What is numbing and what is life? Is all enjoyment of life numbing? Is watching a TV show, going to a concert, going skiing all just glorified, legitimized, celebrated temporary escapism from this hideous hell of a world? Why couldn’t life be something we didn’t try to escape but loved the reality of? Why can’t we make it beautiful instead of hateful? These are the types of questions that swirl around in my mind these days as I try to live my life alongside the genocide in Gaza. If you scroll through my phone’s photo reel you’ll see what I mean. Shortly after October 7, there are an unusually large number of screenshots versus family photos. There are hundreds of Palestine-related screenshots of photos of pleading children, sobbing mothers, slogans, reels, YouTube videos, protests, calls to action (vote this way, call your rep about this, email about this).
Interspersed between these photos of horror are photos of my other life: hikes, playgrounds, friends’ houses, dinners, lunches, a science museum, a trip on a little Steam train with my sweet and carefree toddler, a comedy show. Nothing changed in my life in the physical sense. I live in the same house, work the same job, have the same family (thankfully), walk the same route for school drop-off and pickups.
And yet everything changed.
The pain in my life shot up. The dials on various negative emotions turned up:
- Guilt: This genocide is funded by my taxes. They wouldn’t be able to do this much damage without Western weapons. I’m not doing enough to stop it. If my child was in the line of fire, I’d have dropped everything. Here I am just going to work and not mentioning world events at all, pretending like nothing has changed. The only concerns I’m permitted to express to colleagues remain that my zoom upgraded at an inconvenient time, or so-and-so from department X isn’t aligned on my proposal.
- Helplessness: What can I do to stop it?! What can I do to even save or help just one person? I get lost in thought contemplating the vastness and complexity of The Empire and their ruthlessness in crushing any nascent movement against them. Their factories, their ammunitions, their propaganda, their lies repeated over and over again until they become the teleprompter in the minds of unthinking individuals. To rise up in any meaningful way against The Empire is to risk life, limb and torture. They can inflict so much pain on a person that a person wishes for death as an escape. I’ve heard many people in Gaza wishing themselves dead. This world is capable of horrors far worse than death. No doubt many activists in the world languish in prisons, punished for the supposed sins of wanting a better life for humanity.
- Fear: Of the growing racism I feel every day. Of knowing that this event shows that humans have made very little progress in valuing human life – the progress that has been made is exclusive to a club. One day we can be in the club, another day we’ll be out. The gatekeepers of the club, the billionaires and the political elites, can change the rules as they wish at any time. As people of color, we are especially vulnerable. It’s a matter of when, not if. We will all be painted as terrorists or something else. They’ll always invent a reason to justify our slaughter, for example, Trump’s accusation that Mexicans are rapists and murderers. We will likely see violence against people of color reach expanded and deeper levels of horror when resources get even scarcer with accelerating climate change.
- Anger, Shock and unresolved bewilderment: What kind of sick dystopia is this where killing and maiming people is branded as the ‘fight against darkness’? Why is it my burden and responsibility alone to care about humanity? Why must the lives of people with empathy be impacted when people who don’t care can go about living a happy life? I’m about as related to a Palestinian child as someone who doesn’t care at all is. In many cases, staunch Zionists if they are actually from that region are closer blood relations to the people being obliterated than I am. How can they not see they are hurting themselves? How can they not see that a child being painfully killed is not just my child being painfully killed but our, collective our humanity’s child, being painfully killed?
It’s hard to swim out of this whirlpool of emotions. But as we are in day 129 of the genocidal war, with no end in sight and the horrors mounting every day, we have to have a sustainability strategy, and I fall back on logic and pragmatism here.
What can an activist do to take care of themselves?
- Be in a community that cares: suffering alone is worse than suffering in a group. Find a group of other activists, and if not that, at least other people who care about the issue, and are willing to converse about it (most people who care about something want to talk about it). It doesn’t have to be all you talk about. But I don’t believe it’s helpful to surround yourself only with people who are “kind” in the broad sense, but who sweep an issue as big as this under the rug and don’t bring it up at all. Make new friends if you have to. Friendships grow and evolve, they are not supposed to be static.
Khushiyaan baatne se badti hain, Dukh baatne se kam hote hain
Happiness becomes greater by sharing, Sadness becomes less by sharing
— Hindi quote, no idea what the original source is
2. Divest – from relationships that are toxic. I tried to “convince” people of my perspective, but then after a few weeks of fruitless back and forth, I’ve realized if someone thinks there can be good reasons to kill a child, or that a child’s life should be conditional on who they are born to, they’re a lost cause. Your energy is better spent educating people who don’t know enough about it but are curious, than those that don’t want to see the truth. It’s best not to engage in debate with Zionists and leave their DMs/comments unanswered. Don’t fuel the fire, you both get burned by the debates. If you are going to engage in debate, pick up the phone, don’t do it over text or written word. Too much gets lost and open to (hostile) interpretation with the written word.
3. Act – wilting in misery of thought without action is the worst experience. Try and take an action a day, or an action a week or whatever pace is manageable for you, and whatever action is manageable for you. Posting on social media is acting. Since the mainstream news barely covers the Palestinian experience and in a very biased way when it does, every like and reshare helps more eyes see the unfiltered reality of what’s going on. Raising awareness through conversation with friends is acting. Voting is acting. Going to a Palestinian restaurant is acting (Beit Rima for my Bay Area readers). Buying clothes from a cause-driven organization like “Wear the Peace” rather than a commercial store is acting. If you’re a teacher, teaching a class is acting.
Consumptive behavior like reading a book on the history of the region (The Hundred Years’ war on Palestine by Dr Khalidi, or Noam Chomksy and Ilan Pappé’s short and highly readable ‘On Palestine’), watching a documentary (Israelism) should be coupled with some kind of act. Educating yourself is a very useful enabling behavior. But just consuming for long periods of time without creating is pointless and unsatisfying – most people who are reading this blog are too smart for consumption to be their main activity in life.
4. Rest and allow joy – We cannot always be ON. I feel so much guilt about this, because of course the people in Palestine don’t get to rest. They don’t get to sleep at night for the cold, the bombs, the hunger, the disease, the wetness of the bare soil in their tents. BUT you not resting or not taking care of yourself does not alleviate any of their suffering. Take care of yourself. Rest. Take breaks. Do something you love. Find joy. You, who have a beating heart connected to humanity, deserve the most joy and the most love. Let yourself have it.
5. Be kind to those around you: In my desperation to “help the world”, I sometimes forget that taking care of my child or being kind to my partner or to a colleague is also helping the world. Ugh, I cringe at the corniness with you, but it’s true: Charity begins at home. So if you have small opportunities to be helpful or kind, or compliment or smile at someone, take it up. It adds a little bit of kindness to the harsh world.
