Calling the Prime Minister
It is the fifth time I have called the Prime Minister on the line open to citizens in a matter of days. The first message I left was insistent and indignant in urging him to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and flood Gaza with humanitarian aid. After the news that the United States vetoed the ceasefire, I could feel the world further turn on its axis. My legs give out under me and I am on the floor, tears steaming down my face. Pressing the number now etched on my phone’s contact list, I hear a despondence in my voice that I cannot recognize. Now I am imploring, begging him to recognize how horribly we are failing humanity and future generations.
When I was a middle-school teacher, I taught about the Holocaust every year. It was a curriculum designed to nurture empathy and understanding while recognizing that humanity can lose the best of itself when psychopathy leads. As the daughter of Greek immigrants, I hold the deeper meaning of the word – literally, “soul suffering”. Only a sickness of soul could have allowed such cruelty to reign unchallenged.
The psychopathy we are seeing play out before us – the relentless and escalating cycles of violence – are harming each and every one of us. And this violence is not limited to what is currently unfolding in Israel and Gaza.
It is the violence that undergirds and permeates our lives. The violence to the Earth, the violence against women, the violence against Black and Indigenous peoples, the violence against the queer community, and on and on and on. The list is heart-stoppingly long.
That we so profoundly devalue our innate interconnectedness with planetary life and each other means we are separated from the depths of expression of our beauty, creativity and love as human beings. Rather than resourcing our imaginations to create just and regenerative worlds, we have somehow determined that a perverted necropolitics is “just the way things are”, damning us and future generations to the cascading apocalypse. Addictions to fossil fuels and power turn souls into wounded monsters whose rage disrupts the peaceful possibilities of a profoundly wondrous planet rich in exquisite diversity. Instead, rage and trauma lead narcissistic and short-sighted decision-making, further contributing to rising tides of violence and ecological imbalance.
Women I know and love and some courageous men acknowledge to me that they feel changed by the events of the past two months, since the violence of October 7th. While we’ve been critical of our governments before, we find ourselves waking up in a truly Orwellian world where the walls seem to gain depth and structure with each passing minute. The Western world’s championing of human rights has become empty rhetoric. It has turned to ash.
Confused arguments warp the clear violations that we see taking place before us. Disproportionate responses pass silently as “reasonable”. Clearly supremacist logics are centered as righteous and good, while historical memory is manipulated for the most cynical ends. Silence is demanded through surveillance and tactics rooted in heavily resourced pressure, ridicule and harassment.
We have numbed ourselves to a spirit and politics grounded in the extraordinary altruism, courage and creativity we are capable of enacting. We have so many wise teachers of different traditions across the globe who try to remind us otherwise. Who implore us to love, forgive, share, honour our connections, remain humble and practice dying so that a truly expansive life of care, honour and unique self-expression comes into focus. That we accept instead such puniness of spiritual imagination, relegating us to repeating what our bodies register as grotesque inversions of our most sublime human capabilities, is our greatest shame. Holding a mirror to this limited worldview can enable us to hospice and integrate our profound failings as instructive and memorable teachings. We do not need to be so destructive. In fact, our collective lives depend on being otherwise. That we turn away from the cosmic and sacred gift of life and decide that killing and plundering are so easily justified is humiliating.
Perhaps this explains the relentless nausea that takes hold of me every morning. I open my eyes and the children, men and women of Gaza are shadows in my room. With every drink of water, I am reminded of their thirst. With every bite of food, I feel the emptiness of their bellies. I think of the profound fear being experienced by the hostages. Small joys I experience during the day are fleeting, vanishing quickly when I remember that brutal, raw power is aligned against them, with scores of bystanders enabling, encouraging and witnessing their raw agony. I spend my days carving out activism amidst the responsibilities I have. Posting, calling, educating, dialoguing, finding protests, emailing friends and family, witnessing, learning, donating. It all feels so small and yet requires courage in the face of the wounded rage being unleashed. I resist. I refuse. I sob. I plead. I join the cries of the families of Israeli hostages - "All for all". I join the cries of the Palestinians in their decades-long struggle for justice - "Liberation for all".
But they are unmoved.
They have soul sickness.
And it is spreading, more pervasively than the pandemic.
From the ashes of Auschwitz to the ashes of Gaza, we also bear witness to the ashes of wildfires increasingly threatening our shared home.
Can the human spirit rise from those ashes, healing its soul sickness by remembering the sacred songs of belonging, interconnection and loving compassion it was born to sing?
I hear the echoes of this song in my pleas to the Prime Minister.
I pray he is moved.
It is the fifth time I have called the Prime Minister on the line open to citizens in a matter of days. The first message I left was insistent and indignant in urging him to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and flood Gaza with humanitarian aid. After the news that the United States vetoed the ceasefire, I could feel the world further turn on its axis. My legs give out under me and I am on the floor, tears steaming down my face. Pressing the number now etched on my phone’s contact list, I hear a despondence in my voice that I cannot recognize. Now I am imploring, begging him to recognize how horribly we are failing humanity and future generations.
When I was a middle-school teacher, I taught about the Holocaust every year. It was a curriculum designed to nurture empathy and understanding while recognizing that humanity can lose the best of itself when psychopathy leads. As the daughter of Greek immigrants, I hold the deeper meaning of the word – literally, “soul suffering”. Only a sickness of soul could have allowed such cruelty to reign unchallenged.
The psychopathy we are seeing play out before us – the relentless and escalating cycles of violence – are harming each and every one of us. And this violence is not limited to what is currently unfolding in Israel and Gaza.
It is the violence that undergirds and permeates our lives. The violence to the Earth, the violence against women, the violence against Black and Indigenous peoples, the violence against the queer community, and on and on and on. The list is heart-stoppingly long.
That we so profoundly devalue our innate interconnectedness with planetary life and each other means we are separated from the depths of expression of our beauty, creativity and love as human beings. Rather than resourcing our imaginations to create just and regenerative worlds, we have somehow determined that a perverted necropolitics is “just the way things are”, damning us and future generations to the cascading apocalypse. Addictions to fossil fuels and power turn souls into wounded monsters whose rage disrupts the peaceful possibilities of a profoundly wondrous planet rich in exquisite diversity. Instead, rage and trauma lead narcissistic and short-sighted decision-making, further contributing to rising tides of violence and ecological imbalance.
Women I know and love and some courageous men acknowledge to me that they feel changed by the events of the past two months, since the violence of October 7th. While we’ve been critical of our governments before, we find ourselves waking up in a truly Orwellian world where the walls seem to gain depth and structure with each passing minute. The Western world’s championing of human rights has become empty rhetoric. It has turned to ash.
Confused arguments warp the clear violations that we see taking place before us. Disproportionate responses pass silently as “reasonable”. Clearly supremacist logics are centered as righteous and good, while historical memory is manipulated for the most cynical ends. Silence is demanded through surveillance and tactics rooted in heavily resourced pressure, ridicule and harassment.
We have numbed ourselves to a spirit and politics grounded in the extraordinary altruism, courage and creativity we are capable of enacting. We have so many wise teachers of different traditions across the globe who try to remind us otherwise. Who implore us to love, forgive, share, honour our connections, remain humble and practice dying so that a truly expansive life of care, honour and unique self-expression comes into focus. That we accept instead such puniness of spiritual imagination, relegating us to repeating what our bodies register as grotesque inversions of our most sublime human capabilities, is our greatest shame. Holding a mirror to this limited worldview can enable us to hospice and integrate our profound failings as instructive and memorable teachings. We do not need to be so destructive. In fact, our collective lives depend on being otherwise. That we turn away from the cosmic and sacred gift of life and decide that killing and plundering are so easily justified is humiliating.
Perhaps this explains the relentless nausea that takes hold of me every morning. I open my eyes and the children, men and women of Gaza are shadows in my room. With every drink of water, I am reminded of their thirst. With every bite of food, I feel the emptiness of their bellies. I think of the profound fear being experienced by the hostages. Small joys I experience during the day are fleeting, vanishing quickly when I remember that brutal, raw power is aligned against them, with scores of bystanders enabling, encouraging and witnessing their raw agony. I spend my days carving out activism amidst the responsibilities I have. Posting, calling, educating, dialoguing, finding protests, emailing friends and family, witnessing, learning, donating. It all feels so small and yet requires courage in the face of the wounded rage being unleashed. I resist. I refuse. I sob. I plead. I join the cries of the families of Israeli hostages - "All for all". I join the cries of the Palestinians in their decades-long struggle for justice - "Liberation for all".
But they are unmoved.
They have soul sickness.
And it is spreading, more pervasively than the pandemic.
From the ashes of Auschwitz to the ashes of Gaza, we also bear witness to the ashes of wildfires increasingly threatening our shared home.
Can the human spirit rise from those ashes, healing its soul sickness by remembering the sacred songs of belonging, interconnection and loving compassion it was born to sing?
I hear the echoes of this song in my pleas to the Prime Minister.
I pray he is moved.
