Relentless rehumanization

Until war is the memory

a sunset on the california coast

Hi y’all,

Greeting you from a hotel room where I am in a bit of a hurry to post this before checkout. I’m acknowledging that this piece touches only on a portion of what I yearn to express, but here we are in the infinite unfolding. It need not be comprehensive nor complete because such things are just illusions anyway. I look forward to turning the pages of notes I have into more posts here to come.

Thank you, enduringly, for your presence.

I hope you are finding nourishment in these trying times that push us beyond all limits.

My heart is beaming to you,

Rachel

Mahmoud Darwish

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Sometimes, when my heart is at its heaviest, history feels like an undying memory of compounding injustice. Thousands of years of under-metabolized grief, anguish, despair, betrayal deposit layer upon layer upon layer upon us.

No wonder it feels bleak buried at the bottom of all this haunting.

I think of all the locked-up stories embedded into our cells and tissues. I think of all the unlived lives we are carrying into our own. I think of all the lives extinguished in desperation, in innocence, in a dominant reality where life is disposable in service of the aspirations of very few people.

I think that all life is innocent, I think that no life is disposable, but our world hasn’t (yet!) been structured around those principles.

“Where life is precious, life is precious.”

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Those amongst us who do the worst to others are playing out the furthest extremes of a fabrication built by narrow, fear-consumed imaginations. They do the bidding of regimes that profit off of their exploitation. They are the heartbroken human “shields” of inhumane obsessions. They are the ones most manipulated, most penetrated by toxic mind-heart-soul distorting ideations that they lose their souls to the distorted torture machines. This is not a justification for horror, it is a recognition that legitimizes the ways we are biologically engineered for connection and that it takes many massive and monstrous things to change us into murderers. We are a sophisticated species forced into perpetual downward spirals, races to the bottom - a lower price, a faster bullet, a more destructive bomb, a more instant gratification, a more intoxicating distraction… we are worthy of so much more than this. We are worthy of living beyond constant retribution, constant cycles of violence. Life has honored us so that we may honor life. How do we live that way at scale? How do we trust in this worthiness?

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Today we watch a war erupt via infinite scroll-stream on split screens, social media and mainstream, centered thousands of miles away from most of us in one collective birthplace of humanity, one sourcepoint of the very concept of civilization. Timeline jumping between scenes. Future and ancient coexisting.

Cell memories ripple across spacetime and no time at all seems to pass, because here we are spiraling in battles between brothers for what old delusion packaged in a new way? To be the holiest of holies before the King of Kings? To become gods themselves? Or has it all been lost? The meaning of it? Was there meaning? Does anyone even know what they/we are fighting for beneath all the rhetoric?

“They started it.”

“They did worse.”

“They are more evil.”

“They are backed by ________.”

“They want to annihilate us, so we must annihilate them first.”

And “they” becomes a larger and larger mass of silenced, suppressed, exploited bystanders, and “we” becomes a smaller and smaller pool of ego-maniacal men enabled by compounded history with devastating ideations and fixations that haven’t aged past 2000 BC.

We must be able to age beyond teenage tantrums that swell into terror projects with the coerced  hopeless and helpless behind them, looking for anything to escape the madness.

Violence in response to violence is defense but we cannot thrive if we’re under eternal threat. Violence responding to violence responding to violence responding to violence will destroy us. We must break the cycle.

No amount of oppression can make one immune from being an oppressor.

In fact, it is the unhealed experiences of oppression, the unprocessed traumas of persecution, that only make one more likely to inflict oppression.

It feels impossible to process grief when we’re stuck tiptoeing through self-created landmines of hyper-rationalizing, virtue signaling. Grief processing is one thing we need most. Just to be in our grief, our grief for it all, our scared grief.

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“What modest dreamers we have become.”

Zadie Smith

There are many kinds of grief swirling within me. One is that you are “canceled” in this culture of performative liberation by feeling grief indiscriminately for all of humanity, for Palestinians and Jews equally.

The catch-phases of “revolution” feel empty and disassociated from what’s *actually* happening in the lives of everyday people – the peacebuilders are gobbled up in vitriol about settler-colonialists, the dreamweavers are swallowed whole in assaults about terrorist-jihadists. How quickly those terms can shapeshift across allegiances. Even the Indigenous peacekeeping protestors at Standing Rock were called jihadists.

Another grief is that you are “canceled” for even suggesting that a pathway toward peace is a possibility. And yet, this is what I have always known of the region, this is what I was raised on: that inheritors of wounded choices reifying vast oppressive systems are working every single day to undo them, to reweave broken solidarity and build trust across the cruel machination that is a border, a nation-state. I think of Vivian Silver who was kidnapped and possibly murdered by Hamas. I learned that she was a critical advocate at the Erez Crossing between Gaza and Israel to ensure Palestinians could access needed medical care across the border. I think of my father who does the very same thing for the most impoverished, marginalized individuals transiting through the clinic he helped found in Juárez, ensuring safe, swift passage between nations, between ideologies, to transcend the trappings of orchestrated hierarchies to say “all are worthy, all are worthy, all are worthy.”

They are kindred spirits across worlds navigating similar conditions. Neither are “indigenous” or “native” to their geographies. Vivian ended up in Kibbutz Be’eri, my dad ended up in El Paso, Texas, both as an outcome of countless microscopic choices across generations to somehow survive an antisemitic world, each doing their utmost in the places they live to serve relentless rehumanization. It is the smallest decision that changes a fate. It is not hard for me to imagine how at any point in the last 50 years the tiniest shift in circumstance could have switched our places, where instead of fearing for my father’s safety at one border crossing, I fear his at another. My brother Yonatan Ziegen knows this intimately. May she be returned home safe. May they all be safe. As he says, may the madness stop, may the violence stop.

We are not here to arbitrate worthiness. We are here to remember it in ourselves and each other every second until it becomes so ubiquitous it is the blissfully forgotten principle that builds our world on a love so profound war itself becomes the memory.

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