Something Unfocused

I try to feel it all. The human mind is barely capable of comprehending a single death, and yet we are forced by the thugs and murderers of the world to hold thousands upon thousands of lives within our collective soul. Every bomb that hits another bakeryhospitalhomesheltergeneratorambulancepresscorpsschool is a brutal injury to any human with a conscience. To any human with a soul. I have found myself frequently wondering how those who are not consumed by this grief are still alive. I have had similar thoughts about much less consequential transgressions of human respect (love. I’ll say love that’s a word that needs to be held up and said as much as we can). I do not think that I could deeply betray the love of my friends and continue to live. I think it would break me. And I do think that most of the people I am speaking of – those who do not seem to be broken by this inhumanity – are broken. This is somewhat borne of necessity. Capitalism inundates so many of us with so much pain at all times that we must break ourselves merely to survive. While it is true that a level of desensitization is necessary to continue to live, due to the utter saturation of barbarity that permeates every part of our world, we cannot lose our own humanity. We must not allow this desensitization to lead us to willful forgetfulness or erasure. The forces that create the pain that we must desensitize ourselves to want us to forget. To bow our heads. We must continue to discuss and mobilize and simply carry the knowledge of their depravity with us. They will win when we are silent. They will win when we are forgotten. They hate us so much because they know we will never be silent, and we will never forget. That is not to say that we can simply sit back and let our memories carry the day. We must actively maintain the flames of the martyr’s memories. We must loudly proclaim the injustices that are constantly perpetrated. Every word that we speak is a blow against the oppressors, yet we cannot allow ourselves to think those words can ever be enough.

Everything feels insane. I scroll through social media, inundated with images and stories of Israeli inhumanity and Palestinian suffering. I try to imagine the scale of the devastation on personal terms, feeling awful that I can only do so in insufficient comparisons. I want to hold every one of their souls in mine, but that cannot be sustained. The only hope I have is in our collective. In our communities. It is in those spaces that we can hold their memories and their pain. It is together that we will be able to survive this. While there is no end to this current horror in sight, I already find myself thinking on the future. On the aftermath. It feels irresponsible and selfish to do so, but I find myself wondering how this will be forgotten. How will this particular horror be swept aside and shelved neatly alongside the ones that preceded and will follow it. I thought I understood the depravity and inhumanity of these empires, but every single day my body shudders and shrinks from my attempts at comprehending this loss. When the aftermath arrives, however it comes, all of us will be forever changed. It feels so inhumanly selfish to think of how my perspectives on those living in the beating heart of the empire will be changed by the deaths of tens of thousands, but it is my reality. I must live within these spaces, so I must spend time thinking about their changing dynamics, as much as I wish I could spend all of my energy and time thinking about and mourning and fighting for Palestine. The reactions of citizens of the empire will echo through history. I don’t know that I have the words for what I think of those who are silent. I do not know if that is because those words are incendiary and likely illegal, or if I simply do not wish to give those people a space in my brain. There is already so much in here, so much that I must carry with me to live with dignity, that I do not wish to consider the cowards and the spineless. May Allah sort them out. I do not wish to give them my time.