What do you do when you’re running run out of words? When you find yourself repeating the exact same things you’ve been saying for nearly two years now because everything still applies, and the situation in Gaza, not to mention the world at large, is going from worse to impossible? What do you do when the usual words—atrocity, war crime, horror, insanity, carnage, massacre, slaughter, starvation, inhumanity—no longer accurately describe the extent of what Israel and its enablers have been doing with absolute impunity to the Palestinian people?
Do you cry and weep and shout and holler instead? Do run down the street, screaming at the top of your lungs? Do you climb up on the roof and howl? Do you jump up and down, tear your hair and rend your clothes?
What do you do when you’re running out of actions? When the poems, essays and comments you write are read only by those who already think and feel the same way you do? When the letters and emails you send to your elected officials are never answered, if in fact they are even delivered, let alone opened and looked at? When the petitions you sign are never acted upon and never heard of again? When the protests and demonstrations you attend are ignored by the press, and mocked or shrugged off by passersby? When protestors are monitored, harassed, beaten or arrested by armed police squads? What non-violent action is labelled antisemitic or proscribed as terrorist activity and made punishable by law with a prison sentence?
Do you plant yourself in front of congress or parliament and go on a hunger strike? Do you set up camp outside your elected representatives office or home? Do you douse the steps of power with buckets of blood or spray paint military equipment blood red? Do you set yourself on fire like Aaron Bushnell in order to make people see and hear? Do you raise holy hell and damn the consequences because going to jail pales against children and women being bombed, killed, maimed, displaced, driven and starved day after day after day?
What do you do when you’re running out of patience? When after 17 months of death, disease, destruction and displacement the ICJ has still not come up with a final judgement on South Africa’s case against Israel? When the UN cannot get its act together to expel Israel or send an international force into Gaza to enforce peace and distribute aid? When heroes like Francesca Albanese do their job, yet are sanctioned, vilified and condemned for exposing how genocide is good for business, and every major company is in on the take? What do you do when both Arab countries and BRICS, while claiming to “promote a more inclusive, equitable and representative multipolar international system with the United Nations at its center, based on international law and purposes and principles of the UN Charter”, have failed to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians in any meaningful way? What do you do when feeble, ludicrous statements about a two-state solution are the very best feckless world leaders can deliver while knowing, at the same time, that a Palestinian state is an illusion and a surefire recipe for constant war?
Do you lose all faith and trust in the law and international courts? Do you bang your head against a brick wall? Do you go out and get yourself a gun? Or do you check yourself into a nuthouse before you become a danger to society?
What do you do when you’re running run out of hope? When you try telling yourself that this genocide cannot go on much longer, but it does? When, instead of better days ahead, it feels like the worst is yet to come, and you dare not imagine what the worst will look like? What do you do when men and women who have the power and legal responsibility to stop genocide are totally impervious to public opinion, interested only in their political self-preservation, morally bankrupt and beholden to those who are making a shitload of money on murder and destruction? When nothing short of revolution, anarchy and complete breakdown can rout the rot and corruption that run so deeply throughout our “democracy”? What do you do when most people still believe or do not dare to question the bull shit because it’s all too complicated? When too few people are willfully oblivious to the pain and suffering of those who are far, far away, and simply don’t care?
Do you take a pill or a good stiff drink? Do you stop getting worked up over things you have no power to change, and accept reality? Do you become bitter and cynical because, like it or not, this is how the world works, has always worked and always will work? Do you pack up and move to a small island or a mountain retreat and lead a reclusive life of quiet contemplation? Do you faithfully wait for the second coming of Jesus Christ, an alien invasion or some other fairy tale miracle to save the world?
Running out of words, actions, patience and hope feels to me like running out of gas in the middle of a scorching desert highway with no gas station in sight. And if you happen to come across one within walking distance, good chance it’s out of commission. So what the hell do you do? Do you throw a fit? Do you curse and swear? Do you wreck what’s left of the place? Do you sit down and cry? Do you feel sorry for yourself? Do you blame everything on someone, anyone, God? Do you say fuck it!
No! You take a deep breath. Like in the song, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again. You carry on bit by bit, step by step. You fight on. Because when it comes to genocide, war and the future of humanity, giving up and giving in are not options. Shutting up and looking away are not options. Backing down is not an option.
Because, in the end, we must answer to our conscience. We must live with ourselves. And those who come after will condemn us or commend us.
Please read to the end, everyone.
Diane, just how did you get inside my head, I've been asking the SAME questions as you - actually, you added more that I should have been asking. I have arrived at the same conclusion as you though.
One further (sobering) thought, we are compelled to expend our time and energy on keeping things from sliding back into a New Dark Age, rather than move forward, in new discoveries, new expressions through the arts. In a sense, it is another opportunity that the bastards are stealing from us. To which I say, "Four-letter-word you, royally!"