The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel

 

If you let the Looney Tunes Q-Anon villain outsmart you in political moral theater when it comes to the genocide in Gaza, you need to rethink things. 

If three or two years ago someone had said the issue that will unite large swathes of people around the world, that will have groups gathering and rallying weekly and daily in the name of freedom, liberation, and self-determination for the Palestinians for over a year and a half, and Israel would become a pariah, no one would have believed that person. They would have sent them to an emergency room to check for vitals if person had eaten something poisonous and hallucinogenic, hit their head, or having a stroke. It's been kind of amazing; average people have shown on such a large scale a moral compass that have exceeded their own nation states governing bodies, media, educational and art institutions, etc. The younger generation here, left-liberal-center-right are actually united in this, in the majority. So, this write off that American Generation Z are actually BAD, as they are authoritative nazi bois and submissive trad girls bringing social progress to a halt (and not blaming the actual old generations for their shitty voting patterns still) is kind of a misleading narrative, it's more complex. If you can find people on this issue no matter their political identity, there is something there inside connected to human and collective wellbeing. Can the dem consultants get on board with that? It's likely why the dems don't want to organize the youth and focus on the podcasts. It's a radicalizing issue away from the system and sowing more distrust, this is bigger than the post 9/11 response. But regardless of this issue that goes beyond any electoral politics that it's penetrated such a deeply divided political culture everywhere besides the origins of the ethnostate empire, is nothing to overlook at all. Masses yearn for wokeness (aka social consciousness) and connection to one another, now it's a mess the hows and why's and can it work?, but something real is there. The numbers and statistics for support as well as people in the street, donations, think pieces, bodies on campuses that let themselves be targeted over and over, protesters arrested, people fired, people fired at and attacked, people on a small boat that was droned at twice the month before, and people cheer and rally and demand a world away...I mean who would have foreseen all of this?

On my mind lately is I think back to 2022 and the midterms and special elections and how I got wrapped up in false hope. Even while I was scribbling down in my one line a day journal about the smell of theocratic fascism on the rise a year prior before leak of Roe to be overturned, I was hoping there was fight somewhere that it couldn't just be me. So those things/events led me to believe something bigger was happening that was more powerful and stronger than these forces, that as a collective who cared we could feel it in the air, and we were inching closer at any moment... Yet in the end I've come to think of those events as red herrings. Not distractions in that they didn't matter the elections and amendments, but that it was not a true and complete picture. The bills and dismantling of reproductive and LGBTQ rights that were in so many states, and the book bans, that so much of this occurred with that barely any true fight or civl disobedience push back was the real tell. I feel really bad I fooled myself. I feel really bad at what did not occur. I feel really angry at the young women who just ignored it all. 

I feel bad I wanted to believe some men cared enough about their loved ones not being sanctioned to state torture and mass government control. Men just don't care in large numbers about women nor themselves, their feelings are all that matter to many of them and a cobbled pod of people they can barely open up to, they claim to love yet have such a tiring slog in expressing this in healthy, steady, and reliable ways (*). I feel betrayed by middle age and older white women, and those are the white women who vote most out of all. I feel a big fuck you to the Gen X and Boomer women whose time has passed for that ability and they fucked other women. Some of you are no better than the men in the man vs. bear scenario at the moral center. Your daughters, granddaughters, nieces, cousins, girls as your neighbors, students, as your patients. etc., you fucked them over. I hope it haunts you but it won’t. A lot of older white women are captured into individualism they feel little larger care of others in the world, they mimic patriarchy in this way. They enjoy patriarchy in this way. Them against the world. 'Not my problem. (*)'

I also resent the reproductive rights movement for not preparing for this at all, even though they have openly written as if it was a good thing they had the foresight to see this years ahead of time back in 2022, and it’s like well what was your plan? To beat a drum, recite comedy, read a poem and honk at fake pregnancy clinics? Shame anyone demonstrating with more outrage? You abandoned the streets. You did. Shame on you.

 On another angle outside of the movement in moments misread and looking back in hindsight, I recall political commentators and critics that ‘oh now the Republicans have caught the car and it looks like there is a big price they won’t be able to afford.’ But too many couldn’t organize nor see the larger picture or feel or care about the danger top to bottom, seasoned to amateur citizens…So many gun to the face mistakes over the past ten years that makes me want to kick down a house.

* (*) recent

Yet I wrote almost all of that above a couple weeks ago before these protests against the gestapo been going on. It's hard to find a concentrated energy in this moment however for me, that doesn't feel it will eventually be a forgotten deflated ballon. I am moved and supportive but I rarely feel inspired. I went to a Palestine event which I enjoyed and I felt less alone, but once you leave it's difficult to keep that social energy up when you don't know anyone. We all are pulling at threads throughout our lives hoping we can find the right "way." But the fear of nothing there and the years of realizing nothing was actually there, no matter how hard I pulled or dreamed, puts in me in a position where the desire to tug a thread is not so enticing. And yet what is all this bitching and self pitying from myself when so much suffering is happening, people disappeared, family torn from one another, police beating the shit out of people as usual, people taking rubber bullets, a boat seized that was carrying humanitarian aid. Seized by the ethnostate guardians of the supposed best and most moral army in the world. I hope I find my people, I miss that tribe once upon a time. But I must remind myself the self pitying, no one is going to be drawn to that. I watched a Maya Angelou video recently and will badly paraphrase how it has struck and stuck with me,  she said you should carry yourself in the world the way people who carried and lifted you up throughout your life. Bring that with you. 

- Ms Rachel -

Ms. Rachel is literally a guardian angel and all you zionist pearl clutchers uncomfortable with her advocating can fuck off. As you would never be as selfless or brave beyond your own boundaries. You are bound by your own mental and spiritual borders, just as limiting as the land you claim will save and free you, all that at the expense of other people. Not that you see those people as people. You are troubled of the limitations of your own humanity and others can see that in a way that was not possible before. That's why you deflect, lash out, and threaten when people support Palestinians. You zionist pearl clutchers, genocide apologists and enthusiasts, know nothing of love, compassion, and humanity toward your fellow man. You have no moral high ground. We see through it all. Cry and temper tantrum into the wind but the average citizen of this world no longer cares of this rouse. Your commitment to this genocide means no one has to take you seriously again when you speak about kindness or human rights. You're bankrupt. You gave up. You rescinded. But the rest of us didn't. Children are being killed and starved, that matters more than the distorted fairytales you call history that are worthy of no respect nor to be wasted on honest ears and hearts. 

NO OTHER LAND Accepts the Oscar for Documentary Feature Film

Amazing to watch this live because I was convinced it wouldn't happen. I even started crying. I recall back a year ago Glazer's hands shaking reading his speech and thinking his career will be over and the backlash letter calling him out a few days later and very few people supporting him. Wow, how the tides changed. All the people also clapping in the audience. Also calling out that the US is the one blocking the path of peace and people clapping?! My oh my. Another layer of the Zionist wall down. 

Somehow we survive

We are in a new age, for now. We are all going to get what's coming. Masses rescinding in advance. I feel a violent whiplash from Jan. 6th 4 yrs ago to now. This is all on Biden, Weekend at Biden's team and the Democrats but I'd like to take a moment to curse out the Dem primary voters of 2020 who saw Biden on display for over a year and said 'this is the man who can save us, we want to go back to sleep' and look what has been wrought. If he had never been VP Biden would have never even broke 5% in the primaries.  

What keeps me up is not what Trump and the GOP have planned, because that has been on my mind the past few years since 2021 (yes seriously), but the lack of mainstream resistance and on the ground in comparison to years prior. It's like an abandoned mine town. Now one could claim the mainstream resistance wasn't built on a solid foundation other than American institutions and exceptionalism is great "America is already great!" which isn't wrong but I'd prefer it to this. A new grotesqueness is the pop culture acceptance of him. To Carrie Underwood and Snoop Dogg and Jeff Bezos and Oscar DeLa Renta and Dior, etc rolling their tongues out and wagging. And sure we shouldn't be looking to figures like this for guidance and I don't but this acceptance that was unthinkable eight years ago is chilling. Like the 1930s, as they say history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes. I guess the Hays Code is coming back with Gibson, Stallone, and Voight leading the charge. Back to reactionary white hetro American masculine classics of The Golden Age of Hollywood. The GOP ghouls in Indiana are putting up a bill to make divorce harder and states are trying to get abortion as a death penalty punishment. These other groups and orgs who weren't mainstream resistance libs where are they? They have been hollowed out the past few years and many people have seem to have exited.

Trump is the luckiest motherfucker that ever lived and Biden is the biggest loser on earth. 

What an unspeakable tragedy we are being strapped in and lowered into, a new reverse Operation Warp Speed.

Though I do want to pause outside of myself and I am thankful even if it's temporary for the relief of the ceasefire for the Palestinians. 

Free them all.

I think of this poem "Somehow We Survive" by Dennis Brutus a survivor of South African apartheid often since I came across it around 7 years ago. We will need these words to move through what comes.

Somehow we survive
More terrible than any beast
that can be tamed or bribed
the iron monster of the world ingests me in its grinding maw:

agile as ballet-dancer
fragile as butterfly
I eggdance with nimble wariness
-stave off my fated splintering

Somehow we survive
and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither
investigating searchlights rake
our naked unprotected contours;
over our heads the monolithic decalogue

of fascist prohibition glowers
and teeters for the catastrophic fall;
boots club the peeling door.
But somehow we survive severance,
deprivation, loss.

Patrols uncoil along the asphalt dark
hissing their menace to our lives,
most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror,
rendered unlovely and lovable;
sundered are we and all our passionate surrender
but somehow tenderness survives.

 

IF I MUST DIE

 

If I must die, 

you must live 

to tell my story 

to sell my things 

to buy a piece of cloth 

and some strings, 

(make it white with a long tail) 

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza 

while looking heaven in the eye 

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— 

and bid no one farewell 

not even to his flesh 

not even to himself— 

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above 

and thinks for a moment an angel is there 

bringing back love 

If I must die 

let it bring hope 

let it be a tale

- Refaat Alareer

Do countries matter more than human lives? That is the real question of Israel and Palestine. The rest is a smoke screen.

Israel detonating people in coordinated mass attack is now business as usual. It's difficult or impossible to see that the world was not turned into something evil and dark that can't be put back yesterday. Everyone in the future could be possibly detonated randomly because governments and private corporations deem it a necessity. The chorus of people saying 'well don't be a bad person and you have nothing to worry about!' have no clue. The bodies and souls Israel and the US is allowing to be altered and destroyed is a turn in the 21st century. We are still a post 9/11 world and perhaps always will be. How succinct Thompson was when he wrote: The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. 

MSNBC historians quiet over this when it comes to deconstructing and forewarning authoritarianism. One prominent writer in those circles but not on the circuit who used to write about real things on the ground and the impossible and hope, selfish silence is angering. *You can’t claim to love and despair over what is happening to the environment and not condemn the environmental implications of Gaza’s genocide and the US’s thumbs up of it. All of these people were also not surprisingly Biden dead enders who had us circling the drain for a while. We are all sitting ducks while you keep sipping your coffee, plug and vent on twitter and get your TV slots, columns, fellowships, book deals and panels. Can't they see a possible "October Surprise" to get Trump over the finish line coming out of this? 

* (updated note Oct. 25, 2024, I did see they actually are now speaking and posting others suffering in Gaza. Randomly came across form a person I follow responding to them on twitter. I don't know if it's new I had seen for awhile it had been quiet but want to amend that they actually do care and that matters and matters to correct, but I will leave it up as it is a reflection of my own thoughts at the time as a diary entry of sorts. 

Strange to reflect on almost a year of the genocide and knowing when I saw reported the Oct. 7th massacre that Biden was going to fail in a very real and consequential way. Prior I had known about his long history of Zionist love since his senate years. I recalled his disregard for the Palestinians when the capital was moved during Trump's presidency and people were pleading if he could amend it. Biden's refusal to engage with Palestine at all during his early presidency that this was not an issue his administration were looking to deal with. The only exception in some crumbs was telling Bibi to cut it out when Israel bombed that building that held the AP News office. Yet this has somewhat exceeded my expectations. 

Though in another view I think it's just the horror of it happening with so much protest in the face of it all. The screaming 'No stop this madness!' physical and psychological manifesting, the desperation, pleas, marching, encampments, disruptions that have not moved Biden in the slightest is what has exceeded my expectations. That his administration heads don't care to help politically in any way. That he cannot help himself politically then nor help Harris now. And she has shown up to this point she cannot and/or will not break despite everything in the face of this position being disastrous and risky to dismiss.

Not even Uncommitted results nor Pelosi's recent gestures have been able to move political optics operators in DC. To fucking help Harris. For this hampering young and black voters. To risk Michigan, to risk PA, for what? It's not like Israel is even providing us with weapons to protect and infrastructure or food sources to get by. Oh right it's a colonial power that must be kept in place to be the surveillance of the Middle East in the guise of caring about Jewish people, culture, religion, and history. Israel's exploitation of Jewish people's history and trauma is grotesque and has made for truly vile opinions of supremacy over Palestinians. Endorsing their extermination, as well as indefensible actions, and people's souls who espouse language of genocidal rhetoric that have also had them go on to partake happily in carrying out genocide. An IDF was caught on camera raping a Palestinian man in prison and was welcomed on Israeli TV. This is a deeply bankrupt society of supposed human values and ideals of democracy and the charade is gone. How could this be fixed? The car crash of human history, the angel of history, the rhyming of history, the loop of history. Time and lessons lost and crumbled into the dust bins because people like easy answers.

Post convention without stars in the eyes

Very anti climatic and a huge blunder morally and politically ignoring Uncommitted. The shunning is inexcusable. Nine years of the horror vortex that won't close and people keep getting sucked in as it gets furthered normalized is what we are trapped with having to have yet another election rematch. Your favorite dipshit comedian podcaster who wants you to think he’s just a cool down to earth guy but he’s a popular entertainer who has now shown he is a collaborator. I don't care about the Sanders interview. Wanting fame stroked and money in the bank not concerned about his audience’s well being but he puts off the air that you could be friends only if. You could get a spot on the couch, you could sit at the lunch table, just that kind of guy. Carlin would hate feckless egos like him and Joe. (Carlin would really hate all of this, everything.) Many moderate news outlets are all aboard once again trying to shove Trump as not only normal but the next president, show him some respect and get in line. Oh and guess who is all aboard helping along and endorsing? The one and only roadkill chef-sex pest-health care crisis-political tragedy RFK Jr.!  What a topsy turvy almost two months since the crisis. A month since my prayers of April 2019 answered. Two more months to go. How will it go.

I was hoping to stay a little while longer in the coconut tree that I hung out in feeling relief since we got off the sinking ship.Yet I wonder even if the boat has oars again are we still on a life raft of sorts? I don’t know I haven’t been able to read this election for the past two years. I try to tap in and it’s blank. I see multiple outcomes and none I can land on unlike the last few election cycles.

However the most lethal army in the world is not what the common man is interested in or the swing median voter is hoping for. While not perfect and still a politician I am Walz pilled. This is politics though and no gods no masters is always at the core of my outlook whatever the vibes, and whatever jokes along the way with everyone else in my political alignments to get by in the rising tides. 

The Uncommitted have no obligation to any of this. Free Palestine.

For some reason one of the worst places for opinions on the Gaza genocide is on the worldnews sub on reddit. I see the flames of hate, dismal, and delusion toward what is happening to the Palestinians. 

'The numbers of people killed are not true.' 

'Why do queer people care about Palestinians?' 

'They elected Hamas' 

'Trump will be worse you virtue signaling progressives'

'You would do the same thing what Israel is doing if it happened to your country' 

Other dehumanizing sentiments to that effect are regularly reconfirmed glowingly and celebrated. And these are the good liberals making the bulk of the commentary. The people who would never dream of voting for Trump. Those who still make 2018 jokes about Trump to keep each other in good spirits on social media and irl, to not deal with the pain of the reality we are in another election year with him as the nominee. People who really believe the good moderate Republicans are going to save the election this time. 

The good liberals who really never question if they themselves are always on the right side. To check in from time to time. Anyone should do that. The types of people posting would be highly insulted to be challenged otherwise. Some people think this is some feature of liberals but I contend it's not. They are just like regular humans afraid to be wrong, deathly afraid and to become humbled by that sort of awareness, it's too much to bear. Get back in five years.

The worst sentiments of the worldnews reddit sub were yet to come. The other day Biden got his Great War Criminal Bush Weapons of Mass Destruction moment saying a genocide is not happening and it's outrageous to suggest that. Yes the person who had the temporary and bad idea to have a disinformation czar at one point to combat the online world, is spreading massive disinformation of his own. Everyone can see what is going on through their phones and if they so chose which many do not. However the ones watching it on their phones horrified and helpless are not supposed to believe our own eyes? That's literally the memo. 

So like clockwork on the reddit post people in the comments were agreeing wholeheartedly with No Malarkey Joe. The people who believe they are on the right side and would never support an outright fascist like Trump agreeing to this should scare you. But I have been scared of how people lie and deceive themselves of the awful thing that is happening but not happening since Covid phase 1 four years ago. There is a strange but I guess a way to work through the horror school of thought Biden is doing this on purpose and trying to get Trump elected, as if this is a big complex conspiracy, it's incompetence not malevolence of political strategy. 

I don't care about Palestinians political beliefs as prerequisite for their safety, livelihood and humanity. My support is not conditional on what someone thinks or believes in for me to not want this for them. I don't want this for anyone. Never again means now and means everyone. My politics means no bombing people to hell and back and starving them to death. And no it's not just because it's a large number of women and children but for the men too. They don't deserve to be collateral and dehumanized. To put it another way for other people in hoping a lightbulb clicks 'care for humanity', women and children are left as the survivors of the men they lose. If you care about them you should care about them losing the men in their lives, connect the dots. 

Don't lose your sensitivity and humanity for a political body that would feed you to the wolves if your cause/your belief became politically a battleground and the donors pressure wins out. Always keep eyes out. It's also like when people want poor and hungry children fed but their parents are addicts so they can't support help for them. You see this with how immigrants have been discussed.  Going from kids in cages, to get them out of here, to kids being killed is unfortunate in war, is a hell of a whiplash. It's America so many juggling contradictions at one time.

Remember the Floyd protests? Because everyone else seems to forget. What a time in every state and it went around the world. The cops beating the shit out of people sometimes the media itself on camera and in the end they get away with whatever they like. A Men in Black cultural memory wipe. People out there because they knew something was wrong that something has to be better. Now that gets brushed aside?? people came out because they were bored, it was trendy (??). 

Now we got a Cop City destroying a forest. Biden gave more money to the cops than ever. A black Donald Trump Democrat mayor for NYC. Netflix remaking Beverly Hills Cop into a series. Cops as TV entertainment is back. Patrisse betrayed people and denied doing that leaving lasting damage. Black men motivated to vote for Trump. Police budgets swelling. The person who was president who could be president again, who let cops be attacked and die related to Jan. 6th is supported mostly by police still (not surprised but it’s something to at least point out) and the blue lives matter crowd no matter how much Biden and the Democrats love the police. 

Did the fascists see those people out there four years ago and think cynically if they can be motivated for the right things maybe they will become disenchanted and we can get them on our side? They sure did and it looks like it's working. Good job whoever. 

It’s extremely dangerous to memory hole the Floyd protest the way it has been especially in a moment where fascism is ascending around the world and the ruling class is lining up to fill their pockets and help it along. As well as mainstream and independent media outlets, social media platforms, entertainment companies, celebrities, cultural critics, even the fucking art world infiltrated by the fascists through being funded by heterodox and anti woke bullshit peddlers. Those crypto nazi podcast cunts had on the CRT moral panic scammer and he was arguing in defense of Chauvin I read. The execution of Jordan Neely a year ago and the reaction of 'well actually....' was also disturbing and I wondered if this was a sign to come a cultural backlash. There have been so many incidences I keep collecting and trying to read if it's something more.

It's strange to see all these amazing pro Palestine and anti genocide protests yet in the comments and in articles and interviews no one mentions the Floyd protests at all the these young people grew up seeing and participating in likely. ???? Did Covid damage so much memory and hope? On another note I notice much silence of the professional celebrities liberal activists who loved speaking up in Trump years and talking about how they speak out for social justice and now crickets for Gaza. The best are wealthy white women entertainers who rescinded their white privilege cards  during the Floyd protests to speak out and now take it out exclaiming they don't benefit from it to excuse Palestinian genocide. Don't make excuses for people worth a tens of million dollars who have had a fruitful long life in American pop culture.

In Palestine they put up a mural for Floyd during that time, it's so fucking heartbreaking. I hope people are not going to memory hole this but my faith in the long term cultural memory of fight and resistance is mostly remaining faithless.

https://ips-dc.org/why-palestinians-are-mourning-george-floyd/

Our children are buried under the rubble

Release the hostages!

You are bombing our hospitals

Release the hostages!

You are blowing up our schools

Release the hostages!

There is not enough water or food

or even fuel

Release the hostages!

There is no milk for the newborns

Release the hostages!

or sanitary napkins for women

Release the hostages!

You also have thousands of hostages

in your prisons for years.

Release the hostages!

You are killing us

Release the hostages!

You are killing your hostages

Release the hostages!

Can you hear us?

Release the hostages!

- Mosab Abu Toha

  Photography, it's crazy how the photo world is divorced from speaking of the photography being utilized in what is going on in Gaza and that being on social media as well. We are liars and cowards of our craft if we ignore the function and role of photography in the first genocide of the 21st century we see unfolding on our screens. 

 I guess at the rate of technology we must combine video in many conversations about photography as well. Though they are different mediums of functioning yet they are both visual communication tools for the private, sharing of the personal, selling of the personal, and political.

We not only see through these technologies but hear the horror of what Palestinians are facing. I hope that punctures at least some people's hearts and headspace though it doesn't seem to get to the right ones with the power. Because those in power are reenforced and nurtured that they must be divorced in certain contexts. 

Politics before people, political games before human lives. Corporations over people living out to be full human beings. Profits over what mental, psychological, emotional potential and comfort we could have in our everyday lives. People tell you it's not possible, to go back to work because the boss of their boss of their boss believe people are disposable and need to serve the man.

When I try to imagine the horror of people in Gaza it's only a flash, it's an evil that can't be reached through the screen. What is the complicity of merely bearing witness? There is no real guidelines to all this in the context of viewing this on social media. Is it a question that can be answered truthfully and given easy guidance on? 

Though there are plenty of assholes reactionary to liberal and say you're being too sensitive and virtue signaling consuming a form of torture porn war trauma being hypocritical, but it's like people are dying fuck off with that. We know where some of you will likely be with a fascist regime slowly unfolding into place (it's actually happening now under Biden in the red states and the states who are not fully red but are controlled by red congress houses and governors) you'll be drinking Starbucks disaffected.

May 9, 2024 - 3:44pm

Do you realize how much artists have lost their way in the culture when the man who rapped “Thrift Shop” has more moral courage on Palestine than 90% of mainstream-well known artists out there? He's one of the very very very few vocal and consistently vocal out there. Like one of the most political creative mediums is in a crisis (but many have said for the last almost decade) if the top of the game people Kendrick Lamar and Drake are having a pants pull down contest right now. Rap is not even music in my rotation of pop culture knowledge and what I curate in my day to day listening, but even I know this is pretty insane and surreal. Respect to Macklemore because so many artists have truly lost their way.