This will not be a particularly well written essay. At the best of times I’m not the most aesthetically-minded writer. I’m not an exceptional prose stylist and I don’t write very beautiful sentences. This is not the best of times. What is there left to say? This week I saw a photo of the body of a child, dismembered by explosions, hanging from a wall. I saw this photo ten times or more throughout the day, while at my job teaching history to kids. We spent a week on the Boston Massacre, an incident from two and a half centuries ago where five people were killed. Someone stood trial there, at least. In the time it took us to pick through these old bones for clues, thousands of people, many their age or younger, were murdered by an army funded in some small part through the taxes levied on my own wages. Men in powdered wigs speak through time to complain of the intolerable situation in Massachusetts. How could anyone stand it?
As an Irish person in the US, so much of this resonated with me. I also haven't been able to in post about anything else, and every time I do I feel that mix of embarrassment and hopelessness. But you're right: nothing else feels real. I've also seen those tears shed in defense of killing. At the hearing for my city's ceasefire resolution (which passed, thankfully), there was such righteous indignation that you'd think we were calling for retaliatory strikes on Tel Aviv instead of asking our own government to call for an end to the massacre of a captive civilian population with money and weapons that we continue to supply. I keep wondering how much of my own taxes have contributed to this hell. Enough to buy a tank shell? A canister of white phosphorus? So many people here are under the illusion that silence is neutrality, when the US government has very much picked a side for us. I'm fairly cynical but this has utterly broken my faith in national politics and the Democratic party. I don't know how we're going to make it through this year. It's maddening.
As an Irish person in the US, so much of this resonated with me. I also haven't been able to in post about anything else, and every time I do I feel that mix of embarrassment and hopelessness. But you're right: nothing else feels real. I've also seen those tears shed in defense of killing. At the hearing for my city's ceasefire resolution (which passed, thankfully), there was such righteous indignation that you'd think we were calling for retaliatory strikes on Tel Aviv instead of asking our own government to call for an end to the massacre of a captive civilian population with money and weapons that we continue to supply. I keep wondering how much of my own taxes have contributed to this hell. Enough to buy a tank shell? A canister of white phosphorus? So many people here are under the illusion that silence is neutrality, when the US government has very much picked a side for us. I'm fairly cynical but this has utterly broken my faith in national politics and the Democratic party. I don't know how we're going to make it through this year. It's maddening.