yikes // another semi-regular offgassing of wtf-are-we-doing // 10-19-2024 (Patreon)

Zionism is white supremacy. Israel is a white supremacist military state. It is a colonial project dropped onto a piece of land that nobody asked anybody else’s permission to use or collaborate on. They just showed up and said this is ours now, law says we can have it, get out or submit—with broad support from the war-planners of the 1930s and 40s, who also did that, and wrote the aforementioned law about it. It has existed in apartheid for its entire history. Just like so many nations we recognize today. This is the tapestry thread that the dominant cultures we coexist within are woven from.

There have always been and will always be people who believe they are smarter, better, and more deserving than others, people who put themselves and the people who look and act like them on a pedestal and view anybody who doesn’t like some kind of pest to be: at best, dominated; at times, tolerated; and at worst, exterminated. Xenophobia and exploitation are the sickest perversions of competition, where deception is rewarded with power, where we all tacitly agree that this is a fine set of rules for a game, and follow those rules devoutly. It’s blind domination just for winning’s sake, because it feels good to win, right? To have proof that you're the best?

We have been watching the same horrors we always knew were, sort of distantly, humanly possible. It’s happened before, to people, at some time, yes we’ve seen it, but no not here. Not us. Old pictures and stories and stuff. Maybe an ancestor or something. Maybe we saw it close up, but that was then and this is not then anymore.

We’re watching the execution of horrors that at some point in our sweet young hearts we couldn’t have even imagined, at an ever quickening pace, becoming more unabashedly sadistic, with unprecedented access to weapons of devastation and terror and torture. We are watching it creep outward and seeing the ways it has already crept inward. Please do not misjudge what your eyes can plainly see. Let it haunt you. Please let it in. This is a very important moment in the becoming of us all. It's already happening. We are in this moment all together, no matter how we choose to navigate it. No matter who wins. Whether you're watching or not. It’s not us vs them, it’s just us out here acting really insane.

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So what do you say to the guy who tells the other guy he can’t just take his backpack? Just give him your stuff, man, it’s not worth it? 

What about the guy who won’t stop murdering entire families, aid workers, journalists, fire bombing hospitals and schools, playing the sounds of crying babies to lure out the concerned to shoot them for sport? Rounding up people and torturing them, using them to trip minefields, posting videos of it to their social media--laughing, and insisting it’s so very funny.

What do you say to the guy, who says he’s not cool with that anymore? Do you say anything at all? Or do you just quietly slip away, hoping you won’t be noticed, trusting that you won’t have it that bad if you just lay low? What do you say when it’s your turn, when the hiding doesn’t work, and you can do nothing but speak up? What do you do when everyone scatters like rats, trusting that they won’t have it that bad, if they just lay low?

Is this really how we’re going to deal with this, y’all?

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We really need a reckoning here that we are all part of the same thing. Even the sick parts. Same thing. Just like the dark and difficult parts of yourself are still a part of you, the same is true about humanity-at-large. There aren’t people who are better and smarter and more deserving than other people. Those people are actually also just regular people. So are the people who have less and struggle more, or have more and struggle less. And the people who have given incredible gifts to humanity, and people who have taken so much from humanity. And the people who have soft hands. And the people who have no hands. And the people who know everything about anything. And the people who are really bad at skipping rocks. They’re regular people too. Nobody is more deserving of safety, of kindness, of pleasure, of nourishment, of clean water, or of peace, than anybody else. These things cost us nothing but our presence and respect to have or to give and to maintain. To take from, or to deprive another person of those things is an act of violence, of posturing, and of animalistic dominance. Even on a minute, interpersonal scale. These freaks have probably never trusted another person in their life. Or maybe once they did. Just the once though.

We have to be better, and we have to hold each other accountable to being better. It’s all we have.

Thanks for being a real one.

~amelia