We are gathered
here today in these last days of the American
Empire, and the beginning of the end of
late-stage capitalism, to declare that none of
this foolishness is working, and a system
ain’t broken when it’s working like they had
planned it.
And yet all of it
is broken, the world is broken, and so are we.
And here we are.
Rabbi Cat Zavis, a
wise woman, said just a few days ago, “We
can’t heal ourselves in a broken world, and we
can’t heal the world if we’re broken.”
I keep thinking
about that little Palestinian girl in Gaza.
Hind Rijab was only 6 years old. On the phone
for three hours, begging for her life, in the
car with her dead family members. The most
moral army in the world fired 355 bullets at
her. I think a college named a building after
her.
When I see Hind, I
see those four little girls bombed in the
Birmingham church. I see Emmett Till, I see
Trayvon Martin. I see Anne Frank. Oh, my
children, they tried to bury you, but they
didn’t know you were seeds. Remember that it’s
all connected.
All those children
in Gaza looking like Baby Jesus, swaddled in a
keffiyeh in the rubble, too many of them
hastily wrapped in burial shrouds. The death
camps of Gaza are the killing fields of the
Congo and Sudan, the Warsaw Ghetto and
Auschwitz, the Trail of Tears and Rwanda,
Greenwood in Tulsa and Osage Avenue in Philly.
And the Middle
Passage, the floating dungeons. The millions
of African souls resting in the bottom of the
Atlantic. All of this is connected. All of it.
Building your home
on a mountain made from the skulls of the
“bad” people will not protect you. Building a
wall to keep out the migrants on stolen land
built by stolen people will not make you safe.
Because nobody is illegal. And rounding up 12
million for the camps makes you the prisoner -
a prisoner to your own depravity, psychopathy
and lack of humanity.
Genocide is killing
past, present and future all at once -
murdering all the storytellers and
truthtellers, like Refaat Alareer; the
journalists - I hope Lama Jamous, that little
Black girl in Gaza is alright - and those who
know where the crimes are hidden. Genocide is
blowing up the mosques and the churches, the
hospitals, the libraries, erasing all the
schools and all the students, the teachers,
the scholars.
Genocide is also
building residential schools to kill the
Indian and save the man, and bury those Native
children in the yard behind the school -
they’re still digging up those bodies -
because savages need to be civilized. And
human animals and terrorists must be
exterminated, because the children of darkness
are bad parents and don’t love their own
children. “And they made us kill their kids,”
they’ll tell us in any case.
Burning the sacred
olive trees is cultural genocide and ecocide,
the way the White man slaughtered all the
buffalo. And the Irish never forgot about the
mass starvation imposed upon them by the
British colonial power. This is all connected.
Say it once again for everyone in the back
row.
Lest we forget,
Germany’s first genocide was against Africans,
concentration camps in Namibia and everything,
they’ll never tell you. Years later, the
fascist brutality of European colonialism
turned inward, and the Nazis wiped out six
million Jews, and millions of others in the
Shoah. And the Roma. And queer siblings. And
those with disabilities. And dissidents. And
others.
The Nazis burned
the trans books before they burned the Torahs,
and studied from Uncle Sam and Jim Crow, and
took notes as they wrote the Nuremberg laws.
But some of that Jim Crow racial purity stuff
was too bonkers even for the Nazis to handle.
Now, Germany - out of a guilty conscience,
maybe selective historical amnesia, or maybe
blinded by the whiteness - will stay silent
and not speak out against Israel’s genocide of
Falastin, because who are they to judge
genociders when they, too, committed genocide?
Now, Hitler’s descendants will arrest Jews in
Germany and beat Palestinians who stand
against genocide in Palestine.
Meanwhile, America,
failing to come to terms with its own rotten
harvest reaped through enslavement of the
Black savages and annihilation of the
Indigenous savages, will “stand with Israel”
and supply the bombs to “finish the job” -
complete with signatures - and arrest and
expel student protesters. And arrest and fire
professors, all in the name of protecting
Jewish lives - or military contractors - and
something about the only democracy in the
Middle East, Judeo-Christian values, Western
civilization, Israel having a right to exist,
and whatever else.
Nations have no
right to exist, no right to subjugate, no
right to apartheid, occupation or genocide.
The Jim Crow South had no such right, Uncle
Sam still does not, apartheid South Africa had
no right. Yet, all people have a right to be
free, in a world where they are not scooping
up pieces of their loved ones into plastic
bags like Legos. All this sh*t is connected.
Someone tell me where I am wrong.
Colonial genocide
abroad is fascism at home. “Whenever I open
the prayer book, I see before me images of
children burning from napalm,” Rabbi Heschel
said. And Dr. King called war an enemy of the
poor, and America the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world. King asked how young
Black men were sent to Vietnam to guarantee
liberties they did not have at home.
Meanwhile, in the
present day, King’s words have returned like a
boomerang with moral clarity. The White
Moderates who told us to slow down, shut up
and wait ‘til after the election - because now
is not a convenient time for justice or saving
lives - have made way for Orange Dictators
financed by South African apartheid tech-bro
oligarchs. A failure to come to terms with our
ugly past will guarantee a brutal future.
And here we find
ourselves in this hot mess, at a time when
livestreamed genocide is our entertainment.
America is an exceptional place - the land of
medical bankruptcies, school shootings,
corrupt leaders and college debt mortgages.
And property rights come before human rights.
And a handful of people hold most of the
wealth in the world. And the CEO of a company
who profits from killing patients was “one of
the good guys,” while the vigilante who choked
a Michael Jackson impersonator in the subway
is a hero.
We need truth,
justice and peace in the world today. Without
justice there is no peace, and there will be
no justice unless we seek the truth and repair
the harm and injustices of the past.
Because it is all
connected. We are all connected.
