Where Do We Go From Here?

& what's next?

“It must be clearly understood that the only way to solve the questions now besetting mankind is to eliminate completely the exploitation of dependent countries by developed capitalist countries, with all the consequences that implies.”

Che Guevara

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I knew Trump was going to win.

I’m also surprised when I find out that others didn’t. Not that Kamala didn’t have her strengths - she had the entire Democratic convention behind her, i.e. all the celebrities - Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Oprah, Kerry Washington, Reese Witherspoon. All the US American elites pretending the country hasn’t already been roiled out by fascism, that its very blood isn’t brimming with the poison of white supremacy, and that its very soil is not wrought with the most sadistic kinds of barbarism ever known to mankind. You can never heal from a past that hasn’t been plucked out and faced.

The legacy of the United States, the free world, the Global North, and the Western nations is that they presume their (artificial) intelligence is supreme. Have you ever read anything about Christopher Columbus? That guy was a morally bankrupt genocider (generally two things that go hand in hand, but you know, apparently people still haven’t figured that out) but this is also the guy who founded this land, and until recently was a hero in the US American imagination. What do you do with a society that valorizes genociders but refuses to call them such?

Interestingly, we consider the German Holocaust of Jewish people the worst genocide in the history of the world when we know that’s statistically untrue. Didn’t Howard Zinn say that in the space of less than a hundred years, roughly ~130 million people were genocided in Central, South, and North America combined? On the day to day, Americans forget that this is their legacy, that they murdered en masse a people, who are now impoverished. They took these people’s land and now pretend protecting stolen land against its original inhabitants is a matter of homeland security, imposing dehumanizing immigration laws, and calling them thugs and criminals. Doesn’t this all sound routinely familiar to what’s been happening in Palestine?

What many Americans want you to think is that most of these ~130 million Indigenous people died because of illnesses and diseases but Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes,

Proponents of the default position emphasize attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease.

Settler colonialism begets settler colonialism.

This is a headline from Israel newspaper Haaretz

This is from the BBC

This is from PBS.

A lot of this settler delusion is because of education. If you didn’t know, states like Texas are trying to ban Between The World And Me by Ta Nehisi Coates, a relatively moderate and liberal man, because white children are realizing they come from a deeply racist past. Many white parents and white fascist government bodies in the South feel as if that’s an infringement on their civil liberties—how dare you make their children care and have a conscience? Whiteness seems to obstruct you from social accountability. Sometimes it’s truly absurd to witness.

I recently had dinner with Coates - it was lovely but he is not a revolutionary nor is he a radical, he is a former staff writer at The Atlantic, this man is the American liberal consciousness. I don’t mean this with disrespect, I mean this as fact. So even if his work is considered too castigating of the realities of white American history (lol) this shows me that these white people would rather live in complete denial of their existence rather than even fathom what their ancestors did and what this country is paying and will continue to pay for for those debts. A stronghold of this country's population still doesn’t want to face their past. That, I think, is proving to be a massive problem.

I am a spiritual person, I know these things never go away. They haunt like a disease until they’re plucked out and faced. Capitalism, we have to remember, is not a reward.

I think Trump is a spiritual debt for American sins, or at the very least he is a byproduct of it. So, in that sense, I think it was unavoidable that he would win. Taking a hard look around this country, especially since COVID began, it’s clear that there is no longer a cohesion between the masses. We’ve see the COVID deniers, people who would rather pretend the climate crisis is not real and Zionists. We know where everyone stands. The mask is off, the United States voted a giant orange-faced reality TV star not once but twice! A scar borne out of its own mutilation, this is America. The spiritual bypass, the impossibility of feeling any accountability for the past, the entitlement to life and to privilege and to extraction.

I believe, with my whole body and soul, that this will also be the fall of the modern world, that this kind of behavior will be what collapses the European nations. Its own faultiness, its own greed, its own perverse lies that shield it from truth. But, eventually, like all things throughout history, people always have enough. Things are on the precipice of a mighty change and have been so for the last few years. We are expanding, spiritually, and socially — and despite the convergence of fascism around the world, there’s a growing powerful force against it. Internationalism is emerging again, alongside the awareness that the world as we know it is evolving because it must.

Inevitably, I do think there is a moral arc to the universe, but where do you go when a vast majority of your country refuses to understand that its “strengths” are built on slave labor, exploitation, and the mass murder of an Indigenous population who lived on this land for thousands of years. That kind of denial… well that kind of denial breeds Israel.

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Money rules the world and how does one make money?

Through maintaining war.

The United States of America is the biggest exporter of weapons in the world.

Let me repeat that again.

The United States of America is the biggest exporter of weapons in the world.

Knowing that, isn’t it interesting that wherever the United States goes that’s where there’s consistent war?

Money rules the world and how does one make money?

Through maintaining war.

You do the math.

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When will white people understand their legacy of carnage and exploitation? That all we need for them is to reckon with this.

I watched a German white woman speak to professor and political scientist John Mearsheimer recently and she verbatim said, “You can choose unfair peace or you can fight for fairness of the land… but sometimes unfair peace is probably better.” To which Mearsheimer says, “If you were a Palestinian living in Gaza and you were young, you would have joined Hamas in all likelihood. You would have rebelled. If your family had property in what is now Israel you would want that property back.” To which this woman said, “I understand but these things happen in history all the time.”

I see this as a Zionist argument — other people colonize, why can’t we? Which, you know, says everything you need you know about what they’re doing.

The ICC put out an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and Gallant and like an Onion headline their response was, predictably, that the arrest warrant was “anti-Semitic.” How can you debate or exist alongside such an unserious people? A people that are pretending nobody else exists just the nation-state of Israel and its wants and whims that a whole globe must acquiesce to. So what if they want to rape and kill all Palestinian life — that’s their prerogative! Apparently, we are all anti-Semites to even question it!

I can’t stop thinking of Dr Adnan Al-Bursh. One of the leading top surgeons in Gaza who was sexually, mentally and physically tortured in a Zionist prison - Ofer Prison to be exact, one of the most notorious Zionist prisons where several Palestinian political prisoners have been murdered since October last year. CNN reported in May, “An unpublished report compiled by the United Nations which CNN has obtained describes beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual abuse and threats of sexual violence against both men and women detained by the Israeli military.”

They also added, “The total number of Palestinian detainees who have died in Israeli custody since October 7 rose to 18.”

But detainees is not a correct term, right? Most Palestinians in Zionist prisons are there on “administrative detention” including children and what this means, as I explained to you in my last essay on Sinwar, is they are held in prison without trial. This is why the Al Aqsa Flood happened on October 7th. They were trying to free political prisoners. They were trying to free political prisoners. They were trying to free political prisoners. There was a precedent here of swapping Zionist soldiers, like the case of Gilad Shalit, who was exchanged in a prisoner swap in 2011, where 1,027 Palestinian prisoners were freed. Yes, 1027 Palestinian political prisoners. People in prison for years without trial are held there without custody. And, in some cases, like Dr Al-Bursh, tortured to death. The Zionists still haven’t released his body.

In order to understand Palestine, to really hear what the land is saying, what the people are screaming and have been shouting for us to collectively hear for decades, would mean many of you would have to unlearn what you know about Israel and re-understand it as a colonizer who, under the U.S’s tutelage, is using the most inhumane methods to mass murder Palestinians. This is similar to what the European nations have done too, and this is who Israel so desperately wants to be. The declaration of the only democracy in the Middle East is much like how Europe touts itself as being civilized and moral while it still relies on its extraction of colonies that it maintains through proxy wars like it is currently doing in Sudan or Haiti or Congo or… the list goes on and on. What do you think the World Trade Organization does? It creates unfair trade relations with the Global South in order to continue the cycle of impoverishment where the Global North pays nothing for their goods. Bananas, quinoa, avocados, gold, cobalt, copper — everything. Why do you think the Global North is “developed”? The same lie Israel spools is the lie that the Global North continues. Supremacy without naming extraction, without naming all the people you have to exploit in order to maintain the life that you have. This behavior has to be faced by those of us in the Global North. It’s incumbent on us to change, to show others there is a better and more profound way to be in relation with one another.

The way of extraction, of capitalism, is collapsing because it is untenable and it must collapse. How are you ushering in this inevitability?

I write about a lot of this in Who Is Wellness For? a book that feels like it’s finally meeting the time. Everything I have witnessed over the last year is exactly what I started researching in this book. If you want to understand the cycle we are currently in, let this book inform you because for many years I’ve been asking myself, what’s next?

I’m currently reading the great Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. There’s symmetry between the Che quote uptop and this from Rodney:

“If we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe/America has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries. If we wish to live up to our people’s expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe/America. For ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and we must try to set afoot a new [humanity].”

What he means by this, is discovering and inventing a world without extraction and exploitation from Europe/America. A chance where all people are worthy of life and the resources that are theirs without fear of enslavement or extraction.

Is this not a future worth fighting for?

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I’m a little injury-prone. My IBS is such that it’s deteriorated a lot of the spinal tissue around my gut (since I’ve had it severely for so long, twenty years this year since I was first diagnosed ) that every few months I might pull a muscle that will completely knock me out for weeks. I can’t write, move, it even hurts to get in and out of bed — it’s a cruel experience that I’m constantly avoiding. So since the genocide started, I’ve been trying to physically get stronger, and in the last year I’ve been training with a PT. One of the best decisions of my life, it’s expensive — but worth it for me.

Anyway, a few months ago I found out my trainer, who I love, was a Trump supporter. I couldn’t believe it, and very characteristically, I started to grill her the first time she told me explicitly. I have a Mars in Sagitarrius that doesn’t come out to fight until it does and when it’s there… and especially if I feel righteous… well, then, I’m gonna be a fucking blunt bitch. I can’t help it. I made her cry. It was awkward. I was in fumes as I trained and on my way back home I felt betrayed by the experience, by her. I wondered what made sense, should I stop working with her?

I decided against no. I wanted to observe her. It was strange because she wasn’t what I thought a Trump supporter would be. She was young, funny, Mexican, and had good values and good politics. We’d talked about anti-Blackness in our communities, transness (my partner at the time was trans, but I’d also talked to her about my own transness) my queerness and Palestine… for months before she revealed that she was pro-Trump, so it felt disorienting to picture her through this different lens.

I decided through this observation that I would just talk to her, get to know why she voted for Trump. I wanted to understand her motivations rather than throw her under the bus, especially because in many ways, she had an openness to me and others that I knew was real, I knew her feelings towards humanity were earnest. Turns out, she voted for Biden last election — but because her partner is here under DACA (for non US people, this is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, basically if your parents came here without papers) and Biden said he would figure things out and then didn’t, she felt betrayed by a Democratic government. Trump, on the other hand, weirdly gave her hope. On the day we fought, something that kept making me go crazy, was that she kept saying, “He’s a good man.” To which I’d spit some kind of angry snide comment about him being a fucking rapist but then I realized… she’s just not going to listen to me if I condescend her. I have to find a way to talk to her where I hear her, where I don’t accuse her of all the things anyone else can accuse her of. Where I humanize her even in a moment of disagreement.

I keep thinking about what it means to mobilize the masses. Working class and poor people are tired. They want better lives, too. They want better living conditions, too. Trump speaks to that in them, that’s why so many poor and working-class people vote for Trump. People on the left need to understand that. We need to understand the tactics the right uses to seduce people. Globally, something is happening wrt fascism, because everyday people are finding a connection to what they are being sold. Trump is a Capitalist wet dream. It doesn’t matter if what he’s saying is a lie, he’s fucking funny and he’s found a way to communicate to the masses. Who are, at the very least, intrigued by this orange-faced buffoon. That’s something we need to understand rather than shirk. If we want to revolutionize, how do we engage everyday people to care more and to know more about what’s going on? Shouldn’t we educate them?

Can you blame a population raised and indoctrinated on reality television? Trump is an Octavia Butler fantasy because he is a creation of this society, of this America. He was on Friends and Sex and the City and God knows what else. It’s like that famous photo of Michelle Obama hugging George W Bush—her good friend—America is the most successful propaganda machine in the history of the world. And like anything, it’s just a story. The big reality we are facing is that there’s no real delineation between Democrats and Republicans. So if there’s no morality, no cohesion or clarity or principles in either party… and I’m telling you the whole thing has been rotten anyway… what do we do next, collectively?

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For the last five weeks I’ve been teaching my final Grief Studies cohort for the year. I’ve said this before but teaching is probably the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done with my life. To be able to speak to all the things I want to, and that there are people who are impacted by the work enough to have it change them means a lot to me. It changes me. Every single time I teach, I am changed in small and monumental ways.

Two days ago was the acceptance : action week for Grief Studies - acceptance being the grief stage and action being the decolonization stage.

It was powerful as it was every week as I sat stunned by my entire class’s brilliance. To sit with grief, together, is such a gift. During this class, one student expressed going back to her homeland, and after talking to her Indigenous siblings, she realized that revolution is a spiritual experience as much as it is anything else. We have to be spiritually ready for revolution. It made me wonder, what are we / you / us doing to spiritually accept that we must evolve as a species and revolutionize… can we make space in our bodies for what’s to come? For both the work and the play and joy of it… if we are dreaming and reimagining together isn’t it possible to dream up a revolution can be sexy, erotic, and irresistible—as Toni Cade Bambara once told us? adrienne marie brown explains this through pleasure activism, what if worlds we didn’t think were possible… are? What if we can move with care, with softness and agility toward the world we want?

Another student shared that at a recent talk she attended, Fred Moten, who was speaking, shared that people often think the Civil Rights Movement was a mass movement but it was really just a series of small meetings over a long period of time—but that’s how things shifted, they changed through these conversations. The value of discussion and conversation as these things become more and more outlawed is increasingly important. We have to be able to dialogue with each other about the futures we are trying to build, together. We have to hear each other about our concerns, our pain, and what we need to co-create these futures, together. We have to move toward connection rather than against it.

If you don’t understand that white supremacy, capitalism and Zionism are distinctly interlinked (I mean the richest man in Haiti is an Israeli billionaire, the richest man in Congo is an Israeli billionaire… AGAIN YOU DO THE MATH ABOUT HOW THAT HAPPENS) but things need to collapse, and they are, because we are connecting the dots, finally. But we do need everyone in this fight. And I mean you, dear reader. We need you in this fight. It’s time.

I understand that not everyone can show up in the same ways but even if just beginning your political education, it’s time. Learn about the world, read Franz Fanon and Aimé Cesaire and let it change you. I see people reading Robin Wall Kimmerer all the time but why not implement what she’s talking about? I seethe at the amount of liberal Zionists I see who do medicines and healing but refuse to understand how to actually heal with the land. Side note: you can’t heal and be with the land if you can’t acknowledge what’s happening to it, bloop! Not enough ayahuasca ceremonies are gonna help you spiritually bypass that. No matter how much delusion you might have been in, it’s time to be honest with yourself. First and foremost.

That’s actually maybe the best advice I’ve been telling people. In a world with this much dishonesty, how powerful and potent that we get to determine and hone honest relationships with others. They have told us, the people in power have showed us, colonization has made such a standard accessible, but cruelty and lying and delusion are so passé. Like, get with the times bitch, it’s the Age of Aquarius. It’s time for truth-seeking, world-building and creating global harmony.

Zionists and capitalists are a death cult, all they believe in is the destruction of life for the benefit and sake of a few. Aquarius tells us no, she is ruled by Saturn so she is used to the work, she’s asking us to expand further than we ever have before. She’s asking us to dream beyond the visions of colonizers. She understands that the future is bright only because we create it together in the image of a world that protects all of us. That values all of us. This is a world worth fighting for, a world worth our time.

Today I pulled the Estanatlehi oracle from the Earth Warriors deck and I wanted to share its wisdom: “She (Estanatlehi) brings us hope and reminds us that life is continually renewing itself around us and within us. We can always begin again. In the face of loss or destruction, her presence brings comfort, hope and peace, so that rather than losing faith and giving up because we feel defeated, we have the courage to continue to fight for what matters — with refreshed reserves of energy and enthusiasm.

If we are struggling with change — either too much or too little — Estanatlehi emanates reassuring wisdom. When something needs repair, the Divine knows how to restore it. When something needs to end, the Divine will show us the way to empty ourselves of the past and prepare for a new beginning. When there is lack or deprivation, the abundance, the generosity of the universe shall bring fullness. We do not need to fear change, whether wanted or unwanted… We belong to life and can trust in it. Evolution is not always easy — it often requires tremendous courage of heart and inner strength.”

May you find that heart and inner strength today to fight harder for the world that deserves you. May these words ground you today. Onwards and upwards.

I believe in us.

Liberation for All, Free Palestine.