Around this time last year, MC Abdul first found his way into my YouTube feed with his Shouting at the Wall music video. You might recognize him from Macklemore’s Hinds Hall 2, but MC Abdul was still new to me then. This young Palestinian kid rapping these painfully vulnerable yet defiant lyrics while walking past piles of rubble in Gaza, felt so opportune as Israel was pounding Gaza with 50 bombs an hour during those first days of this ongoing genocide. But the video was actually released on June 29, 2021, a little over a month after Israel responded to the Unity Intifada with 950 airstrikes that killed 256 Palestinians (66 children) and destroyed 1800 residential units. In May of 2021 I had just moved to Cincinnati and was barely keeping my head above water, sleeping on blankets in an empty apartment and barely paying my rent as a “homelessness prevention” caseworker. My solidarity ended at posting some memes on social media and reading some articles on Electronic Intifada. And then I went about my life, almost immediately forgetting Palestine. The Israelis, however, were calling for genocide.
MC Abdul is 15 now and it has been a year that I have not stopped thinking about Palestine, every single day, multiple times a day, from when I open my eyes in the morning until I finally drift off to sleep. Remembering has become my religion and I pray with my feet, my voice, my writing, and my future. My partner demanded that I admit that I had changed on October 7th, 2024, and he was right in a way. I threw myself into the movement almost immediately, sensing that if we didn’t do everything we could to stop the genocide in those early months that it would drag on. All that organizing activity and care was not new for me, but it was dormant. Before October 7 I was just getting by, aware of the metacrisis and the machinations of capitalism, but emotionally separated and safe in my own little version of the American Dream. Now I feel it all and am learning how to channel the grief and anger as I hold vigil. I am becoming more human, more expansive, and more determined. I am letting go of my attachment to modernity and exceptionalism while repairing my capacity for connection – to the Earth and all peoples. Collective liberation is no longer an abstraction, but a multigenerational project of resistance and creativity that I will be weaving strands of myself into every day for the rest of my life – a journey my now ex-partner is not interested in taking with me.
In that spirit, I’m going to share a few things that I’ve come across in the last few weeks that have helped me to orient myself through these increasingly choppy waters.
“We have to stop thinking that in order to have rights someone else has to be stripped of theirs. Democrats show performative disgust with Republicans and their disregard for human rights, while simultaneously insisting that we need to ignore some people’s human rights in order to have our own, in order to maintain the status quo. And that’s really it, isn’t it? Our status quo is killing Indigenous People in order to get what we want. And we think that by doing it again, just this one last time, that we’ll buy ourselves enough time to accomplish all the things we need to do to “maintain” our democracy. As if anything of integrity could be built on the back on genocide.
We’ve been tricked into thinking we live with scarcity. That it isn’t possible to create a sustainable society. But that’s only true when we believe it. Once you stop it loses all its power. Just like any cult. I mean, did you see the DNC? It was pure political theater, starring billionaires and war mongers. With a crowd of cheering liberals acting like it’s a 1960s Beatles concert. I’m surprised underwear weren’t thrown. I don’t understand how anyone can take the party, or the government, seriously after that. But people ate that shit up, rose colored glasses firmly in place.” – from I’m Not Giving Up. And Neither Should You by Lindsey Moon Hartzel
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