Forty-two.
A birthday is nothing to celebrate.
It’s my birthday this week and I confess—everything that I’m writing feels inadequate in the face of reality. All my words have become sour.
I originally intended to share some more stories about old flames and coming of age, since my interest with this project lies in excavating who I used to be from the rubble of my past, but it all feels so insignificant, even callous. As the Palestinians are currently being buried alive under actual rubble and bombarded by weaponry so powerful that it throws their bodies into the sky after stealing from them their lives, weaponry that my tax dollars purchased, the flow of which our politicians refuse to stem despite a hailstorm of protests from us, their constituents, it feels impossible to live—and write—while these heinous crimes against humanity persist. I feel less and less capable of love.
Toni Morrison taught us that a writer’s job is to bear witness. As much as good art must reflect the times, as much as we are all one species stuck on a planet together, as much as no one selects the circumstances of their birth, I cannot look away. I’ve not averted my gaze since I first learned in 2014 of the extreme atrocities being carried out with the full-throated (bipartisan) backing of the American empire. It is, of course, not the only extremity being conducted by the Americans, but it is right now the most pressing. This is an ongoing emergency; it is the holocaust of my generation.
(@bigsnugga). “when obama blew up a yemeni wedding he didn’t upload a video of it going ha ha. that’s the only difference between the two parties. marketing” 5 April 2025. Tweet.
I have ardently followed the modern diary of a young girl, the daily video briefings by Bisan Owda. I have read Mosab Abu Toha’s and Mohammed El-Kurd’s incisive, searing indictments of the American condition. I have seen how the most dispossessed people on earth have created ingenuity from ashes and art greater than anything from the Renaissance. I have been moved by their undeniable humanity, and I grieve with them, too. How dare any of us, here in the belly of the beast, be any less courageous?
My friends and I organize. We call, text, email, and visit our elected representatives. We learn and we donate. We are a textbook case of democracy in action by every definition, patriotic dissenters by the book, and it is still not enough. The blades rotate onward unimpeded.
The hypocrisies of the West, of America and Europe and Australia and the United Nations too, have been exposed bare. International laws and courts have demonstrated selective memory, willful powerlessness, and the most double of all double standards; signatories to the International Criminal Court have affirmed their commitment to noncompliance with its warrants, dereliction of their sworn duties, now that the wanted criminals hail not from the Global South. Moreover, the imperial boomerang has returned to its roost: the United States is now deporting its own citizens with Brownshirts clad in red, white, and blue. Our secret police aren’t even secret—they operate in plain sight, in navy blue and white hoods, forcibly transiting dissenters and innocents alike to Louisiana and El Salvador.
I don’t know how to live like this. My smartphone, the flashlight of distress and last testaments via algorithmic news feeds shining directly into my eyeballs, is a device I’m choosing to operate, I am fully aware, but I will not turn it off. It is my civic duty, as a citizen of a so-called democracy, to remain informed of the barbarity being conducted in my name. I must not bury my head in the sand.
Nationwide protests are happening, and truly savvy anti-war politicians could capably spin this into political capital and material change. That no politicians have arisen to do so, save for possibly Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and even these two are dubious) and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, is an indictment of Western culture. With this understanding, it’s not hard to see how a senator can grandstand for twenty-five consecutive hours and in the next minute vote to confirm the current President’s appointees and more bombs for war, all in service of identity politics. But it’s not just this one issue either: time after time, vote after vote, next to none of these people have our backs where it counts when they’re in power, whether it’s to raise the minimum wage or reform our healthcare system or improve public transit or reduce police brutality or… It is farcical beyond parody. We don’t live in a democracy.
It’s long past time to recognize that the American experiment has failed. It has also succeeded. The slave-owning Founding Fathers have achieved their vision of a society cleaved in two, a system founded upon racial supremacy and a permanent underclass to sustain a privileged minority.
I know that at least half of Americans read at a sixth grade level, if they can read at all, but worse still is their inability to think critically. Americans take for granted the liberties and luxuries they enjoy in the heart of the imperium, gained at great cost to the rest of the world; that they are moved to action only when they have been personally injured is also illustrative of their selfish indifference. Above all, Americans do not believe in the humanity of others, not even that of each other. There is no sense of collective, shared responsibility towards the public good. This is a profoundly sick society.
Today, I cannot write about the lovers that once held me, consoled me; I cannot impress upon you the true depths of devotion I once received. I cannot speak to you of a love that no longer exists. So, I leave you with this: please, do not look away, and do what you can to stop the carnage, as will I.