Am I just like the guy screaming into traffic?

Ok, what’s the score? Well, I have cleaned poop out of my toddler’s underwear with the bidet attachment on our toilet more times than I have done fiber art this week. I would be whacked out but who the fuck cares. Seriously,  at least I can clean the poop out of that underwear and have a sense of accomplishment for having actually done something.  That’s more than I can say about the amount I have accomplished in the face of hundreds of children being killed in Gaza in huge bombing campaigns, prolly from bombs the U.S. sold Israel as part of its 735 million dollar arms deal in 2021. 

It’s all a sick joke and a farce. It’s like the month after 9/11 all over again. The NY Times coverage seems bent on ginning up support for the war machine and the only people smiling are the fat cats at the defense contractors and their shareholders. All the rest of us? We are left in a bind of feeling responsible for those kids in Gaza City, since our tax dollars subsidized those bombs, and being equally as horrified that a bunch of Israeli civilians are dead. Do you feel the bind? I do. 

Yet, the sheer magnitude of the power imbalance and the attempts to ignore history prompt me to pick a side. “Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?” Pete Seeger croons in my ears as I write this. The ghost of Howard Zinn counsels me, “You can't be neutral on a moving train, Events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that.” I cannot accept the abuses of the Palestinian people, who have been under a general ban on travel and a strict restriction on the flow of goods in and out of Gaza since 2007. It’s so bad that Human Rights Watch has called Gaza an “open-air prison.” I haven’t had to live in an open air prison, but I have tasted the desperation of your dreams being squashed due to my lot in life. I will always be with those powerless people—those folx being crushed under the weight of a boot of tyranny. I won’t stand with a far right government in Israel that does not in any way reflect the values of the Jewish community of the world I have grown to know. 

But, alas, things can be that simple and complicated at the same time. You can decry far right extremism in the Israeli government the and deaths of innocent Israeli civilians. Yes, it can be done. I agree with the wise counsel of Sharon Arnold who recently said: “I don’t stand behind political parties or nation states. I stand behind people and I believe that the liberation of Palestinian and Jewish people is inextricable.” Go look at the election results that brought in this far right Israeli state. It’s not like 100% of the folks living in Israeli back this regime. Any of those Israeli civilians who were killed could have been any one of the approximately 30% of the Israeli population that didn’t vote in the last parliamentary elections or one of the folx who voted for a leftist alternative seeking a very different path to end the conflict.  They certainly didn’t give their consent to the bombings. And yet, folks want to flatten the world by making them all the problem. It’s easier to justify people dying when we flatten the world to make its maddening complexity more tolerable and interpretable. 

A questions burns in my heart from this discussion. Can we blame any one person who lives in a nation state for their state’s abuses when they have exhausted the established means to seek change? That’s an open question for you to ponder for yourself.  If that logic follows, are we in the US then responsible for the war in Iraq and the over 4,000 predator and reaper drone air strikes that have been carried out during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations? Is that blood on our hands then? This is something that troubles my mind pretty often. 

At this point, you are prolly like, “this dude be sociologying so hard right meow,” and you wouldn’t be wrong. Stick with me though, I’m wrapping this up and tying it back to my death work practice. Shocker, the sociologist is again here to tell you that no one group, state, or person can represent the entirety of a faith community, race/ethnicity, or group of people living in a place.  Consequently, I am of the opinion that once you start deciding whose death is good (and conversely who is worthy of living) that it’s a slippery slope towards places that have shown us the darkest corners of humans capacity for destruction. That’s how we got to most of the genocides we shutter to recall today. So the deathworker in me stays with the powerless who have a boot on their necks at all time and with those who died mixed up in conflicts they had no power to make choices around or effect change around.

Societal death work must remain devoted to honoring the deaths of all people. It’s my opinion that you have to stake a claims to whose side you are on. You have to decide who the beloved dead you will serve will be. You don’t have to directly serve all people, and it would be impossible to do so. It’s even fitting to not directly address the deaths of some people who have caused tremendous harm. However, it is our ethical responsibility as death workers to deny any person’s attempt to say who is worthy of death and life. That’s above any person’s pay grade here. That’s the job of the great web. Yet, there be a lot of people screaming on the internet right now trying to make claims about who should be dead and alive. As a death worker, I don’t play with that nonsense. All civilian deaths are a tragedy, because all deaths of ordinary folx caught up in conflicts beyond their control are a tragedy. Full stop. So get out of here with your fake tough person internet persona. We not here to be part of the propaganda machine for any political party or nation state. We are here to uphold the basic dignity of all human life.

I am not sure why it’s so scary to say that I am with the Palestinian people and continue to support liberation for Jewish and Palestinian people. There is a certain consequence in the air for speaking freely once the war machine has been started up and the US mass media has taken its side. As per usual, I fear that I will lose my job for expressing my first amendment views. I am still trying to figure out whether that fear is an irrational anxiety or a healthy fear of the consequences of decrying tyranny in a society that doesn’t like truth tellers or outsiders. I’m sure there are some of you who have already exited the text long ago. 

Instead of focusing our anger and vitriol on each other, we should be focusing it on those companies who are cashing in and stoking the flames of these conflicts. Bob Dylan decried these “masters of war” in his song of the same title off his classic 1963, pre-electric guitar era album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” He didn’t mince words, wishing death upon these masters of war:

“And I hope that you die

And your death will come soon

I'll follow your casket

By the pale afternoon

And I'll watch while you're lowered

Down to your deathbed

And I'll stand over your grave

'Til I'm sure that you're dead.”

Since our US judiciary has ruled in favor of corporate personhood, I see no problem in Bob  hoping that Defense contractors, who collectively sell hundred of billions of dollars worth of missiles, fighter jets, guns to the U.S. government each year, die. Imagine if we used those hundred of billion dollars a year to house those without a home, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, educate those that want to learn, pay reparations to the decadents of slavery, honor our treaty agreements to indigenous nations, and give meaningful work to those who want it.  Consequently, seeing to the death of the defense industry seems to me a much better use of our energy than jockeying over whose got the best take on the internet. That’s the sort of deaths we should be calling for: the death of profiteering from instruments of death. 

But, I have carried on here for too long and run the risk of being just like the man I saw on Friday yelling incoherently into traffic. I was stopped at a stop light crossing at Colorado Boulevard and could barely hear the record I was listening to on my tiny handlebar mounted speaker. I sure as hell didn’t hear the middle-aged man carrying on at the adjacent bus stop. The all-encompassing drone of passing traffic on a major 6 lane state highway drown out almost all the sound. Yet, as I looked around waiting for the traffic light, I could see the anger take hold of him. He was wildly gesticulating and airing his grievances right into the void of late morning rush hour traffic. His yelling into the void had no effect, save for people giving him a wider passing distance. I hope we stay the course and find different ways of relating to these difficulties we face today. The urge to yell into the void is strong. I get it. However, that approach only serves to alienate us from one another. I, for one, will be trying to keep human dignity at the center of everything I do and decry any corporation, state, or political party trying to use it for its own profit or power. But, I do fear this whole exercise is still just a lot more empty air let out into the world. 

Be well, dear reader, until next time.

James