Enough. Time for a New Plan
On a daily basis I see dead children. This is not a sentence anyone should have to type, or read, or relate to. That’s how I know things have gotten out of control. That’s how I know that if it’s at all possible, we need to make a change.
First things first: Why am I seeing dead children every day? Because every day children are being killed, and the killings, the aftermath of these killings are posted on social media.
It’s kind of hard not to notice, to be honest. Just refresh the timeline.
Who is killing the children? Israel, mainly. Who are the children? Palestinians, mainly. But I’m sure it’s a lot more complicated than it seems. Blowing kids to literal smithereens is a nuanced issue, where many can be right, I’m told.
Compared to the many harrowing stories I’ve heard about October 7th, 2023, I’ve seen thousands more with my own eyes since*. These happenings on a daily basis — a stream of reminders of the cruelty of humanity — have removed the response to October 7th (described as a genocide) to the happenings of October 7th (described as a terror attack) so far as to make the reference to the original almost a non-sequitur, a disassociation that seemed impossible at the time. But we’re here. And we’ve seen enough.
*None of this is to say that the timeline starts on October 7th — not for Palestine, and not for me. People have different entry points to the reality of how Israel behaves in the place it considers its own. Mine occurred in 2014, when an unseen actor in the Israel Defense Force directed an airstrike at a group of boys playing together on the beach of Gaza. But I won’t spend time here walking you through my own personal hallelujah. They’re everywhere you look (but you have to look).
Say I’m right. Then we can talk
That any discussion of Israel’s conduct can only occur after the precondition of all parties condemning Hamas is a cruel joke that has made fools of us all. Huge portions of the population have been coerced into supporting a degree of collective murder that situates them among the least well-regarded in history.
Maybe it seems like I’m here to scold. I’m not. I just want to know — what’s our plan for ending this?
What we’re all doing now
I don’t want to make excuses for those who’ve gone about business as usual. Maybe they’d say, “We’re grinding.” Maybe they see that many are standing up, and think, “Someone is already standing up.” I don’t know. Maybe there’s something in human nature that makes it easy to ignore anything that’s not happening to you. Is that why so many don’t speak about the atrocities committed against Palestinians by the US-entangled entity Israel? Could it be that the real reason people say nothing is because they’ve actually made a conscious choice to ignore the issue? I think it’s plausible. What if Israel/Palestine conflict is a distraction from “trying to make it,” and therefore can only be cast the briefest of glances? From paying the rent, the mortgage, from stacking a slightly higher pile of money, because the knowledge that the world is a cutthroat place isn’t new. ~“Those people being exterminated is their problem, not mine.”
What would this mean, if it were true?
Does the pursuit of a luxurious life provide worthy absolution? Is that enough? Is “doing your best” anything if it’s only the best you’re doing for yourself? Maybe there’s an excuse in our nervous systems — there has got to be some aspect of the horror of being alive, of being an organism trained by evolution to strive for purchase despite the striving of other descendants of the fertile, hasn’t there? How would we expect a survival of the fittest organism to function in an unfamiliar milieu?
Any chance it’s that complicated? Or does the apathy here fall in the category of, “I know full well it’s happening but I’ll comfortably deny the scene in plain view until it literally kills people I care about, and even then…” that we saw adopted during COVID? That we see with climate denial? In Red vs. Blue team-think politics? In sports fandom, in religious zealotry? ~“Let’s do brunch and ignore the obvious” — that the people who don’t want to talk about what’s going on likely agree with the ends, if not the means.
Oh, heck, what am I saying? They’re fine with the means too.
Some will argue this point — “Of course the way things are happening is bad, but-” Their issue is not with me, but with their indoctrination into the sick worldviews concocted by those with endless wealth and laundered through the media and political class they own. This programming is the thin veneer that allows them to rationalize the impossible, that allows them the cognitive dissonance necessary to see a child’s head blown off and feel nothing. This child, and all the others, was born to the group we agree to disdain, you see.
How’s that ignoring going, anyway?
Well, wouldn’t you know it: among you unfeeling types, there exist a sensitive sort. A kind of person who defaults to assuming other people are full emotional beings with realized inner worlds just like them. Someone who does the difficult emotional task of mentally experiencing the lives of others in order to gain some sense of why certain things aren’t okay. What racism, sexism and ableism do, and why recognizing these moral cancers is important. Why dehumanizing is dangerous. This type of person has been experiencing an entirely different set of events. They don’t see ideas and ideologies fighting — they see tanks detonating nurseries. They see futures shriveling up like the abandoned babies in demolished NICUs. To someone like this, there is no moving beyond what’s occurring — no watching a Netflix special, no escape in a comedy show while the suffering of starving children is felt. Each life taken is a lance between the ribs, each family extinguished a shotgun blast to the heart.
What’s it like to go to work at the same time you see your peers being butchered in a prison city across the ocean? What’s it like to log into ADP knowing that you’re feeding into the society that is necessarily choking the planet to death to pursue its too-slow status quo technological advances? Hurry up with the animal unextinctifier, the forest regrowacil. Why is it all lithium ion dogs and foldable karate robots and forever chemicals? Why is it never the bad guys from the movies getting blown up, but little kids I witness scattered in pieces on the timeline in hundreds of configurations daily? Or maybe I’m complaining too much. I’m alive to witness the pinnacle of human technological advancement, aren’t I? Isn’t it some consolation that the species I’m a member of has superficially shed the trappings of its barbarism? Isn’t the ability to talk to a Scarlett Johanssonesque neural network worth the extinction of most megafauna?
Maybe I’d be swayed, if every other point in history hadn’t also been the “pinnacle of human technological advancement” for those alive to justify their allowing ominous dominos to fall and keep falling. What it looks like to me, instead, is that we’ve all collectively decided to bury our heads in sand.
No leaders. No adults in the room.
We’re alone.
This is your brain on Anavrin
What’s it like to be an empath during the genocide? Last October, I started finding out. I call it Anavrin: the opposite of Nirvana.
Imagine you’re about to take a nap. Not literally, but you know — things are peaceful and warm and safe, maybe your belly is full — you could easily curl up and doze for a few minutes. Okay, that feeling. Now, the heart-in-throat falling out of that safety. Add a BOOM or a smattering of ear-ringing detonations. Flashes of white-hot light that signify the end of an unknowable number of lives. A not-so-distant conflagration, a collective scream. A flash of footage, one burned into your brain — something you should have never seen, but you saw it. Feelings, memories, thoughts, sense memory, emotion. This was a life, erased with pleasure. And this, and this. Snuffing after snuffing. Identity and narrative and the calculus of accumulated experience, each body a complicated novel of events, each child a miracle — the newest descendants of a long line of successfully reproducing human beings deleted, after eight months of torture. Joining a pre-pre-pre-kindergarten non-graduating class of tens of thousands. These kids existed, had names, had joys and fears and tantrums and spontaneous dance moves, and now they are smoke and ribbon, shrapnel and confetti. Now they are only the names we must always speak.
The shock of being a witness and needing to stay afloat. Your job, where you’re thinking about the task you’re meant to be doing moment to moment — the ability to hold space for that task is gone. You’re a buzzing pile of nervous meat. You’re a body, a non-player-character. You scroll, and you gawp, and you reluctantly perform the tasks of your job. This is your brain on Anavrin. Stochastic dehumanization material. Emotional terrorism, the kind of triggering imagery that suggests the empath’s worldview is an illusion— that the mind of the other is more like the hell it creates in places like Rafah, Jabalia, Al-Shifa.
Which children am I referencing? Which life? Depends what day it is. Because chances are I’m talking about some kid that just died an hour, two hours ago. Some kid who was growing up in some of the cruelest environments to ever be concocted, eating scant handfuls of whatever in order to stay alive, and now they’ve been reduced to arms, legs. A body without a head, being desperately hefted aloft for the lens of a camera to capture, so that the image of this person’s entire world shattered has the barest possibility of moving the needle in the direction of some end to the carnage, some way to make bearable for others what has been so unbearable.
And we repost the image.
And we go to work.
And we refresh the timeline.
Under a photo of a child killed, her head smashed from the collapse of the building she was inside, possibly playing, probably preparing fearfully for death, a commenter chides: “This isn’t a picture from today’s massacre.” We are conditioned that only the most recent death is to be mourned. Tomorrow, the more than one hundred women and children slaughtered in what is today being called the Tent Massacre will be old news. And that is what makes it endless, and what makes it feel hopeless. There are countless horrid events to recount, to memorialize. An exhausting cacophony of stolen voices, screaming silence. But the killing doesn’t end — as you’ve compiled the latest unspeakable image into your mental film reel, the stakes are again doubled. And the maddening rationalization of the perpetrators continues to spread.
How to argue with insanity?
How to fight a gaslighting abuser and win?
I raise my shaking voice, and you do too — and those we thought better of scoff, pose, lie. “The real victims,” they say, the ones that live in their heart and harden it against these new ones, “still deserve to be avenged, a hundredfold,” though the victims’ no-longer-living selves might have recoiled at how their ghosts have now been used. The opportunity for mourning the original event was immediately waved away in favor of immediate wanton retaliation, as though a meticulously planned endless slaughter kept in a bottle was uncorked the moment the green light of history shone on the first published comparison to September 11th. If 9/11 could lead to the ill-wrought destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, why shouldn’t the new addition to the Calendar Atrocities lead to the stomping of Gaza? Why shouldn’t 10/7 lead to the blaming of babies for their own deaths?
Oh, right, I forgot. These babies aren’t real, and if they are, they support Hamas. How could I have forgotten my propaganda?
The old ways abandon themselves
Why write this? What’s the point? On the honest level, it’s partially because there are times when I feel such anguish, such emotional pain, that writing is the only thing I can turn to that will relieve it. On a more optimistic level, it’s partially because I think writing is one of the only ways we can still reach one another.
It’s not enough to notice things are incoherent, out of control. We need new leadership, and new actions. The systems we have now have shown they bring us to a terminus of unrelenting failure. Continuing with those systems is no longer an option. They must be exited. And the question of “how do we relinquish our grasp” on oil, on material goods, on socially constructed value stores, on private jets, on the comfort of the billionaire class — is not a futile handwringing anymore, not now. The energy in the system is different now. Beyond simply imagining that Jill Stein or Cornel West or Robert F. Kennedy could be the President, we can imagine a country that doesn’t control its populace with President Worship in the first place. We can imagine a world that doesn’t include the United States and its military at all. We can imagine a world that moves forward from the failure we’ve so clearly witnessed to this point.
What if what has felt impossible to change, from our perspective as powerless consumers trapped in a capitalist prison, is now simply inevitable? A number among us have the will to partake in toppling the barbaric systems, but hasn’t the house of cards begun to topple itself? All that has to happen is that enough people opt into a new reality, one that isn’t hell-bent. You can make that decision right now, even if your programming leads you to a different answer.
Eyes open, honest reckoning. This can’t continue.
Time for a new plan.
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