feels intolerable to realize how many of our neighbors are genocidal racists. How many others are indifferent and unmoved. How commerce and trade and normal relations can go on while genocide is ongoing. Our minds are repelled. We’re emotional wrecks alternating between panic, guilt, rage, and helplessness.
From this place we write our laments.
The world has failed.
We have allowed this to happen.
We are cowards.
These are our human reactions.
The lament is necessary to feel the futility of appeals to our elites who are more rotten than we could have imagined; to feel the futility of appeals to laws that are on the books but that depend on these same rotten, racist elites for enforcement. When we tell ourselves that we have allowed this to happen because we are cowards, we are challenging our own courage.
How could we not? We share the world with people in Yemen who have said that they will support Gaza even if the sky falls; we share the world with Aaron Bushnell and a growing number of political prisoners. The people of Lebanon had their villages destroyed, thousands killed. The people of Palestine are struggling against a whole West bent on exterminating them. Are we doing enough? It’s a good question, a just question.
But, my anti-genocide friends, we have to focus!
We have to accept the reality we are in. We can’t afford illusions about power we don’t have. We aren’t allowing this to happen: we lack the power to stop it. (more...)
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