*Please forgive the double email, this site is funky sometimes*

Listen to the sound of my voice…

This one’s about bodily autonomy, how these violent mfs need to keep their hands off my trans homies, clear out a doll’s crowdfund and fight for the living > protect the dolls t-shirts, Palestine as post-apocalypse and social media as (overflowing) grief container, D’Angelo, and how we’re all antifa in the state’s eyes and might as well act like it.

And if y’all got nothin’ else out of my words, I end this one with a reading of To My People By Assata Shakur.

Love you!

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Writing is not coming to me as easily as I’d like, but I needed to get some of my jumbled thoughts about how important valuing and upholding our collective humanity is going to be in the coming days and years.

So you get a lil audio rant instead.

About getting COVID amidst this current surge, Charlie Kirk and peak white foolishness, AI’s special place in hell, the DRC and the colonizer’s violence turning inward, and the recent, apocalyptic death count update in Gaza.

In all these things I see a world where the powerful are trying to get us to abandon our own humanity and that of others, especially the ones they deem disposable. I say fuck all that! We all should.

Thank you for subscribing and thank you for your support! I got mad love for y’all!

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If the US government orchestrated a self-serving colonial project to establish a safe homeland for us as overdue penance for slavery

And a small group of white American and European colonizers deemed that a long-inhabited part of Guatemala was to serve as this homeland

With a claim that we were there long ago, backed up by broad bad faith interpretations of the Bible

So we kicked hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Guatemalans (Maya) out of their homes and violently forced them off their land, killing as many of them as we could with the help of the so-called western democracies

Taking pride and pleasure in torture and extermination

All with the claim that anyone who didn’t support this was anti-Black and in favor of Black people being enslaved again

And we set up a genocidal, apartheid state turning Guatemalan natives of the land into less than second class citizens

If we sent our teenagers on “birthright” trips to further their indoctrination and match them with soldiers and others in the “homeland,” to “further the race”

If we considered those currently living on the African continent weak for being from the same stock as those captured and stolen by Europeans for the Transatlantic slave trade, but also used them as props to justify our colonial project in the “troubled region” of so-called Latin America

And we killed an untold number of Guatemalans with the money, political and media support, and armament of the most powerful nations in history

For decades

If all these things were true

There is nothing in my mind, body, or spirit that would bring me to support the “Black cause in Guatemala”

I would feel compelled to fight against this project with every part of me, and to collective with as many of my people as possible to reject and stop it

So what are we to think when we hear the same lines from Zionists?

Other than that they are in full support of the extermination of Palestinian people and the wholesale theft of their land

The bad news for them is that the Resistance, in all its forms, will not bow, will not break, and will not leave the land that is truly theirs

Landback for all Indigenous people is the only way we make it out of this mess

I hope we catch on sooner rather than later

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Today is my 40th birthday.

40 years ago, I was born in a winter storm in the wee hours of the morning. My dad biked through the snow to be with my mom to welcome me into this world. And now here I am, half a wise guy, thinking out loud to strangers online.

Between being Black in America, being an alcoholic (now in recovery), and being suicidal most of my life, I never thought I’d make it this far. I think not expecting to survive the passing years, or often not even wanting to, has dulled my tendency to want to celebrate birthdays. I’ve had a few big parties since childhood, and even a really sweet and dearly appreciated surprise party my sister held for me just before the pandemic began. She even set up a fake Eventbrite and printed tickets to make it look like we were going to see a singer perform. Got my ass good. She did her thing!

Today I’m feeling reflective on what life’s been like this past decade. A lot has gone down. I’ve experienced great triumphs and great loss, as is true of any life I know. And I’m grateful that I can spend time with my parents and sister later today. Though different in degree, being able to go home is something I’ll never take for granted again, as we witness today’s images of Palestinian hostages returned to their families after as much as 40 years in Zionist Occupation prisons and torture chambers. Amidst the horrors of the day, there’s something still to be said about truly militant resistance. A fine birthday gift of empathetic relief and joy at the sight of liberation.

I don’t remember if 40 ever seemed old to me. I’ve long felt like I’ve either been 8 or 80 years old, for reasons good, bad, and in between. I’ve caught COVID a couple times that I know of, and as it’s been confirmed to age us with each infection, who knows how old I am biologically.

As a kid at least, I was always in such a rush to grow up. And now that I’m grown, the main thing I miss about being truly young is the vitality and relative lack of responsibilities. Kids in our culture are absolutely oppressed though, so I would never want to trade the autonomy of my adulthood for their lot in life. I get to rest my mind, body, and spirit today, which couldn’t be said of my youth. And I hope that our kids get the liberation they deserve on this front.

However I choose to reflect on the years that led up to this one, I will always be grateful to my parents for not instilling in me the obsession with living one’s life on a series of deadlines, as far as accumulation and accomplishments go. I lucked out that they haven’t been like typical Boomers. Having kids, being married, or owning a house were never things I set my sights on too intensely. I know if you’re younger, you probably feel immense pressure to achieve these things and more on an unrealistic timeline. Maybe you feel futureless given how flagrantly violent and neglectful most everyone in power is globally. And I can’t imagine what this world looks like through a kid’s eyes.

I believe your 30s are for fucking up in ways that are hopefully more instructive (and less destructive) than the mistakes and harms of your 20s. I will try to be gentle with myself on this front, and I advise you to do the same if you’re looking at 40 and thinking it might as well be 400.

The last several years have also been a process of ungendering for me, and unlearning what’s left of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. This includes letting go of the need for external validation. No mean feat as it’s absolutely something that was beaten into people my age. My sense of self ebbs and flows as far as how gender-full I feel. And dwelling on it non-constructively has also been like being drenched in colonial ways of thinking and living. How I present obviously has its own power that I have to be cognizant of. But even that is affected by my Blackness. In a constant state of figuring it out feels like what I can expect for however long I have left.

I’m willing to be a lifelong learner of ways of living that uplift and liberate those around me (and an unlearner of annihilative ways of dying that serve no one but our oppressors). I think that life is a series of recommitments. To ourselves, to the people we love, to growing into who we were meant to be and then growing some more. It’s certainly not a linear process, for anyone who thinks that once they turn XX their life is over.

After Long COVID made life feel more precarious and accepting disability a new reality for me in 2022, I’ve spent more time riding my bike in the past year than at any point before. I don’t know what healthy even means for me right now, but I have felt more comfortable in and able to move my body than I have in a long time. I’m told I look good for my age, whatever that means. I suppose it depends on who’s saying it. And how long does that last exactly, this whole matter of finite desirability and being fit for consumption by society?

Hitting such a round number of an age, it’ll be an adjustment weaving around the criticisms of all the things people think I should or shouldn’t be doing right now. I’m still learning that since I have no control over it, what other people think of me is none of my business. That understanding does seem to be an undeniable perk of proper old age.

I’ve accomplished a lot of what I wanted to, and I’m also nowhere near a lot of other things. Most days I’m accepting that this is fine. Maybe even that there’s both time to be grateful for what’s come before and time left to do the things I’d still like to do. I’m still learning to both not have regrets about the past while also not completely shutting myself off from it. I can only control myself in the present moment, so we just have to work with that.

The last year has been one of great loss and devastation for the global collective. Both humbling and horrifying to say the least. And at the personal level, I’ve never gone through a breakup, lost loved ones, or spent a year-plus looking for work while bearing witness to polygenocide.

Thank you to my parents for pushing me to keep going and to stay true to myself without pressuring me to fit into capitalism’s brutal mold. Thank you to everybody who’s helped me stay sober for the past 13 years. I planned on dying at 27, but instead I came to a stop and stayed that way three weeks shy of that infamous birthday.

Given the sea change I was lucky enough to undergo, I’m grateful to be an old head. And I’m already finding myself inching toward caring more about maintaining my humanity and holding that of others sacred than caring about what people think of what I’ve made of myself so far. Maintaining humanity, even when it’s concerning someone I can’t get something out of. How we treat those we have our own bit of power over, those who might have already been deemed disposable by our system, is going to define us individually and as a culture in the coming months and years.

What I drove, what I did and who I did it with, what zip code I lived in. People will never care about that shit as much as they do about how safe and seen we made them feel. I want to grow more generous, caring, and curious as I age. I’ve seen what those committed to doing the opposite end up looking like, and it ain’t pretty. I’m trying my best not to shit all over this one precious life, especially as someone who got a second chance at it all those years ago.

The farther away I get from my teens and 20s, the more I find myself rejecting the generational game of divide and conquer that media and other capitalists want us to play. What difference does it make if Gen Z clips their nails one way and Millennials do it the other if we’re all being absolutely fucked by the state in the name of endless growth and accumulation for the oligarchy?

What do things like hopefulness and success mean amidst so much death, exploitation, and barbarism? If I get the things I once believed would make me happy and whole, what good are they if I’m not able to share them and lift up people around me? Getting out isn’t enough if nobody else can follow.

I think as many of us face both getting older and becoming disabled by pandemics or displaced by climate change, the acts of asking for help when we need it and being of service where we can will become more vital and more common.

I think I’ve been humbled more deeply in the last several years than I could’ve ever anticipated. As I wrote about here not long ago, not working this long, relying on family and others for help, and not getting whatever brass ring I imagined I’d have by now have made a mark on me. And not entirely in a bad way. I’m reminded that I’m fortunate as hell to have the loved ones I do, that I can still be helpful to those around me no matter what state I’m in, and that I’m not defined by whatever accolades or accomplishments I may be chasing.

I think a lot of people my age were raised to believe we would take the world by storm with whatever it was we set our minds to. Not that long ago, it didn’t seem foolish to be a (self-centered) striver. The lingering legacy of the selfishness and greed of the Reagan years meant you weren’t seen as a bad person for trying to get all you could get, no matter the cost. There was even less thought given to the collective good then.

With our world set to nightmare mode, we’re encouraged to “find community” to survive deepening fascism. I’ve been thinking rather deeply about what that means, as friends and acquaintances have come and gone, and as we witness the need for true community in the face of disasters of capitalism and imperialism such as climate catastrophes and genocide.

I think people can be led to believe community has to be this massively scaled out thing that we have to figure out immediately and permanently. But I don’t know what’s wrong with starting small. We are being encouraged to completely abandon empathy and care for each other on the deeper levels that perhaps don’t come as naturally. Think “Asking your friends to help you move or for a ride to the airport is cringe.”

We’re supposed to care about the male loneliness epidemic, or be convinced that it gets harder to make friends as we age, but what conversations are being had about the ways we ourselves can offer community, and the ways we can reject moving like the oppressors to truly be there for one another?

I will never make any of those rigged 30 Under 30 lists, but I invite everybody who’d be on the “100 under 100 who thought they’d be gone by now” list to join me in committing to being somebody else’s safety, comfort, support, and serenity. We can even start small with one or two people. I’ve been a lot less suicidal, on average, these past few years. Maybe I’m living out of spite for my enemies (Fuck you forever and a day Elon!).

After the last two decade’s climate catastrophes and the ongoing pandemic alone, it’s beyond clear that there is no plan to take care of us or our people on even a basic level. Unless you count throwing billions more in cash at the military, police, and AI as taking care of us.

That said I’m always here to talk for people who feel like dying or like their life has been a waste. And the same goes for those struggling with booze and drugs. If you want to talk through starting to mask again to protect our communities against pathogens and wildfires, I got you there too. And I’m always down to learn from those around me, now more than ever.

I’m not sure what I’ll feel like ten or twenty years from now. What this world will feel like. We might not have that long to live lives that resemble anything like what we’re used to, if these tech mutants, professional killers, climate annihilators, and politicians get their way. If you’re struggling with the idea of the years passing you by, I understand. I refuse to give up hope though.

We only get through whatever the future shapes up to be together.

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If we’re at all alike, you want to believe that as more contradictions are exposed, things are starting to shift slightly towards liberation. There’s the hope that despite all their power and wealth, we never lose sight of how vulnerable and pathetic our oppressors are.

I started writing this before we learned that a suspect in the murder of United Healt…

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Show me the meaning of being absolutely cooked.

She signaled her loyalty to Zionism and capital at every turn and was willing to lose the biggest race in the land to keep that knee bent to the occupation. Every bit of data pointed to the fact that funding and arming Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people was a red line for a substantial number o…

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I don’t know how I feel about using this site as my diary. That’s what Twitter (I’ll die before I call it X fuck an Elon) has been for me since 2008, which is a somewhat terrifying thought. And I’ve been oversharing on the Internet since they were sending free AOL CDs in the mail. But this is where I write for the time being, so I can get into it for a …

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At the time I’m writing this it’s presumed, barring typical Dem scheming, that Vice President Kamala Harris will be taking over half-dead Biden’s failed campaign. I’ve been thinking a lot about (white) people’s expectations of Black women to clean up white supremacy’s violent catastrophes (instead of white folks unfucking the messes their kin create ind…

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This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and now I’m finally able to share it with you. An audio version of my piece on living with suicidal ideation and finding hope and solidarity, “I’m Not Supposed To Be Here,” originally posted here on Rants Rants Rev on March 31, 2021. Some of the things discussed here have evolved a bit, such as the continued unfolding of the pandemic and my ongoing uncoupling from my maleness in recent years.

But the foundation remains: You’re not alone and we can get through even the worst of these feelings together. It can and does get better.

In the future, most if not all audio posts will be exclusively for my paid subscriber homies (and my free trial friends!), but I’m throwing this one up in its entirety for free for folks to listen to and share with anyone who may be struggling.

Thank you as always for supporting my writing. I love y’all!

Rants Rants Revolution is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my future work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I also offer a 7-day free trial here! Thank you!

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And here are some resources for anyone who is feeling depressed or suicidal and/or is struggling with drug and alcohol use:

Trevor Project (LGBTQIA+ suicide hotline/text line)

The Asian Mental Health Collective

National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network

The Loveland Foundation therapy fund for Black women and girls

International suicide hotlines

SAMHSA’s National Helpline – 1-800-662-HELP (4357)

Alcoholics Anonymous

Narcotics Anonymous

SMART Recovery

From Wendy:

“It’s hard to say just how long I’ve been aware of Kasai Richardson on the internet. I know it began with Twitter—seeing posts that I registered as straight-up truth, sometimes making me laugh, and more than once go, Oh, shit… in that way you might when you’re like, This truth is so real it hurts.

“So I’ve been aware of Kasai, and have felt some kind of long-distance fondness for making me laugh, see truth, and also, enjoy some fierce cat memes among his Instagram stories. Then I realized he had a stack, Rants Rants Revolution. And the posts I saw first were these. I mentioned them in a recommendation a few months ago, and/but they are timeless.

“As is my mini-interview practice, I asked Kasai to respond to three to five questions from a total of eight offered.”

Wendy: Take us on a walk through a place that gives you life. 

Kasai: One place I truly know peace is the backyard of my parents’ home. The whole house really, but especially posted up in a patio chair on a warm spring day. It’s truly restorative. It wasn’t always the most peaceful place growing up for sure. 

Their neighborhood was started in the early 20th century by Black professors as a response to the racist “No Blacks, No Jews” housing covenants of wealthy, white Baltimore neighborhoods such as Roland Park. When we moved there in 1995, the Cape Cod with peeling gray paint was overrun with scrap, greenery, and trash that my dad and I cleared out. 

We each struggled growing up, in a number of ways. We’ve worked on ourselves to get to better places in our lives, through therapy, recovery, my dad finally getting his military benefits after being drafted into the Vietnam War, and my mother retiring from her federal job that was needed to provide for us but that also wore her down. Bit by bit my family has similarly worked on that house to make it more appealing and a more comfortable place to live. 

The backyard transitions into a wooded area that descends into a nearby stream, and the trees let just the right amount of sunlight through. My audiophile father has set up outdoor speakers to complement the ever-present tunes in the house and on the front porch. Usually pumping old funk or R&B. I often go over there to bliss out when things feel overwhelming. As a family, we’re all in such a different place now, and the house is a different space as well. I’m grateful for the change on both fronts.

W: You're alone in the middle of the ocean. What are your thoughts?

K: When I was 7, my first year at a private school in Baltimore whose only important claim is that John Waters also attended it, I went to a class party to mark the end of the school year. An old money family with a Dutch name and claimed “we were on the Mayflower” heritage hosted us. There was a pool adjacent to the castle-like main house. I don’t remember much about my walk towards the edge of it or what was going through my mind. 

I took a step into the deep end and commenced drowning, as I hadn’t learned to swim like my classmates. I distinctly remember seeing angelfish swimming around me as the life left my body at the bottom of the pool. My friend’s father, whose family owned the property, saved me after who knows how long. I was the only Black kid in the class and my dad was Mr. Mom, tending to my baby sister and unaware of what was happening until it was over. Panicked white mothers judged him in the quiet yet unsubtle way white folks often do.

For a long time I resented him for not being the one to save me, and for not being as concerned in the aftermath as I felt he should’ve been. This was where I learned the pain of feeling abandoned, but I now know he was just scared out of his mind and doing the best he could while living with his own demons.

Later in life, in adolescence in particular, I had a phase of jumping into water and expecting people to save me. The height of my pre-recovery entitlement and death wish era I guess. I similarly stepped into the deep end of a lot of dangerous situations and behaviors for years. It’s a miracle I’m still here.

Something that’s also on my mind a lot, almost to the point of wanting to write about it, is that the rate of Black folks who know how to swim is lower than that of whites. Structural factors spanning many years, such as the segregation of pools, can be blamed in large part. I’m compelled to learn soon, but it hasn’t happened just yet.

Now though, alone and surrounded by shimmering ocean, I think about the tropical fish I saw at the bottom of that pool. The same fish my father owned when he worked at a tropical fish store way back when. Angelfish, cichlids, gouramis. Thrashing about in the depths, I regret putting off learning to swim still, but accept that there’s nothing that can be done to change that. 

In brief flashes, I’m thinking about how I don’t feel abandoned anymore, even if I might be doomed. I’m at peace knowing I feel more content and more loved than I did that day in 1992 and for many days after it. I can go knowing I’ve been held and seen by so many, and that I actually did some good with my second shot at this thing. 

W: What is your dream life (at night, asleep) like?

K: I’m an insomniac since way back, but my issue these last several years has been staying asleep more so than falling asleep, thanks to getting sober, untangling a lot of internal mess, and ending up with a sleep apnea diagnosis. For a long time, especially before I got sober in 2012, most of my dreams were stress dreams. Missing planes or trains. Teeth disintegrating in my mouth. Being attacked by knife-wielding villains or bitten by rabid animals. Loss of loved ones.

Even as a kid, my dreams were often big, cinematic joints that I could almost always remember in complete and colorful detail upon waking. Lately the cast is often played by people I went to school with who I haven’t seen since Bush was doing lines in the White House. Extras in the little movies my brain makes when I’m knocked out.

Sometimes the dreams feel catastrophic or like a portent of sheer disaster for me and everyone I care about. In others, I have 500 billion dollars and am endlessly baby-birding cash to people from all over the world. Occasionally, I have “drunk dreams,” where I drink or use drugs in my sleep and wake up thinking I’ve relapsed. Someone once described them as postcards from my disease, and I’ve taken them less seriously since.

Recently I woke up from an otherwise mundane dream that had me laughing into the forced air of my CPAP mask because of one of its characters: A nude mountain man snuggling a beehive in a state of unadulterated ecstasy, honeycomb in hand and covered in bee stings. “God damnit Bobby’s gotten into the apiary again!” someone shouted. Another had Mariska Hargitay, television’s Olivia Benson on Law And Order: SVU, showing me her yearbook while we were seated for dinner in a crowded New York restaurant. 

I think a lot about the Black-White sleep gap, and how many of us in general are walking around completely drained thanks to this system we’re clinging on to.

And part of me wants my dreams to be this generative deal that serves as a wellspring for ideas for my writing, especially the fiction-writing part of my brain that I want to jumpstart back to life. But maybe it’s not that kind of party. I know generally people grow bored when discussing each other’s dreams, but I love sharing them. It’s another layer of someone that you get to discover, even if some of it is mundane or goofy. 

To read the rest, peep and subscribe to Wendy’s Buttondown, "Mommy’s El Camino,” here.

Love you!

About Wendy:

Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir, Hollywood Notebook, and the dreamoir Bruja. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, BOMB Magazine online, FENCE, and elsewhere. Wendy is a parent and psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles, California.

Rants Rants Revolution is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my future work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you!

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As a writer, knowing when words fail me is something I have to carry through every moment, whether I’m trying to unfurl a truth, expose a lie, or simply sitting still with my feelings. But especially in moments like those that come after witnessing an American airman self-immolating to protest the Zionist occupation of Palestine. The video, particularly the sound of Aaron Bushnell forcing his body to repeatedly yell “Free Palestine!” until it physically couldn’t any longer, shifted something within me. And sitting in silence afterwards felt like the only natural thing.

Shutting the fuck up and truly turning inward is often necessary when clarity is needed. When the time came to write, whether I knew that my words would connect with anyone or not, I still had to get them down here.

Whatever words one may be holding onto, a time like this demands a question of us: What do any of us know of sacrifice?

Aaron Bushnell knew that presenting himself the way he did, using the exact words he did, embracing and living his truth even though his heart was surely racing, live streaming the whole thing, sticking through the brutal seconds where the lighter didn’t work and cops began to bear down on him, stating clearly that Palestine must be free and that he could no longer be complicit in genocide, were all necessary if his actions were to change something within us.

What does it mean that a white man self-immolating in full military uniform with a thoughtful and measured preamble was what it took to get this many people talking about it? As though the flames that consumed him lit a way in all this darkness.

Western media begrudgingly reported on his death in the kind of context-starved way propagandists have perfected. Bushnell spoke and acted with clarity and purpose, as martyrs often do, and corporate journalists still actively misinterpreted his decision. The political class could hardly be bothered to speak on it, but surely they can hear the screaming. Aaron’s. People’s in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, and West Papua. Africans’, pleading for rescue in the Mediterranean. That of those fleeing violence and climate annihilation only to find themselves indefinitely detained amidst a new nightmare in the US. Yours and mine and that of millions within these American borders.

They just won’t be moved by anything like decency or half-measures. And certainly not by shame. In Bushnell’s video, the responding officer drawing his weapon on the man’s burning body, no longer capable of standing, dying, is a solid encapsulation of the cowardice and heartlessness of our enemy.

Anyone making a sacrifice like his is taking on the suffering of us all, as we struggle together to escape this burning house we’ve been crammed into. If we are truly living in the Pyrocene, we must account for the psychic and physical tolls of an incendiary anger and discontent this profound. Turning millions of acres of forest into ash for the sake of capital. Palestinian children burned by Israel with white phosphorus with impunity. A genuinely young life ended with the aim of trying to get killers and thieves to end their genocidal projects.

The loss of the plants, animals, and humans that are being burned and are yet to be consumed by the fires is still worth fighting to prevent.

Aaron Bushnell should still be here. The same way precious, 6-year-old Hind Rajab and her family should be. And Trayvon Martin, whose recent birthday reminds us of how he was so full of both potential and his parent’s love before his murder. Breonna Taylor should be sharing her radiant smile with her family. Refaat Alareer should still be teaching, cracking jokes, and inspiring people around the world. Nex Benedict should be able to dream of and live out their future, full of love and joy.

And on and on throughout history for the great many taken from us for the sake of maintaining the death cult’s violent, capitalist way of life. Whether our dead set out in life aiming for their deaths to carry on a message of love and justice or not, they are still with us. From the revolutionaries we lift up and aspire to think and live like, to the martyrs whose names we’ll never know. This includes our elders, who have fought for us and lived full and radical lives. And when our children are martyred, on down to the tiniest infant, our bond with and love for them is even stronger.

In no uncertain terms, the fierce love self-immolating martyrs have shown throughout history, by sacrificing their lives in such a way, is born of the deepest possible conviction a person can have. We would all benefit from holding ourselves to their standard.

On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi of Tunisia self-immolated after not only having his food cart confiscated by police (which he’d plunged himself into debt to secure), but also being beaten and humiliated after the fact. He set himself on fire as an undeniable statement rejecting the abuse. His act of sacrifice was witnessed by a crowd and the local press, and quickly spread online. The Arab Spring would take hold shortly after, with Bouazizi succumbing to his wounds on January 4, 2011.

On December 10, 2011, Cedrick Nianza of Congo self-immolated to protest the long-running genocide and displacement of millions of people in the DRC. He shouted “Congo na nga, Congo na nga” (“My Congo, my Congo”) as he burned. He would die days later.

For perspective on how long the resource-rich, African nation’s people, heavily exploited by the so-called developed world, have lived under siege by internal forces, neighboring states such as Uganda and Rwanda, and malevolent actors such as France, the US, and Israel, an as yet unidentified man self-immolated more recently on November 8, 2023. In a video posted to social media, he held a sign which read “Stop the genocide in Congo.” He pushed away those who attempted to put out the fire, collapsing and later dying.

In the martyrdom of these people, and in that of the resistance forces fighting and dying against their occupiers and annihilators in Palestine and throughout the world, we witness an often fatal rejection of “what the ruling class has decided will be normal,” in Bushnell’s words during his final moments. The aim is to build a world where people no longer have to make this sacrifice and can live freely and fully. To fully abolish the normalcy of the hell on earth that the ruling class has created.

Thích Nhất Hạnh’s letter to Dr. King in June of 1965 stated plainly that self-immolation is not suicide (the press then, as now, claimed as much): “The Vietnamese monk, by burning himself, say with all his strengh [sic] and determination that he can endure the greatest of sufferings to protect his people. But why does he have to burn himself to death? The difference between burning oneself and burning oneself to death is only a difference in degree, not in nature. A man who burns himself too much must die. The importance is not to take one’s life, but to burn. What he really aims at is the expression of his will and determination, not death.

“In the Buddhist belief, life is not confined to a period of 60 or 80 or 100 years: life is eternal. Life is not confined to this body: life is universal. To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, i.e., to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people. This is not suicide…”

In recent days we’ve seen a good number of important people (journalists, academics, politicians, the usual) say that we shouldn’t honor or celebrate Aaron Bushnell, or anyone who martyrs themselves the way he did, because people with suicidal ideation need treatment, not that sort of attention.

I think one of the worst things about Americans, along with being unabashed rule-following jerks, is the sheer pride in being dead wrong. I’m gonna name right now that these people don’t give a damn about anyone living in crisis of any sort.

Any time those with power want to prove a point in support of empire and the white supremacy and capitalism at its core, they run their mouths about mental illness as though they care and want to make a change. Meanwhile more people who are truly victimized by systems of dominance, stigmatization, and exploitation get pushed further toward the margins by the negligence and violence of our society.

I’ve had thoughts of killing myself for most of my life. I wrote about it in-depth a few years ago here. If you’ve had thoughts of harming or killing yourself, you’re not alone, and this place is better with you here. They don’t make it easy to see that it can get better, but I’m always here to remind you that it can and does.

In my lowest moments, self-immolation was never a thought as far as how I wanted to end my life due to whatever was causing me pain. So many people live with some form of suicidal ideation, and it can be a truly alienating existence, especially in a barbaric, individualistic, and capitalist country like the US. So there is truly no need to connect this reality with that of the martyr’s self-sacrifice.

Any time someone makes the choice to die in this fashion, I’m forced to think about my own end and what I want to contribute to freeing people both while I’m here and when I’m gone.

I believe introspection is vital to actions large and small that we must all commit to individually and collectively. We know something is seriously wrong with the world as it is. We’ve likely known for years, decades even. Yet what is the texture of our grief? Is the pain it causes worth holding onto? How much longer will our fears stand in the way of the action required to free us?

Suffocating flames climb up your chest and neck each day under our current systems. Survival mode is the only normal a lot of us know. Is today the day you finally drown? How can one be expected to fight when we can hardly breathe? The best way seems to be together, and in spite of how we’re told we shouldn’t care about something happening to our neighbors or to those in another country entirely.

Take note of how settler states pathologize resistance against those who maim, steal from, starve, and kill us and our comrades. Dissent as disease, to hear them tell it. Mental illness is increasingly criminalized, and the ruling class has a vested interest in aligning any sort of fight for liberation with those who they deem punishable and disposable. If Bushnell had died in service of the imperial violence the US military inflicts on the world with all its might, these worms would be calling him a hero. Sane.

Truly brave people resisting these violent ass regimes here and throughout the world, moving with love, determination, and purpose, have long found themselves criticized, imprisoned, and killed by those ruled by the American (and neocolonial) need to make everything about us and what we want.

And for the question of who is sane, what if the ways in which each of us are broken down, taken apart, and reconfigured to make us useful to patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism are what’s needed to piece this world back together? I don’t think the so-called sane approach has any use in putting right a world made indecent and grotesque by people who mock our sacrifices and willfully misinterpret our deeply incendiary love for each other.

Like Bernie Mac said, Fuck ‘em!

None of us want to live in vain. Of course.

The biggest losers you’ve ever met claim that Bushnell will be forgotten. Maybe he will be for people who hang on Joe Biden’s every (dying) word. But Hamas, the PFLP, and Yemenis actively fighting against Zionist genocide have all expressed gratitude for his solidarity. It must be a truly spiritual connection to be as segregated from the world as Palestinian people have been for decades, yet know that people across an ocean are willing to die to express love for them and other oppressed people.

We owe it to those who have given their lives to fight with every part of us. We owe them our imaginations as well as our bodies. It will take all of us to free all of us.

What are we working towards? Especially if you’ve been told anything is possible if you work hard enough and play by their rules. Only to have your heart, dreams, and livelihood smashed and stepped on. And to witness how casually and often the state goes about deserting, torturing, starving, and killing both its own people and those deemed disposable globally. I personally don’t want us to go on to our dying days still concerning ourselves with meetings, emails, debt, celebrities, blind personal ambition, and the like while our comrades near and far are being disappeared and slaughtered.

An expansion and diversification of tactics is needed, here in the US especially. And not just regarding the matter of fighting with the Palestinian people for their liberation, but for all the things we’ve been fighting for here and globally. Bickering online and even face to face about who can say Rest In Power, talking about elections, engaging with disingenuous “allies” who tell Sudanese people experiencing genocide that anti-Blackness is not an issue for them, arguing over the effectiveness of sacrificing yourself in the name of justice using deadly fire, trying to change systems from within, and all the other games we were playing 5-10 years ago ain’t gonna cut it.

Writing and calling representatives endlessly, millions marching around the world, voting in the “most important election(s) of our lifetimes.” And it’s still just been years of the ruling class telling us to go shit in a hat and mail it to our mothers. We’re supposed to simply bear the weight of empire and be thankful for the privilege of dying in their so-called first world. As people set themselves on fire to demand an end to violence and oppression.

I’d no sooner debate with someone over the effectiveness of this form of resistance than I would argue over the fact of gravity. I’m done fussing with counterinsurgents over what is. These people don’t have shit to tell us about courage, selflessness, or what’s right. And no one whose definition of martyrdom would fit in around Capitol Hill circa March 2003 is worth debating the concept with.

The Quran states: “The martyrs are of five kinds: One who dies of plague; one who dies of disease of his belly; the drowned; one who dies under the debris (of construction, etc), and one who dies while fighting in the way of Allah."

Given Israel’s barbaric violence in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria in just these past few months, which has left at least 30,000 people dead and many more starving, imprisoned, injured, and sick, we would do well to honor those martyred under these definitions, regardless of our faith.

Two months ago, an al-Qassam martyr fighting Zionists, captured on the IOF drone footage above, had the resolve while dying to lie in prostration, or sujūd, praying in his final moments and becoming a symbol of resolve and conviction around the world for those in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We are often unable to conceptualize this level of hopefulness in death in this country.

The Quran (2:154) states: “Do not say regarding those who are slain in the path of God that they are dead; rather they are alive but you are not aware.”

The Arabic shaheed, denoting a martyr, means witness. In the west, there will always be critics with no understanding of martyrdom’s role in Islam. There’s been plenty of debate over the meaning of martyrdom in the cursed western marketplace of ideas, as bombs rain down on starving and displaced people during the multiple genocides underway globally.

When others have self-immolated to protest, be it against climate change, police murders, wars, or any other violence or injustice, our society here in the US works hard to plunge the act into a vacuum, in an attempt to extinguish the fire of the martyr’s conviction.

When a Black pro-Palestine protester self-immolated in front of the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta in December of 2023, police didn’t release a name, gender, or identity, despite obtaining a search warrant for the person’s home. And the media didn’t press them to. Lest we be reminded of how far people are willing to go to end the occupational violence of fascist states such as the US and Israel.

In the case of Aaron Bushnell, it’s not been as easy to vanish him as with others who’ve self-immolated because of his ideology and connection with the military, made clear in the video he streamed and posts that have emerged since his death. His status as a white American member of the US Air Force surely bolstered the image of his burning body. Whether he was intentional in that aspect of his actions can certainly be discussed, but how much can it matter now? He’s gone. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide” was a concrete statement for him in those final moments. He created a will beforehand stipulating that his life savings go to a Palestinian children’s relief fund. His neighbor is to take care of his cat.

If we’re going to fight, like really fight, we must take his sacrifice and build with it to struggle towards an end to all genocidal occupations.

Nothing about Aaron Bushnell’s actions was more violent or extreme than what Israel has inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere in recent months and over many decades. Or than what the US has done to exploited and marginalized people since its inception. He even said as much in his video.

Even with all the misery and death we’ve witnessed, almost all of us who are relatively safe and comfortable have been shielded from the sight of flesh made flames by US-supplied bombs, missiles, and white phosphorus in Occupied Palestine, in countries throughout the African continent destabilized by capitalist, white supremacist western forces, in proxy wars with old state foes as in Ukraine, and throughout the American coalition’s vicious assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Most people in the US, especially our cowardly journalists and politicians, could never relate to the type of love the martyr holds in their heart. They lack the range, conviction, and compassion. For people living under siege, being displaced, and otherwise victimized by fascist states and actors, knowing that someone in the imperial core loves them deeply enough to make a sacrifice such as this is true solidarity, no matter what pundits or right-wing professors want us to believe about mental illness or their damn acceptable forms of protest.

The growing global resistance to western hegemony, along with Aaron Bushnell’s and others’ fierce acts of love, should have us thinking more deeply about and taking the actions that will be required of us, sooner rather than later, to remake this world into something less deadly and more loving.

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Further reading:

Read Chapter 1 here, and Chapter 2 here.

The media, the majority of western politicians, and other assorted Zionist actors have been working hard to ignore and discredit the largest global anti-war mobilization of the last two decades, boycotts that have caused corporations such as Starbucks to bleed billions, and the truly hardcore actions of Yemenis to obstruct and outright cut off Israeli shipping that supplies this genocide. They rely on us moving past all this, as has happened before.

We’re witnessing a global, multi-racial, multi-faith coalition that the Zionists, with their violent attacks, retribution, callous and mocking propaganda, and joyful songs celebrating the murder of Palestinians cannot claim. This movement has enormous kinetic potential. Meanwhile, globally, Pro-Israel actions and fundraisers have mostly been all-white, pro-war affairs and death drive rallies, where people threaten and physically attack anyone demanding an end to this and other genocides underway.

As the US and its cronies partner up with Israel in its attempt to enact a second Nakba, the political class there grows even more deeply invested in the disenfranchisement and annihilation of both Palestinians and their culture and identity (as evidenced by the destruction of Palestinian archives, libraries, schools, and so on). And the well-being and safety of Jewish folks there and throughout the world will always come second to that, no matter what propaganda they churn out to weaponize past Jewish suffering for the aims of their present neocolonial project. 

The death-worship and reverence for violence of fascist states such as the US and Israel, in the name of “purification” and “rebirth,” seems to know no end. The ease with which the American government furnishes weapons, money, and political support, and the glee with which Israelis dispossess, immiserate, and kill Palestinians (at the moment I’m writing this, at least 30,000 people, including those who are missing or presumed dead in the rubble) make this clear.

In late January of 2024, Biden’s National Security spokesman John Kirby, a ghoul’s ghoul throughout all this, stated plainly that “There’s no evidence of deliberate Israeli war crimes.” The IOF killed Palestinian people lined up for hours for what scant food relief could make it through militarized Israeli checkpoints, and the US government swears that this is fine and just.

This is the bullshit they’re going with, while a large portion of the world stands against what we can clearly see, hear, and feel in our bodies, as Israel inflicts savage violence upon Palestinians. And after Israeli settlers and soldiers opened fire on the car of 17 year old American citizen Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, killing him in the West Bank, we’re reminded that the United States doesn’t give a damn about its own people, even kids, being killed by the Zionist state.

The US, as a fellow death-worshiping state that itself required the murder of Indigenous peoples, the labor of enslaved Africans, and the destruction of these peoples’ cultures and identities for its creation, shares a cursed bond with Israel. Much in the same way Israel did with apartheid South Africa, arming the regime for years. It’s of course a bond that can be severed at any time by the ruling class in this country. It could be argued, if cynically, that it would even be politically expedient, as a growing segment of Americans is against what Israel is doing. But with so many Zionists of all faiths and backgrounds in politics, media, and business, they cling to this doomed neocolonial project as though their wallets and senses of self depended on it.

Now, with present-day South Africa bringing its case to the International Court of Justice, charging Israel with acts of genocide against the Palestinian people, the former apartheid state is outlining Zionist aggression and barbarism in full detail. Something the US, UK, and the rest of the west have been wholly unwilling to do, as other countries have now joined in to bolster the case to put an end to the killing.

Israel has chosen former Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak as its representative judge during the hearings. An 87 year old Holocaust survivor who is still influential in Israel, Barak has said that he sees no evidence of international humanitarian law being violated. He also recently said that “It may be proportional to kill five innocent kids in order to target their leader.” So he’s clearly very normal and balanced and not bloodthirsty at all.

I’m writing this following the early days of the ICJ’s hearings. American and European news media saw fit to broadcast Israel’s paltry defense, which mostly took issue with how South Africa submitted its case and its lack of jurisdiction. None of the major channels and outlets aired South Africa’s testimony on TV the day before. Now Germany of all nations is offering to go to bat for Israel to intervene in the court as a third party. Germans gonna German in the end.

And more recently, France's minister of foreign affairs, Stéphane Séjourné, said that France would not support the ICJ's decision if it rules against Israel, because accusing them of genocide would be "crossing a moral threshold" and "exploiting the notion of genocide for political purposes.” The French are gonna do what they do best in the end too. 

More will be revealed as to whether the US-backed Israeli regime will bother complying with any subsequent rulings by the ICJ, as impunity hasn’t been hard to come by. And Netanyahu’s Twitter account posted a lot of unnerving shit the Saturday after the hearings that offers a hint as to how things could go: “We are continuing the war until the end – until total victory… We will restore security to both the south and north. Nobody will stop us – not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anybody else.” And one doesn’t need to look too hard to find random Israeli citizens on social media decrying the case, calling South Africans monkeys, slaves, and worse.

That such a detailed case is being levied against the state, by South Africa (who’s of course already been accused by Israel of being in league with Hamas, because sure why not?), still represents a shift against Zionism. And we will need as much force as possible behind this push for Palestinian liberation, from all sides. 

They can try to deny global, Black-Palestinian solidarity all they want (so you know better than the Black Panthers and Nelson Mandela, huh?). They can act like Jewish folks all over aren’t resisting Zionism. They can dig in and double down and hold onto the imperial notion as long as they like. There is no denying the global force behind this fight for decolonization. That outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, who for years have platformed Zionist propaganda and anti-Palestinian incitement, are attempting to turn even the words decolonization and genocide into some backwards ass form of hate speech is telling. They are shook.

From the River to the Sea is unacceptable to these demons, but former Israel Public Diplomacy Minister and current Member of Knesset Galit Distel Atbaryan saying "Erase all of Gaza from the face of the earth. That the Gazan monsters will fly to the southern fence and try to enter Egyptian territory, or they will die and their death will be evil. Gaza should be erased!” is perfectly fine, to hear some people tell it.

The Likud Party charter features from the river to the sea language, concerning “The Right of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel,” and it’s not considered genocidal. While the Hamas charter from 2017 clearly states that they wish to reinstate the 1967 territory for Palestinians, and that their war is against Zionism, not Judaism. This is an inconvenient truth for those still tying Zionists’ white supremacist and genocidal aims to the entire Jewish faith.

Those within the state and media allegiant to Israel’s cause don’t give a shit about Jewish people losing their lives, at least not beyond using the dead as mere political chips to cash in for more US money and the most powerful and sophisticated weaponry available to use on Palestinian hospitals, churches, schools, cultural sites, and displacement camps. 

That Israel has a tactical play, the Hannibal Directive, which allows the IOF to use violent force if it means preventing soldiers (and more recently, civilians) from being captured, says a lot about the value of a Jewish person’s life when weighed against the Zionist project and its aims. An "everyone for everyone" deal was even offered in late October via Qatari mediation (all Palestinians held by Israel in return for all Israelis held by Hamas). Netanyahu killed it off.

When Israeli hostages were returned by Hamas in December of 2023, many of them were seen hugging their captors, thanking them in Arabic, stating openly to the press that they were treated and fed as well as members of Hamas themselves. In the weeks since, many of those released have refused to speak to Israeli media propagandists. And the families of those still being held have accused Netanyahu and his fellow Zionists of using their loved ones like pawns by not accepting deals offering the return of all hostages. 

Even IOF PR shills and politicians have admitted that it’s bad optics for the state if the newly released start going off about how they understand why Hamas had to do it to ‘em after almost a century of Israeli occupation. This makes incidents such as the release of three Israeli hostages, which resulted in them being fired upon and killed by IOF soldiers despite wearing civilian clothes, waving white flags, and begging for their lives in Hebrew, even more despicable. 

The Zionists want to hide behind Judaism, and they demand we understand their barbarism as a justified preventative measure, with an eye towards the Holocaust. They paint criticism of their violence and cruelty as unwarranted and hateful, as paving the way for another Shoah. Yet having been subjected to so much violence for so long, why does Palestinian liberation have to center a debate over antisemitism at all? As though they chose the faith of their occupiers. And how exactly does preemptive genocide work? Who else gets to claim the right to it? Or is it just America’s attack dog who’s earned the right? Also, Germany is right there if you really want to press somebody over past violence against Jewish people. 

The Zionists’ old strategy has worked for a long time, but its hold on people is clearly slipping, in large part because western hegemony and its promises of prosperity and safety for its citizens (at the expense of the global South and poor folks even within the so-called developed world) are dwindling as well. Younger people especially are seeing the brutality and the bullshit means used to justify it. The cognitive dissonance forced into the brains of the older generations is beginning to lift.

The sheer boldness of the lies and propaganda from the US, European, and Israeli media and governments in just these past few months has been staggering, and at the same time, it’s also been self-destructive. 

Because let me get this straight: The only people telling the truth are the ones who are rounding up people for mass executions, starving hundreds of thousands, and dropping thousands of tons of missiles and bombs on churches, displacement camps, hospitals, schools, and homes? Everybody else is a filthy, antisemitic liar? Even the dead? And the most violent and propagandized people in history will be the ones to tell us what’s right and how things should be handled? The brain worms are eating good these days! 

Thankfully, fewer people than possibly ever are buying what these neocolonial demons are selling.

Our complacency and cyclical amnesia, both the result of propaganda and the constant, soul-annihilating death drives of imperialism and capitalism, hold their own value to neocolonial aims. In these coming years, we’ll be expected to swallow all manner of brutality and lies to justify and cover up imperial and fascist violence. We are in the peak age of “they keep playing in our faces,” as nearly every global leader has shown their true colors in just these past few years alone.

The US Congress has approved additional billions in weapons and economic aid to Israel, after its Occupation Forces have killed at least 30,000 people (counting those lost or unaccounted for in the destruction caused by IOF airstrikes and raids) and continue to starve, isolate, attack, and displace many more. And the supposed lesser of two evils Genocide Joe and his ghoulish Secretary of State Antony Blinken have gone around Congress to initiate bombing and other military actions against Yemen for the apparent crime of trying to stop Israel from slaughtering more Palestinian people. The US and UK have had no qualms about bombing the nation, after arming and aiding Saudi Arabia in its murderous campaign against Yemenis for years, to protect Israeli interests. Despite even Biden’s own admission that the strikes on Yemen are not having any effect. He says they will continue, because that’s the type of man he is.

Add to this the fact that the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by Israel’s military during the first 60 days of this latest phase of the siege has been greater than the annual combined carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate vulnerable nations. The US has indeed solidified its role as a partner-enabler state to Israel in the work of killing the world in a number of horrifying ways. Both states must be done away with for good.

We need folks in the west, and particularly Americans, to better understand that what is happening in Occupied Palestine can and will come here. We’ve witnessed echoes of it, in instances such as the MOVE bombing, for sure. The US, Israel, the UK, India, Canada, France, Germany, and so many other “civilized” nations are deeply invested in bolstering the military-industrial complex to aid in projects of endless extraction, even in the face of climate annihilation. And they aim to build a Cop World Order to keep us all in check back at home. 

Police and soldiers from around the world are trained by and collaborate with Israeli law enforcement, Mossad, and the IOF. NYPD has a presence there. Weapons, tactics, and technology have been used on Palestinians for years, and then farmed out for profit to North, South, and Latin American, European, Asian, African, and Australian spies, cops, soldiers, and tech mutants. So much of the violence of over-policing, segregation enforcement, border enforcement, mass surveillance, and mass incarceration in the US can be tied back to the “Deadly Exchange” with Israel.  

This latest escalation that Zionists aim to get away with in Occupied Palestine is exactly what their partner states are willing and eager to enact on us, anywhere people are standing up against systematic brutality, extraction and accumulation, and death-worship.

Our struggles are connected.

This is why they want to build Cop City-like “training facilities” nationwide in the US, because they know what’s coming (and got a decent preview of it globally in 2020). City and state governments supplement federal aid to Israel with millions every year, to ensure a collaboration for future violence against their populations.

And of course, Israel has a hand in the genocides being carried out against people in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as helping supply as much as 70% of Azerbaijan’s arsenal in its aggression against Armenia. When Sudan’s protests were repressed, though the Israeli security and military establishments are somewhat split on the diplomatic approach to Sudan’s turmoil (Why are they involved at all, I have to ask?), Zionist tech and weapons facilitated the Sudanese government’s violence.

In addition to providing arms and training, Israel has held clandestine talks with Congo and other nations to take in Palestinians who have been displaced by the murderous Zionist campaign. In other words, bribing and bullying nations still dealing with the effects of European colonization to further their goal of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.

With all that’s at stake, It’s frankly time to grow up. Or more specifically, to grow our imagination for a better world. Especially for white folks in the US and Europe who are still buying Zionist propaganda at their big ages, and anyone else who thinks these empires and their crony states have an investment in anything besides maiming and murdering, all too often for profit. If your heart is not fucking breaking at the images and words coming out of Occupied Palestine, and the idea that we are being forced to live in a world like this and told that there’s no other possible way to do things, you’ve forfeited your soul in favor of something hollow and vile. 

While we’re witnessing an intense repression campaign in the west for all those speaking up for Palestinian people, if you’ve lost a job, a connection, or an opportunity, be grateful that’s all you’ve lost.

And Americans even talking about their meaningless presidential election, or voting as some form of harm reduction or resistance even, as though whoever is imperial president has ever mattered to those who are bombed, pillaged, and vilified, is so unserious and typical. Even just the last few months of the Joe Biden Experience, from publicly doubting Palestinian death tolls, to sharing the beheaded babies propaganda after even Israel debunked it, proves this is some ‘whoever wins, we lose’ type shit. 

Everything liberals in particular claim will be worse under Trump if he wins (again) is already pretty fucking bad, both at home and abroad. We will not be voting our way out of this, be assured of that. And exit polls and who took what states this time mean nothing to the Palestinian people, so long as they live under siege.

Palestinians ask that they not become numbers when they are martyred. If we’re going to talk numbers though, consider the approximate 100,000 US citizens illegally settled in Occupied East Jerusalem. And 60,000 US citizens who are illegally settled in the rest of West Bank, stealing land and homes, and directly benefiting from genocide, for decades. A few hundred thousand more have settled throughout Occupied Palestine, enacting all the worst forms of violence possible upon Palestinians.

At the time of writing this, the IOF, unable to match Hamas and other Palestinian resistance fighters in its brutal ground invasion, launched attacks on Lebanon at a scale not seen since its invasion of the country in 2006. Much like the US, this is a state in decline, lashing out at everything in sight, including its own people. Suicide, PTSD, and other mental health issues plague settlers and soldiers. The Western media is desperate to make us sympathize with these people, over the victims and survivors of their violence.

Being a member of the death cult always means you’re up for sacrifice too. As evidenced by the confirmation by Israel itself that the IOF killed a good number of Israelis at the Nova music festival on October 7th. Recently, 42 survivors of the Nova rave filed a lawsuit against the IOF, Shin Bet, and Israel Police for failing to keep them safe. A number of the Israeli dead from that day have been confirmed to have been killed by IOF tanks and helicopters, and Israeli officials knew of the Hamas plans for the October 7th operation a year in advance but figured it was aspirational and not actionable.

“Self-sacrifice, within the context of revolutionary action, is an expression of the very highest understanding of life, and of the struggle to make life worthy of a human being.” 

-Palestinian author, politician, and martyr Ghassan Kanafani (pictured above)

Even as Zionism appears more compromised than ever, our demands for those under siege in Occupied Palestine and in so many other places globally must be broader and more imaginative. The usual ghouls repeatedly shut down even calls for a ceasefire as unreasonable, unviable, and even antisemitic. The White House went as far as to claim that such a demand was “disgraceful” and “repugnant.” All as we’ve witnessed people being abducted, starved, bombed, robbed of the right to healthcare, and executed in real time. 

As those living in comfort in the west debate what is and isn’t genocide, an entire people are being deprived by Israel of food and water, save for whatever aid trucks their soldiers let through and what people can scrounge up amidst decimated neighborhoods and displacement camps. Ambulances and medics are being targeted by drones and snipers, with many hospitals bombed into uselessness and thousands of people pregnant and in dire shape. Many people are in need of machinery and medications for long term care, and there is barely any anesthetic available for amputations and other surgeries. 

A public health crisis is unfolding among the survivors of Israel’s attacks, with the spread of diseases such as COVID and bacterial infections compounding widespread, mass starvation and injuries at the hands of the Zionist state. As of January 13th, 2024, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports that there are six operable ambulances left in Gaza. To help over 2,000,000 people.

But asking even just for the killing to stop is the real evil, according to Zionist scumbags.

Their depravity, indifference to suffering, and capacity for violence doesn’t know the meaning of compromise, hedging, or moderation. And thus neither should our willingness to fight, capacity for care, compassion, and sacrifice, or our refusal to accept lies, genocide, and death profiteering be tempered or conditional. 

Through all this, Palestinians still fight, they still hit the dabke, still dream of enjoying Gaza’s restorative beach without needing an Israeli permit, still resist all attempts to erase their names and memories and hopes from existence. We owe it to them to fight too. To do as much as we can day to day to stop this and all other genocides. 

Don’t get it fucked up, return is the destiny of the Palestinian people, and the liberation of many people immiserated and displaced by settler violence hangs in the balance right now. So the time for asking gently is beyond over. No one condoning, abetting, or participating in these genocidal acts should be allowed peace or safety.

Calls for ceasefire, an end to the genocide, an end to the occupation, and the return of land to the Palestinian people should not be radical or volatile demands, if people really want to stand on the business of “Never again.” In fact, demands solely for a ceasefire from non-Palestinians are beginning to feel like the 2020 ask for defunding the police, as opposed to abolition and reparations. 

Palestinians are appealing to the rest of us for a ceasefire with the knowledge that it is the bare minimum to put an end to their suffering.

Especially here in the US, we’ll have to diversify and adapt our tactics, as Palestinians and other resistance fighters and revolutionaries have for years. Because it’s clear the political class and capitalists have learned to absorb even riots at this point. 

I personally hold a deep and unshakeable faith that the old Zionist game is up, and that these current moments are building the potential for a true liberation movement in the face of global, neocolonial violence. These empires and their crony states will not go quietly though, as we bear witness to now. The cost is and will continue to be great, especially for those with the least power and capital. 

So with whatever we’re able to muster each day, we must make the lives of those perpetrating, enabling, and condoning genocide and neocolonialism living hell. What is the place of personal ambition, the frivolity of celebrity, voting for the greatest of all evils, or working ourselves sick to enrich the most engorged and fraudulent people in human history so long as this and other genocides continue?

The spirit of oppressed people and those who would fight alongside them will not be quelled. Even with all their might and supposedly god-given purpose, the occupiers cannot kill the forceful and triumphant idea of liberation. Palestine will be free! And so will we!

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land— the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity." -Frantz Fanon

Read Chapter 1 of Climbing Up The Mountain here!

What does it mean for one to feel safe, anyway? For an entire state or group to feel safe? And how does one reconcile the idea of safety with the fact that others must be segregated, disappeared, deprived, and killed to maintain this facade? Are the many “serious people” in journalism, academia, business, entertainment, and government even capable of thinking humanely about Israel’s genocidal undertaking against the Palestinian people that continues and escalates, in the name of “safety?”

While safety means different things to different people, white nationalists, whether they be in the US or US-backed Israel, in uniform or shorts and a t-shirt, weaponizing “I don’t feel safe!” as justification for brutality, theft, and annihilation is an old story that’s being pushed as hard as ever. We see it with policing and mass incarceration as they interface with whiteness on interpersonal, community, and systemic levels in the US. And in defending whiteness against the threat of the Other and maintaining white supremacy and Western hegemony on a global scale. 

This world will never be truly safe as long as terror states such as the US, Britain, Germany, France, Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Israel remain. And these enemies of peace can sow all the lies they want, but there’s no more hiding the truth of what they stand for. 

Are you anything close to safe if your state has to wipe out an entire people to ensure that the manufactured “danger” is kept at bay? Do you really expect people not to resist their own annihilation? 

Nothing that Israel is doing to Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, and throughout Occupied Palestine currently, and has been doing for decades, is keeping Jewish folks safe elsewhere in the world. And the fallacy that this is a strictly religious undertaking only deepens the threat of antisemitism. Desecrating Jewish articles of faith and icons in service of ethnic cleansing compounds the effects.

When Jewish folks in Jerusalem are beaten and choked out by Israeli police and soldiers for hanging Palestinian flags, it’s not about protecting Jewish people. When an Israeli police chief threatens to arrest and bus pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters to Gaza as a form of punishment, it’s not about Israel defending itself.

Anyone saying that the very real threat of antisemitic violence is due to the Intifadas, the long-standing and current Palestinian resistance, or its global solidarity movement, and not because right-wing fascists are leveling up here and in Europe (with the help of their respective liberal fascists), is disingenuous and rather typically, racist. They want us to believe that we’re nuts for echoing the demand of those in Gaza and elsewhere for a ceasefire, an end to the occupation, and the right of return for the Palestinian people. The Zionists loudly declare that this is a radical call for the genocide of Jews. When it is the Israelis who have been guilty of genocide by all definitions.

Despite the Eve Fartlowcore “The Jews Are Tired” fearmongering, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab violence and Islamophobia are actually getting people harassed, attacked, and killed here in the US and elsewhere. Stories such as those of precious 6 year old Palestinian-American Wadea al-Fayoume, stabbed to death by his landlord, Dr. Talat Jehan Khan, a Muslim woman killed in Houston, and Imam Hassan Sharif, killed in Newark, continue to remind us of whose lives are valued and whose aren’t.

These acts of violence don’t register with western media in the same way as a college professor crying bloody murder because his student wore a keffiyeh to class, because of course they don’t. This type of violence has been normalized by our white supremacist news media since at least 2001. 

Zionists come from numerous faiths, with many of the most hardcore among them being Evangelical Christians. Yet whatever the faith, their mission relies on the false equivocation of Judaism and Zionism, with an aim of creating a psychological buffer that gives them leeway in the American and European consciousness to murder and displace Palestinians.

They are among the most antisemitic people on Earth (e.g. John Hagee), and them claiming to be friends of Jewish people the world over is truly rich. Y’all Zionists got fake friends! Evangelicals only bang with you because they think Jesus is coming back, which will require your conversion or eternal damnation. Take your pick. And of course these people have fuck all to say about actual attacks on Jews, typically by white nationalists, or about the Israeli Occupation Forces killing Christians in Palestine, including those worshipping and sheltering in some of the oldest churches in the world. 

Conflating all Jewish people globally with the cause of the settler state of Israel is both actual antisemitism and vital to the neocolonial Zionist project. Making this into a religious war serves their goals internally and throughout the western world. For one, it’s a large part of what allows them to game the US for so much weaponry and money, no matter how vile their murderous acts become.

“Think about your Jewish friends” treats all people of the faith as a monolith beholden to the genocidal state of Israel and ignores those in the Jewish diaspora and those in Israel who are facing arrest and repression for speaking out, organizing, and acting against Zionism. Zionists have a vested interest in unequivocally connecting Israel and its actions with Judaism at large. And they want nothing more than to erase the diversity of Jewish culture. There’s more than enough evidence of this aspect of their fascist project by now. The harder they can push this, the more easily impunity for the settler and the soldier comes. 

There are those who argue that there is no way any group as historically marginalized globally as the Jewish people can be regarded as oppressors or colonizers. But assuming that 100% percent of a group is good and virtuous makes no more sense than assuming that they are all inherently bad or violent. 

We see throughout history and in the present how Jewish, Black, queer, immigrant, and other people in positions of power who represent marginalized groups are often willing and able to carry water for white supremacy, ableism, and other forms of violence that they themselves are susceptible to. There is also no argument for the level of Israeli atrocity we’ve witnessed recently and throughout history being justified in any way, no matter the cause.

The self-proclaimed keepers of Jewishness and their American and Euro-mutant Zionist pals legitimately believe they have a stronger claim to justice than the Holocaust survivors throughout history, who have long condemned Zionism as a white supremacist, genocidal, neocolonial project aimed at eliminating Palestinians. And a corrupted Israeli society thanks both these elders and those killed by Germany by labeling them weak and forcing many to live in poverty. 

I personally love modern Zionists comparing themselves to lions in their Facebook boomer Minions meme-level propaganda. When they’re more like those snakes that steal eggs from birds’ nests. And then they run back to take the nest and claim it is they who have suffered most at the hand of the bird. Y’all settler freaks know we can see you in 4K right? Then you want to play victim when you get hit with the red triangle? No shot.

The neocolonial victim mindset has settlers crying one second and gleefully pulling the trigger the next. And what is “defense” when you’ve done so much dirt for so long that maybe somebody should put a stop to your shit? Israelis have proclaimed themselves as the children of light, fighting against the children of darkness. These are the actual words they’re deciding to go with. But it doesn’t get more anti-life and eugenicist than Israel force-sterilizing Ethiopian Jews and actively keeping the COVID vaccine from reaching Palestinians (with western media boasting about the Zionist state’s stellar vaccine coverage).  

They want us to be mad about PFLP, Al-Qassam, Al-Quds, and other post-Al-Aqsa Flood resistance fighters deftly taking out their armor and soldiers, while the IOF raids and bombs homes and kidnaps and tortures Palestinian civilians, including children snatched from their families. And Israel has been using drone swarms developed with the help of my hometown villains Johns Hopkins University, and terrorizing those remaining in Gaza and the West Bank with quadcopters with rifles attached to them. Resisting this violent cowardice is the only way forward.

The Zionists and their collaborators and sympathizers want us to mourn cargo ships headed to supply the Zionist genocide effort, thwarted and commandeered by Houthi resistance fighters, as Yemen and other nations are challenging imperial hegemony and Israeli fascism while aiding the Palestinian resistance. They want us to be so mad about beloved, martyred poet and professor Refaat Alareer mocking Israeli lies and propaganda that we condone his and his family’s murder by IOF airstrike. While Israeli citizens and soldiers alike make whole TikToks joking about the Palestinian dead with cruel costumes and skits. They want us to believe that queer people in Occupied Palestine face a grievous threat from Hamas that they would not in actual fascist states such as the US and UK. Or that their lives are in danger for any reason other than the occupation they live under.

They want us to value the navel-gazing whataboutism of western journalists when Palestinian ones, both professional and de facto, such as Bisan Owda, Wael Al-Dahdouh, Hind Khoudary, and Motaz Azaiza have shown us exactly what Israel is doing, in spite of their grief, hunger, sickness, and injuries. Palestinian journalists and others have become famous around the world, in the name of making us all see the violence they’ve faced all their lives. They, along with their families, are being systematically tracked and assassinated by the extensive Israeli surveillance apparatus and military, with the aim of making sure their images and testimony of what Palestinians are living through don’t make it out of Occupied Palestine.

And they have every right to be angry with anyone who isn’t experiencing what they are.

Zionists tell us openly, as has always been the case, that their aim is the elimination of the Palestinian people. They say, with their chests, that the tens of thousands of people killed in just the past few months are not nearly enough for their liking. They tell people in Gaza to go to so-called safe humanitarian corridors, via social media when Israel has routinely cut telecommunications entirely, only to bomb or send in troops to actively target and kill those fleeing airstrikes and raids. 

There is the added layer of how this siege has impacted the disabled among Palestinians, many who cannot move as easily, hear or see warnings or explosions, or receive the care and medications they need to live. A good number of these people have also been disabled as a direct result of Israeli bullets, tanks, helicopters, bulldozers, and bombs, adding to the barbarism at hand. 

The solutions offered by Zionists to stop all this have long been absurd. And they never involve anything like the right of return for Palestinians. This latest phase of their assault is no different. Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir has said that the US and Europe need to take in Palestinians to make room for Israeli settlements in Gaza. 

An Israeli think tank with ties to Netanyahu published a report on October 17th crowing about now being the moment to finally complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, to put a fine point on years of pogroms, carpet bombing, assassinations and executions, imprisonment, and collective punishment. It doesn’t get more Nazified (or British, or American) than creating a think tank to plan the annihilation of an entire people. 

The official Israel social media accounts, one wing of a powerful information war apparatus abetted by the US and the west at large, have been posting like the most jilted, blood-thirsty, racist Harry Potter adult you’ve ever met. And settlers are being armed and encouraged, as they always have been, to enact maximum violence on Palestinians. 

As for the question of whether Israel’s citizens can be held responsible for taking part in the violence against Palestinians over these years and decades, and this urge to fully separate the violent settler from the average citizen, there ain’t no settler state without settlers baby. Israelis protest against their government primarily because of how egregious and ineffective at returning hostages and handling Hamas the campaign has been, not because there’s a massive rift between public opinion of the Zionist project as a whole and state action. Public approval for even the most genocidal of Netanyahu’s and others’ ambitions most often skews toward the majority of Israeli citizens being in favor of them.

Between vile posts celebrating the IOF’s murderous onslaught, to viral songs celebrating ethnic cleansing and Telegram channels dedicated to Israelis sharing photos and videos of slaughtered Palestinians like they’re snuff film trading cards, this is a death-worshiping culture. Much like ours here in the US, if extremely focused in its desire for the annihilation of Palestinians. The average Israeli civilian cannot be excused for not knowing the extent of the suffering these people face, particularly when so few take the 30 days in jail over service in the IOF. The Zionist state identity is built around Palestinian death and displacement, and many Israelis gladly opt in. 

They have created an entirely separate legal system for Palestinians, and the destruction of infrastructure, productive capacity, and property by settlers, police, and soldiers has carried on for years. People are regularly disappeared to Israeli prisons/torture complexes, and the number of Palestinians imprisoned and tortured in them has increased since October 7th, even after the hostage release and temporary ceasefire of late November 2023.

Zionist soldiers and settlers desecrate and raze Palestinian graveyards and homes with their Caterpillar-supplied bulldozers and steal organs from the Palestinians they’ve killed to stock organ banks for Israelis. They use white phosphorus to burn anyone and everyone crammed into the Gaza Strip and elsewhere to the bone, drop American-made bombs that fire out large blades rather than explode, and deploy military artificial intelligence called The Gospel to select targets en masse, to assure the most civilian casualties possible. 

And I will never forget the scenes of Palestinian-American veteran journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral in 2022, after she was murdered by an IOF soldier while clearly wearing her press gear and covering an IOF raid on the Jenin refugee camp. Police viciously attacked her mourners. Even the men carrying her casket. As Israeli settlers used the occasion to steal the homes of some of those grieving her. You have to be truly fucking rotten to not only tell people they can’t mourn their dead, but to attack a funeral procession for a person you killed. And perhaps even more rotten to try and defend this violence.

This is a completely inhumane state that must be abolished. 

Occasionally, Zionists dress all this up with Holocaust-evoking propaganda and double-speak that their target demo of settlers and the squishiest, most naive yet hate-filled brains out there eat up. Netanyahu pops out every now and then to claim that they’re doing it all by the international law book. Though truly, they’ve long felt that there’s typically no need to hide their true intentions or violent actions from the rest of the world. They commit atrocities with obvious glee. And if all this can be done with international law in place, what good is it? 

One thing separating this moment from the ones before it is that they overplayed their genocidal hand, thinking the entire world would rally around them after October 7th, as was done for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.

Instead, what Hamas did has been rightly viewed by many as a necessary act of resistance against a long-standing injustice. And through its violent response, Israel has done great work radicalizing a large portion of the global population, galvanizing a cause to end their brutal occupation and return the land to the Palestinian people.

With ethnic cleansing in full swing, we’ve got to say fuck no to their bullshit, for as long as we’re breathing. And as we head deeper into these new roaring ‘20s, more will be asked of us in the way of action than ever has before. Not once in a hundred lifetimes will I put some sheltered American journalist, politician, or academic, let alone a barbaric Israeli settler, soldier, or Member of Knesset, above a Palestinian person suffering at the hands of and resisting those carrying out or abetting this neocolonial violence.

If the US government’s support for Israel remains unconditional, then our solidarity with and action for Palestinians must be unconditional too.

Chapter 3 will be posted on Sunday January 21st. Subscribe so you don’t miss it, and consider a paid subscription to support my future work. Thanks!

A few questions that have weighed on my soul lately:

Should nothing in our lives proceed in the manner it has, so long as the genocides continue? So long as they insist on this being what’s deemed normal and necessary. Will people better understand now that the things and people that we may have believed to be important, measured, or just, truly aren’t? That a broad and absolute shift in consciousness is needed, especially in the west, as soon as possible? 

How free are we if those who lead us completely ignore our calls and actions for humanity, justice, and reparations?

Do they expect Palestinian people who’ve survived to forgive and live alongside their murderers, in ruins to be rebuilt under the threat of being destroyed by Israel yet again? Do they expect us elsewhere in the world to accept this? To forget it?

How do we carry on with those who are indifferent to or gleeful about the killing and the dispossession? 

How does one witness the testimonies of Palestinians over just these past few months and not come away absolutely shattered, furious, ignited, and changed? How can anyone see armed Palestinian resistance being responded to with a catastrophic level of Israeli bombings, targeted killings, blackouts, blockades, and raids that flatten hospitals, schools, and displacement camps, starving and murdering entire family lines, along with finger-wagging from those living in absolute comfort, and yet still try to justify Zionist barbarism? 

How do you witness this much suffering, especially among Palestinian children and the people who must protect, treat, feed, search for, and mourn them, and make it about how you feel unsafe, from the cushion of your home or office? 

And how does a mind come up with the notion that all this started on October 7th, when taking the larger view of what Zionists have done to the Palestinian people for decades takes no massive effort or leap of imagination at all? 

These questions may mystify or anger those still interested in running thought experiments or navel-gazing. 

Even after decades of violent Zionist occupation–and the multi-faceted, multinational, profiteering, genocidal campaign of brutality, expropriation, apartheid, and denial that’s kept it a reality–there are still many people who see Palestinian mothers and rescue workers and grandfathers and beggars and older brothers and young children and teachers and journalists and street vendors and the smallest of infants bloodied, maimed, murdered, dazed, and displaced by Zionist bullets, bombs, and bulldozers, roaming decimated city blocks, wailing, mourning, in shock but still standing, starving, holding someone they love, or a part of them, for what is surely the last time, trying to hold onto their humanity in the face of utter annihilation at the hands of Israel, as naturalized. 

As a vital organ of the Zionist project and the larger neocolonial and western bodies. 

Yet, we see more clearly than ever that the US, US-backed Israel, and Europe were never the arbiters of mercy, morality, justice, or democracy. Wouldn’t know ‘em if they sat on their laps and spun. The dominant segments of these societies see Black, Brown, and Indigenous people being caged and disappeared, displaced, and killed by their respective states as vital to the function of so-called civilized society. They name it law and order. National security. Safety.

These same “civilized” types are unshakably hostile to the idea of the humanity of Palestinians facing escalating, brutal violence and displacement in Gaza, in the West Bank, and throughout Occupied Palestine. Even when presented with any amount of evidence, they cannot be convinced of the humanness of any member of the oppressed global majority. 

None of their violent bullshit changes the fact that Palestinian people live full emotional, spiritual, and intellectual lives, while grieving, playing, working, creating, and experiencing a range of emotions like any other human being. This is exactly why Zionist politicians, military leaders, and propagandists have nakedly referred to the Palestinians they are killing, injuring, starving, and stealing land and homes from, and have killed, injured, and stolen from for 75 years, as “inhuman animals.” 

The Zionists demand that we see those in struggle against their occupation and all those like it as deserving of the cruelest fate imaginable. It may be tempting to echo their refrain of labeling our enemy animals. But I believe it’s important to acknowledge that the people doing this are quite human. Albeit ones who thrive off of monstrous acts.

They posit Palestinians as people with a state, rather than people living fully under siege by an occupier enforcing apartheid, by its own admission. And Hamas is envisioned as a state itself in the minds of the truly corrupted, an idea meant to conjure up feelings of abject terror. When really these are just people trying to govern and defend themselves in the face of this lengthy and brutal occupation. It’s my view that we should aim for building a world together where an individual or a group doesn’t need to have a state to secure dignity, safety, and freedom. A world without states even.

Many will parrot the Zionist lie that this story is too complicated to be understood, translucent and wholly unknowable to anyone outside the confines of the settler state of Israel. The Zionists and their apologists swear that the situation in Occupied Palestine is impenetrable, yet they immediately lap up unconfirmed and debunked reports and propaganda about beheaded babies and mass rape, to use as justification for their genocidal project and their material and technical support of and involvement in police states and oppressive regimes worldwide.

There are those who still act as though it takes an expert to understand what’s happening over there, as though one needs all the advanced degrees to decipher that a neocolonial project and its occupational forces have escalated an ethnic cleansing campaign in full view of the world. And these Zionist ghouls don’t give a fuck who sees what they’re up to, because they know the majority of western states will fund, endorse, and launder the whole thing.

But what’s complicated about a Palestinian parent holding their dead infant, killed by cowardly Israeli airstrikes on hospitals, homes, and displacement camps, in agony and despair, refusing to let them go? About Israeli snipers looking down their scopes and killing people as they attempt to rescue the fallen, retrieve water, report on what’s happening, or shelter in their neighborhoods, schools, churches, mosques, and maternity wards? About a settler state using the violence of apartheid to create the world’s largest concentration camp, with the material and social support of a large swath of the “developed” world? What’s not clear about Palestinians of all ages, already starved and terrorized beyond belief, being marched naked to mass torture and execution sites by Israeli troops?

And why do we require images and stories of people being subjected to these clear and present acts of horrific, apocalyptic violence and cruelty to understand that what Israel has done for years is unacceptable and must be stopped immediately? Westerners, and particularly Americans, often need to see themselves in those suffering for othered people’s humanity to be accepted. Their minds have been poisioned by white supremacy, capitalism, and neocolonialism. 

And similarly, these people cannot conceptualize someone who is supposedly so different from them taking a stand against violence using violence themselves.

To be asked by strangers on the street and politicians alike, “Do you condemn Hamas?,” after Israel’s escalation of collective punishment, and considering the full scale of just how long Palestinians have been forced to live under siege, is absurd at best, violent at worst. These people see more of a problem with a now-martyred child throwing a rock at an Israeli tank than with the tank bearing down on a child. 

I’m supposed to condemn these people fighting to stop their families, neighbors, and friends from being locked up, starved, and martyred because some no-chin dork at The Atlantic, lying ass US Senator, C-list actor, or Israeli politician with actual bodies said to? No dice. And we’re never expected to condemn the Israeli Occupation Forces (because they aren’t defending shit) and the US military in the same way, of course. 

When Palestinians resist with violence, the most powerful states in the world, led by the US, label everyone within the borders fashioned in the not-so-distant past by said powers as terrorists. They drag up the Bush-era terrorist label, because it’s clear that many long for those days. When really, terrorist simply means anyone resisting imperial violence and extraction. And we’ve clearly seen that settler states such as Israel and the United States will happily offer up their own people as sacrifices if it means furthering the genocidal neocolonial project. 

The same states with ledgers full of massacres, sanctions, drone strikes, destabilization, mass incarceration and mass surveillance, engineered famines, assassinations, and atomic bombs offer themselves up as the standard-bearers of human rights, fairness, and justice. It would be laughable, if there weren’t always immense suffering and massive death tolls attached to their schemes.

The US and Israel have both created their own entitlements to revenge, where attacks on their citizens, insurgent responses to the outsized, devastating, and prolonged violence perpetrated by their governments, mean that grievous harm, trauma, and death can be visited upon even civilians (“the cost of war” as we keep hearing from so-called leaders). For as long as these settler states see fit. And yet on a global scale, victims of neocolonial violence are expected to suffer well and take it.

One would have to live under the type of truly violent delusion that white supremacy relies on to think that anyone facing systematic dispossession and actual ethnic cleansing, for decades, is supposed to just stand there and accept it, and not resort to any means necessary to put it to an end. 

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These people understand it perfectly when the victims of aggression are seen as white, be they real or fictional. Look at how the average liberal American fell to their knees during the early days of Russia’s war with Ukraine. Or when the rebels in any given fictional story are up against the Empire or President Snow. Pointing out the hypocrisy isn’t as forceful when there’s so much of it, but it’s funny how things work.

The reality that people are waking up to, and that many of us have known down to our bones, is that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is both revolutionary and on the right side of history, with clear-cut demands and actions. And it’s connected to struggles around the world against Israel’s partner-enabler states such as the US, the UK, France, and Germany. 

We mourn the great many Palestinians who have been maimed and killed in this phase of the struggle, and in all the years prior during this decades-long occupation by Zionist forces. And we fight like hell and place no conditions on our love for the living, while they’re here. 

Supporting oppressed people when they fight back, and not just when they’re imprisoned and annihilated by occupiers and can no longer laugh, fuck up, tinker, triumph, play, hang out, grow old and fat, fall in love, or speak passionately about what they want out of life, is key to this revolutionary movement.

What we’ve witnessed is nothing short of outright ethnic cleansing. And fuck anybody who tries to erase words from the dictionary or cover this up or spin things to turn them around on the people being murdered and their supporters. Israel has long suffered from a societal rot borne of the anti-Palestinian racism and violence that forms the core of the Israeli identity. This rot is deepened by macabre, ancient prophecy and scripture (such as calls to “wipe off the seed of Amalek” that Israeli politicians and soldiers have turned into a rallying cry), the lust for extraction of resources, and the seizure of property and the capital that’s tied up in it.

The OG Zionists were adamant that the Palestinian people were natives who needed to be set right by their project. Now, modern Zionists claim indigeneity to justify their atrocities. Yet there is nothing that could justify the brutality and theft carried out by the Zionist project, especially as far as this latest siege is concerned.

That doesn’t stop people, especially in the US, from running cover for it. White supremacist Christians who think a special calf must be born in the Third Temple in Jerusalem, in order to facilitate Christ’s return, are running the country of my birth. And they are among Israel’s strongest allies. And these same people have absolutely no problem with applauding the deaths of Palestinians and of anyone else they see as an obstacle to their ethno-nationalist project.

They suffer from a chronic fear that Indigenous Palestinians or any othered people, actualizing the idea to hit back against generations of violence and theft, will act as savagely as their occupiers have throughout time. In the US, fear of Black folks similarly rising up goes back centuries. The white supremacist state and its constituent actors and entities can’t help but succumb to this fear of reprisal, even if it means allowing itself to completely collapse in its efforts to quell it. 

This phenomenon is true in the United States no matter which of the two major political parties is in charge. We know that “in this house” liberals are blood-thirsty, regularly buy into eugenics and fascism as long as their guy is in the big boy seat, require a perfect victim and traffic heavily in victim-blaming. They are often guilty of many of the forms of oppression right wing scum are guilty of, especially where matters involving Palestine are concerned. 

Thankfully, they are not vital to this or any other current liberation movement. Freedom will be achieved in spite of them. We are not seeking communion or trying to build with people who excuse and enable genocide, or who try to dictate to the person who is being killed how (or whether) they should put a stop to it. 

We see how certain forms of resistance are deemed off limits by those who know little of true oppression. The perfect victims and those in solidarity with them must perform state-collaborating, toothless, and sanitized forms of resistance, for the comfort of those benefiting most from the violence we’re fighting to stop. If the settler states’ demands here are not met, then all forms of its violence are legitimized, to hear them tell it.

In similar ways to the reaction to Palestinians refusing to be wiped out, we can also draw a connection to both the past and present of Haiti’s armed resistance to imperial aggression, theft, and subjugation. France and the US in particular have spent centuries legitimizing their own violence, almost always viewing resistance in the abstract and through the lens of a need for unconditional pacifism, despite the historical record and the magnitude of violence oppressed people such as Palestinians and Haitians have faced and continue to face. These powers are still determined to make Haitians pay for their resistance, past and present, this time under the guise of “anti-gang efforts.” The same way Israel demands the right to infinite revenge for October 7th. White supremacist states and entities assume a monopoly on violence, and the rest of the world suffers gravely.

The Zionist state has been highly calculated in its repression, particularly when it comes to anything or anyone that becomes representative of hope or courage in the Palestinian fight against occupation. Symbols of resistance such as The Horse (Al-Hissan) in Jenin, constructed from the remnants of an ambulance bombed by Israel in 2002, was removed and stolen by an Israeli bulldozer in late October of 2023. When the iconic photo taken by photojournalist Mustafa Hassona of Aed Abu Amro in 2018 went viral, it was a powerful moment in the fight for Palestinian liberation. An Israeli sniper shot and injured him later during that same year’s Great March of Return protests, after the photo grew into an international symbol of hope and bravery.

As happens often here in the US and elsewhere, the Zionist oppressors and their collaborators don’t want to hold in their blood-soaked hands the truth that to stop violence (or crime, or the “border crisis,” or whatever they blame for ruining their respective societies), they must put an end to the causes and conditions that push people to desperation and violent resistance. In this case, a years-long, genocidal occupation. No oppressor should expect peace if terror and death are inflicted upon whole families, neighborhoods, and villages, for generations. 

Entire Palestinian families have been killed in this latest siege, removed from the civil registry, lost under rubble and the continued bombing of that rubble, as people use their bare hands to search for anyone who’s survived the Zionists’ barbarism. Many are still unreachable under the thousands of collapsed homes, churches, shops, schools, and hospitals. Survivors have reported to the world that on top of the lack of power, food, water, and medications, the smell of the dead is inescapable. The spread of disease, worsened still by Israel’s refusal to let in aid and fuel to hospitals, is projected to claim even more lives. And the US, Israel, and their goons want us to believe that this is all very necessary and good.

Over the last few months, when analyzing the scale of Israel’s murder of at least 30,000 Palestinian people (counting those missing/presumed dead under the rubble) in this time, a good number of people in the west have focused only on the tragedy of women and children being killed by airstrikes and executions. This has contributed to the erasure and dehumanization of Palestinian men also being brutalized, imprisoned, and killed by the Zionist state. 

It all feels a lot like the language around unarmed Black men here in the US. As though there are caveats a victim must satisfy in order for their death to be a regrettable one. You cannot be considered a “suspected enemy combatant” or “armed and dangerous” and sympathetic (or human) simultaneously in the (white) western imagination. As with the ongoing pandemic, the necropolitics of Israel’s and the West’s calculus as to who is considered disposable in this onslaught swallows up whole generations of people for the sake of extraction and accumulation. The ruling class argues, “Well someone has to die, and it ain’t gonna be us!” 

We have to be better and think bigger than people who openly wish death on us, our friends, our neighbors, our loved ones, and those in struggle throughout the world.

We also witness the colonizer’s re-creation of colonized and racialized men, and especially Arab, Brown, and Black men, as hypersexual brutes who pose a threat to the helpless women of the colony, themselves robbed of agency, as a primary reaction of the Israeli regime, its sympathizers, and collaborators. 

The same kind of white supremacist lies that got Emmett Till and so many other Black boys and men in America killed now posit Israeli women, even ones who are actual soldiers gleefully dancing in TikToks and joking about killing Palestinians, as requiring the intense violence Israel is committing to protect them from the savage hordes.

With no survivor testimonies or real proof of mass, weaponized rape by Hamas (despite its openness to an investigation), and outright lies and unsubstantiated claims boosted by almost all major newspapers and other media, this is a crucial part of the propaganda campaign being used to justify murdering, starving, and stealing from an entire population of Palestinian people. Honestly, get someone to love you the way western news media love using the passive voice to whitewash Israeli atrocities. 

Meanwhile, accounts of Israeli soldiers, settlers, and police committing acts of sexual violence against Palestinians of all genders and ages have been a reality for decades. And those in the west who call themselves advocates for reproductive justice and feminism hardly raise their voices to speak against the current and past atrocities against pregnant people deprived of care and even assassinated, young girls imprisoned and assaulted, or families separated and starved amidst the Zionist occupation. As these victim-survivors are not white, this comes as no surprise. And the abhorrence of Palestinian resistance is typical of those aligned and identified with the oppressors. 

Revolutionaries didn't choose armed struggle as the best path, it's the path the oppressors imposed on the people. And so the people only have two choices: to suffer, or to fight." 

— Fidel Castro, 1967

The other side of the perfect victim requisite being thrust upon Palestinians is that of the perfect survivor, the idea that anyone at the sharp end of neocolonialism must remain ceaselessly resilient. Even after losing everything and everyone. We should reject this notion as well and continue to fight alongside them, while allowing them to be human beings capable of hopelessness and rage. 

People being starved, immiserated, assaulted, imprisoned, tortured, and killed under siege and apartheid don’t owe us shit. Least of all their stories in the hopes of moving us to act, or sympathy for the coincidence of the faith of their oppressors and killers.

When it comes to appeasing or understanding the white liberal and the white conservative alike, taking the high road just leads us off a cliff. It’s clear who out there has felt oppression in their very bodies, and who is able to carry on in life oblivious still to the violence that upholds their privilege and power. We see how comfortable seemingly urbane white supremacists are with saying that “We should kill all Palestinians.” People who very likely consider themselves liberal and “very good.” Some of them even worked for Barack Obama.

Bernie Sanders and other Liberal Zionists want us to believe that under the right circumstances (none of which involve giving Palestinians their land back in its entirety), any minute now, the state of Israel will do the right thing and turn away from its murderous, extractive ambitions. And Democrats have been going harder than even Republicans, selling out for AIPAC checks to rant incoherently about how Israel has a right to defend itself.

Both Israelis and American politicians and sympathizers tell us to think twice before uttering the words “innocent Palestinian civilians,” while also telling us that civilian deaths are a fact of war. They readily criminalize victimhood, as they do with the police murders of the always-specified unarmed Black person, those fleeing Central and South America to cross a militarized US border, and anyone seeking an abortion where their reproductive rights are under attack.

With the unending doubling down of Western governments, Zionists, and their collaborators worldwide, claiming that this is a just war against an evil force, the fact is that this is about maintaining white supremacy at all costs. It is imperative that we reject this foul ass attempt to make us swallow the deaths of whole families, the flattening of entire villages, the wiping out of an entire people, to satiate the white western bloodlust and fiendish aspirations of accumulation.

Viewed through the lens of “white supremacy has a right to defend itself,” Israel’s lengthy, US and Europe-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians makes a macabre sort of sense, clarifying why governments and bad actors of the world are contorting themselves to justify and prolong this genocide.

Many (non-Black) Jewish folks have primarily been granted access to whiteness (though not full membership) by upholding and engaging in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism and violence, much in the same way a good number of groups here in the US and around the world secured their Cracker Card (or a counterfeit version of it) plunging into Lake Anti-Blackness. The fact that many Israelis can claim not-too-distant European ancestry, and the high number of settlers who have moved to Israel from places like the US, should be considered as well. 

For those in Israel or anywhere else who buy into and benefit from whiteness, or adjacency to it, non-white people can be slaughtered or run off their land or locked away for life. And as long as it comforts the colonizer’s sense of self as it relates to that whiteness, the gloves will remain off. At the great expense of the oppressed, of course. Reflection on the part of the oppressor will only come long after the mass graves have been filled. Though truth and reconciliation are hardly guaranteed.

This blood affirmation is passed off as maintaining a measure of safety from outside threats, in whichever form the state wishes to manipulate people into believing is necessary. The Zionists’ broad investment in whiteness, supposedly in the name of protecting Jewish people worldwide, is not paying the dividends it used to, however. And we witness resistance to the very idea of Israel–and that of it being some irreplaceable bastion of safety and justice, while it inflicts terror and death upon Palestinians and its neighboring countries–growing. Nothing that Israel has done or is doing is keeping Jewish people safe from the very real threat of antisemitism, as fascists grow more powerful throughout the world. 

Only a free Palestine will suffice.

Read Chapter 2 here!

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Through austerity, manufactured consent, and a brutal, well deployed unreality in which the pandemic is but a dusty memory, the state has abandoned us. Will we use the lessons of the last few years to work together towards liberation, especially as new threats unfold? This essay looks at what’s happened and what’s next, parti…

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“I don’t just call you son because you’re mine, I call you Sun because you shine!” my father told me, smiling as he knelt down and bolted on my training wheels, then adjusted the straps on my helmet to prepare me for the day’s adventure. He used to say that to me a lot, before the who…

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So.

(Some) people in the US got propped up by the government in unprecedented yet still half-assed ways for about a year and crime went down. Now the tap’s almost completely shut off and “crime” (which is often just conflict and/or acts of desperation, coded by the state as something requiring one’s total removal from society and placement in what are es…

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TW: This essay discusses suicidal ideation and details the thoughts, feelings, and actions attached to it, suicide, addiction/recovery, and death.

It was never The Plan to be here this long. At numerous points in my life, I’ve felt like I was already dead. What began as “I wish I was never born” as a kid evolved into an intense need to no longer be here, often manifesting physically as a combination of nausea and lethargy. As a kid I regularly thought, what if there was a way to just not be, and still be able to hang out occasionally and not have the homies and my family be sad and miss me? This has been how this brain of mine has worked at least. The shallow end of the pool. Deeper in, it gets murkier, and I tend to not care about things like family or friends and their wants and needs.

I made an attempt at suicide my freshman year in college, swallowing some spare oxycontin and other assorted pills, prescription and OTC, washed down with tons of boxed wine and liquor stolen from my housemates in the early morning hours. I was extremely pissed to have awakened in my bed later, puking like shit, but very much still alive. There was no inciting incident necessarily, but I had felt truly hopeless and isolated in the months leading up to that evening and didn’t feel like I had anyone to talk to, or a reason to stick around.

A friend asked me recently how the people I know who’ve died young and unnaturally have gone. I’m Black in Baltimore so murder’s unfortunately number one. Dying by suicide, then overdoses, then drunk driving. 

I’ve never thought I wasn’t going to die young.

There were many nights my family, my poor mother and father and sister, stayed up just knowing a coroner was going to call. I’m grateful to not put them or anyone else I care about through that today, but it’s still a part of my story.

I’m not supposed to be here. Quite literally, in terms of surviving, but even in terms of the space I occupy and the true meaning of home. My ancestors were stolen and brought here to this land, itself violently seized by colonizers set on inflicting maximum suffering in the name of conquest. I will say, emphatically, that I am my ancestors. And I think they want me here, doing things today, even mundane things, that they could only dream of. I couldn’t always see that.

Back in 2012, The Plan was to peace out by my own hand when I turned 27 on the 25th of January, but somehow I got sober a few weeks before instead. I don’t really care about the why, as much as I may over-analyze everything else about my life. I really thought I’d be memorialized like people far more notable than me who’d checked out at that age, rather than just leaving a massive hole in the lives of those who cared for me most, whether I could see that they did or not.

My drinking and drug use was best summed up by three Sheryl Crow songs, taken sequentially: All I Wanna Do Is Have Some Fun, If It Makes You Happy, A Change Would Do You Good. If I was enjoying it, I wasn’t controlling it. If I was controlling it, I wasn’t enjoying it.

It was not the plan to stick this out this long; Maybe get a few days to get people off my back and get back to getting fucked up the way I liked. I’m grateful it didn’t play out that way. I still feel like a baby in recovery, which is a good thing. Lest I start to think I have anything completely figured out. I haven’t arrived at this junction because I’m special or smarter than the average bear. On a freezing January night in 2012, I was just run down emotionally and physically, out of answers, and done fighting. I didn’t even want to cop coke or get carryout booze at last call at Mt. Royal Tavern that night. Those who knew me then know that was way out of character!

My ninth anniversary of getting sober, on January 9, 2012, came and went earlier this year. I can’t help but look inwardly every year around this time. I know I’m lucky as hell to even be sitting here writing this, to have any of the opportunities or relationships or experiences I’ve been blessed with in the time since.

Yes, the compulsion and obsession with getting fucked up is gone, as long as I take care of my shit physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But now I see that living with mental illness is a part of my recovery too, something to accept and not something to be ashamed of or avoid. Getting sober helped immensely, but the thoughts of wanting to die didn’t just go away because I switched my shit up.

Part of me doesn’t want my mom to read this and worry, the way she used to have to. But I guess that’s a difference between me now and me just under 10 years ago. I couldn’t see far enough out past the fog to think about what she felt or needed or dreamed of for me, for herself, or for our family back then. I can find some solace today in a new perspective.

Drunk me would pity my life today. It’s one of routine and relative peacefulness, within and without. And one where I at least make a conscious effort to give a fuck about other people and try to help them when I’m able. I don’t always get it right, but the me of today knows how tired, hopeless, bitter, and lonely I was back then. Life didn’t suddenly go peachy keen just because I stopped drinking, doing coke, and smoking crack or whatever else I could put in my body, but I’ll take this over that any damn day.

I want to be more vulnerable now, every chance I get. Because by throwing that wall up again, trying to convince myself I was all good just by virtue of being sober all these years, in the past, I’ve alienated myself from the people who care about me most. The most recent rough patch I can pin down time-wise—maybe because of the pandemic blending all days into one, or maybe because of how trauma disappears moments and resurfaces them at will—was late summer into fall of 2020. Trying to convince myself I was doing just fine in spite of COVID-19 and the cops and all the fear in the world. That darkness crept back in and I felt, more strongly than I had in a while, like I wanted to die. I felt myself not just passively thinking about it, but planning it. As a teen I planned plenty.

The time before this that I felt most intensely that I wanted to die was when my debt was mounting a few years ago, before being fortunate enough to organize my workplace with my coworkers and get a raise that helped improve my quality of life, after an entire working career of straight struggling, while also busting my ass. This latest round felt even worse than that emotional bottom a few years prior.

When things got real bad in my head, I reached out to a friend to talk through what was going on. Then another. Then my sister. I started talking to myself more gently, and agreeing to not follow negative thoughts/resentments/death wishes down the mind shaft that leads into the darkest part of my brain’s heart. All that said, most times, this has not been an option. There’s that part of me that reads the words above and gets heated, because how the fuck am I supposed to do that shit?! I feel lucky to have made it out from under this time.

The power of positive thinking has its limits of course. I was able to keep that up for a whole week before settling into a baseline just a few notches above everything is fucked and everybody sucks. Through all this, as in every other case, I was still expected to show up for work, process information, be in relationship with others, and deal with all of the little expectations and responsibilities that make up a life. Being able to talk this stuff through with a few people who I know care for me, with no judgment, and really no attempts at advice, just a patient and open ear, truly helped me.

Embracing vulnerability is the only reason I’m still here. This is a lesson I learned years ago, but one I can easily forget. My pride tries to keep me in the dark, separate from my lifelines, from my people, from a solution. It convinces me that only I know the way out of the maze. Pride costs. Sometimes dearly. I don’t want to pay that price if I can help it.

In this latest chapter of my recovery, even though I’ve come a long way from ODing in that dealer’s bathroom in College Park, I see now that this is a lifelong journey of working on myself, and that my mental health is part of that journey beyond just stopping drinking and doing drugs. The thoughts of suicide, which used to come near-daily, now drop by every now and then like a distant friend asking for money I don’t have to give, holding a blade to my throat when I refuse.

If I’m being real, this was hard for me to write primarily because this culture codes these intrusive, scary ass thoughts as a personal failing, and not as a failing due in large part to our systems. This supposed individual failure is compounded if we are perceived as getting or doing better, especially if we end up acting on these thoughts. Recovering from illness, addiction, or crisis, having more things, credentials, status, or accolades, or being in a better place financially. “They had everything, why would they do this?” is the common refrain. Yet it’s beyond obvious that these things don’t always provide adequate shelter from the storms so many of us are trying to live through.

And one does not have to be healed, be recovered, be stable, happy, or healthy to be worthy anyhow. We are all worthy of these these things, and no one is disposable. If you’ve been made to feel that way lately or just in general, I’m glad you’re here, and I’m glad you haven’t given up, as hard as it might be not to.

We’re told it’s OK to not be OK, but the pandemic has demonstrated that capitalism and individualism demand that we remain in tip-top shape, if only for the sake of our own exploitation. Keep spending, keep digging deeper into debt, keep smiling while the ruling class enriches itself beyond imagination. It’s ok to not be ok? You could’ve fooled me. People are peopling harder than ever, and we’re all expected to show up in all the old ways, in spite of immense, collective trauma and loss, on top of all the other shit we all carry.

Of course we’re not going to be OK by default. The chronically mentally ill in this country, diagnosed/medicated or not, have been told we are disposable in a staggering variety of ways. The closing of clinics in favor of opening prisons, ongoing stigma, and the refusal of both major political parties in this country to even entertain the notion of universal healthcare don’t lend to healing, community, or a positive outlook. All of this is compounded for those living with disability or physical health problems, and their risk of suicide is further increased by the disproportionate number of disabled people living in poverty, another significant contributing factor.

Both before and since the start of the pandemic, there has been immense individual and societal pressure on people living with and suffering through mental illness to not disturb the peace of those around us, which just plummets us deeper into alienation and despair. I mean look at us, living through a catastrophic, mass trauma event, stacking up anxiety, debt, grief, and sleep deprivation, then diving into a huge mountain of the shit like Scrooge McDuck, day after day.

This past year alone, we’ve been shown life is cheap in the eyes of those in power, especially the lives of those deemed as expendable (remember that “human capital stock” asshole?). It can feel like all we have to look forward to is death because, as children and as adults, so few of us get the support and resources we truly need. Let alone the chance to experience the joy of indulging in our passions or taking actual time for leisure, connection, rest, and relaxation.

How many times can we tell ourselves, I just gotta make it through this week? I’ve been at it since at least 7th grade. One could argue for an alternative to a system that has almost all of us barely hanging on, but people are quite literally not ready for that conversation.

There’s a boot on our throats, and it also doesn’t help that so many are so eager to throw themselves to the ground to lick said boot and tell us we’re mad not to enjoy the taste. It might feel like there’s no point, especially as the future seems to die a new death each day. But the world is a better place with everyone I know who feels this way in it. We’re connected, all of us, and I honestly couldn’t do this shit without you.

None of us has been untouched by suicide. I have lost friends to it, and I’ve stopped friends in the act a handful of times. The first time I experienced this specific, disorienting feeling of loss was the death of a classmate. We were 13.

A celebrity death by suicide triggers a 24-72 hour window of pseudo-compassion and care-shaming, particularly if it’s someone a lot of us felt a connection to. There are calls to check in on each other, pushes for anti-bullying and mental health campaigns, and the like. Most people’s intentions are good, even if the actions in the follow-through don’t add up. A lot of us aren’t superb at being in relationship with one another, present company included. We’re at best a bunch of works-in-progress, stumbling through this thing, building the plane as it’s crashing and hoping to pull up in time. So an expectation of everyone triaging each other’s wounds when most of us have barely tended to our own feels almost absurd.

Much like how we seem to be passing around the same 20 dollar bill trying to help each other out via GoFundMe and mutual aid while consistently being told by the powerful and wealthy to go fuck ourselves, that one crumb of serotonin we found in the couch cushions is getting passed around too. A bunch of people in the jaws of separate beasts, offering each other wisdom on how to escape their current predicament, ad infinitum.

I think often of all the people we’ve lost to this extractive, exploitative, violent ass system. All their wisdom, their dreams, the things that made them, them. All the unwritten books and plays and poems, the loves that never blossomed, the families they never shared, the unheard jokes and stories, unfulfilled dreams and fantasies, the unpainted portraits and unsung lyrics, the undiscovered phenomena and technologies.

It feels callous to say we made it through a year like 2020, when there are so many of us who are not here who should be. The dead and disappeared don’t have to be, but the machine demands its victims to continue functioning. Balancing survivor’s guilt with the willingness to go on, and maintaining perspective and trying to be of service to people can feel like too heavy a burden, but we don’t have to go any of this alone.

These are alienating times and under this soul-annihilating global scheme, it seems natural to feel alone and apart from one another even long before we were living this now year-plus-old pandemic reality.

For me, loneliness in sobriety is slightly different than the all-encompassing and crushing loneliness of my drinking days. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t creep into my life. I can feel lonely as hell in a room full of my family and closest friends. I have to remind myself regularly that there is a common thread among all of us. I could not have gotten to this point without the love, support, patience, and wisdom of family, friends, and invested strangers. Too many of us go without these resources and relationships.

In the past, I’ve never had trouble lending an ear when others needed help, but god forbid I ask someone for the same. It can be a bit easier for me to reach out now when things get dark, but I know that can still be the exception. Especially for us men, in particular cishet men, who are taught from a very young age to bottle it up, wall themselves off, and attack anyone who might try to get too close to help or listen. Any shade of vulnerability is coded as feminine, as weak. So we suffer needlessly, alone, and in our own heads. And we inflict misogynistic, homophobic, racist, transmisogynistic, ableist and other forms of violence on those sharing this world with us as a consequence.

Our violence also directly contributes to increased suicidal ideation and attempts by women, the disabled, and LGBTQIA+ youth and adults. Our imperative of upholding patriarchy is wiping us out and radiating waves of harm and trauma into the lives of those around us. And it is often our expectation that the women closest to us are to serve as caretakers of our respective mental health journeys. Which is usually bundled with all forms of manipulation and even abuse in the name of “getting better,” at the expense of someone else’s safety and well-being. We have to do better, because this masculinity shit is killing us.

Every mind and every body is different, so I’m not gonna act like I have the solution sweater that fits everyone nice and snugly. If it was a matter of talking ourselves out of it alone, or loving ourselves serene, there would be no crisis of people dying by suicide at the rates we see here and abroad. There are people all over doing amazing suicide prevention, mental health, community care and crisis intervention, and mutual aid work, and thank fuck for them because we are truly all we got.

A former therapist told me my suicidal ideation as I described it sounded “impulsive.” I would’ve described it as feeling like I could be yanked out of bed by my own brain and crossed out, just like that. I was never clinically diagnosed with depression, but I have felt all of its symptoms since I was a kid. Talking to people here and there has helped, but one has to get to that point first. I’m grateful that this practitioner was mindful of my life in recovery, and I found working with them beneficial. I’m currently in the spin cycle of shopping for a new therapist for insurance reasons, but I know many of us aren’t so lucky as to even get started with one. Especially one that’s a good fit for us and on the cheap.

While many of us are not getting the care we need, care that could save lives, the “Go to therapy” hack people seem to love offering is still making the rounds. Never mind that there are indeed therapists who are themselves hacks. Trans-unfriendly, upholding white supremacy, not completely together themselves and unable to address it adequately. Not to mention the fact that many of us, especially younger people, are broke as shit and/or underinsured or uninsured. There are thankfully professionals who offer meaningful help, conscientious care, and even low-cost and pro bono therapy resources that help people heal, but the need to build community and connection in lieu of care that is out of reach for many is clear.

I will not discourage anyone from seeking any sort of professional help, but can we stop acting like we have the guaranteed, universal answers for strangers, with no safety net in place to get people care (not access to care) they desperately need? Scolding or offering platitudes to strangers on the Internet does not a healing framework make. And can we also get these providers trained up and re-educated so rigorously that they cease being instruments and enablers of the same systems that oppress so many of us? Please and thank you.

Yet, I don’t know if the types who harp on putting everyone in therapy (with some weirdos even suggesting it be made compulsory) realize that this is not the fix-a-motherfucker-in-a-jiffy recommendation they think it is. The process offers those of us who can take advantage of it the tools to live with and understand our thoughts and emotions in more manageable ways, but it doesn’t magically make us better people who will never cause harm, be harmed, or have a negative emotion ever again like some seem to think.

For people in crisis, speaking candidly about being suicidal with a practitioner or going to the hospital can mean being involuntarily committed, which would be detrimental to one’s mental health. And if you’re not a cis, white, moneyed man, it truly is a crap shoot as to whether you’ll find a provider who won’t view your oppression and trauma as lesser issues when you inevitably bring it up.

The systemic barriers to care and community will require radical thinking and action to surmount, and we can make a start at it by being clear about what we mean when we say we value mental health, and by being more invested in empathy for one another.

I am not in the pain today that I was when I was drinking, but I know that today, this thing is just different in degree not kind. I am conscious of how my family and friends would be impacted by my suicide today, whereas that wasn’t really a concern in the bad old days. But that also doesn’t mean shit sometimes. Because the brain is a piece of fucking work. I have to take each moment as it comes, but I'm glad I don't wanna die right now. At least not today. The same way I'm grateful I don't want to drink, one moment at a time, for more years than I imagined possible not that long ago.

As much as I’ve thought of wanting to die over the years, I think I’ve always secretly wanted to live. To truly live. I’ve wanted to feel feelings and have experiences and know what it was to love and be loved, to be joyful and passionate and compassionate. I have that stuff now, and I know it's possible for a lot of people out there if someone as miserable and hard-headed as me could get a hold of it. I also know that tons of people around me are going through it, and that none of us is promised peace of mind or even another day.

I’m writing this because I know too many of us are hurting, and I want people to know that they’re not alone. Even if things aren’t going to change overnight, please at least know that. Talking about this shit matters, and hopefully we can get away from the stigmatizing conversations about the subject of suicide that alienate people further and contribute to the “contagion” effect created by so much of the writing and journalism on the subject, which often leads to increased deaths by suicide.

And this might sound like bullshit to a weary mind, but hit me up if you wanna talk/vent/blubber senselessly. My email’s kasairex3000@gmail.com. I know what it’s like to feel like you’re being shaken upside down and stepped on by life day after day, and like no one cares that it’s happening to you. And frankly, it doesn’t have to be that way.

If you are feeling depressed or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Helpline at 800-273-8255,.

And here are some other resources for anyone who is feeling depressed or suicidal and/or is struggling with drug and alcohol use:

Trevor Project (LGBTQIA+ suicide hotline/text line)

The Asian Mental Health Collective

National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network

The Loveland Foundation therapy fund for Black women and girls

International suicide hotlines

SAMHSA’s National Helpline – 1-800-662-HELP (4357)

Alcoholics Anonymous

Narcotics Anonymous

SMART Recovery