Vox released their “Year in Review” video for 2023, which is ~7 minutes of the biggest news stories of the year. Some of it is (of course) the mundane stupidity of which musical artists went on tour and which films over-performed in the box office, but much of it is a good reminder of what we’ve witnessed this year: From the rise of the labor movement and increasing union activity across the country, to the global impact of a warming climate and strengthening natural disasters, the rapid decline of the western empire is captured and distilled into a series of short video clips for your enjoyment.
Open your eyes and witness what has become of Gaza in less than 3 months. What was once a bustling city with schools and hospitals and parks and playgrounds is now a wasteland of pain and displacement and suffering. The level of destruction is truly breathtaking and undoubtedly a crime against humanity. And to think, our tax dollars shipped the bombs. There’s something particularly insidious about a nation like the US which forces its citizens to work under constant threat of starvation, homelessness, and loss of access to healthcare. A country that requires us to pay taxes under threat of imprisonment, and then turns around and uses those taxes from our labor to fund and defend a racist genocide.
The Associated Press thought now was an appropriate time to run this article, detailing the plight of injured Israeli soldiers and calling it, “a hidden cost of war”. This only furthers my belief that many of these apartheid-defending soldiers never truly considered that they’d be facing any risk by murdering innocent Palestinians. The article wants us to empathize with killers who voluntarily invaded Gaza and suffered the gruesome consequences of targeting innocent men, women and children in defense of a malignant zionist project. Somehow I must’ve missed the similarly sympathetic article documenting the hidden cost paid by the children in Gaza.
"I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed sadism against an entire society and gotten away with it."
~ Edward Said, September 25, 2003
Yesterday pro-Palestinian protesters blocked entrances to both JFK airport in New York and LAX airport in Los Angeles. As always, there’s no shortage of critics who claim that actions like these only dissuade them from supporting Palestinian liberation. To them I say, if a little protest and disruption is what’s keeping you from calling for an end to genocide, it’s probably worth reassessing your humanity.
If you’re engaging in difficult conversations with family or friends who don’t understand the need for disruption and protest, or if you need educational resources to strengthen your arsenal of knowledge, don’t ever hesitate to reach out. If I don’t have the answer (and there are certainly plenty of answers I don’t have), I’m always happy to work alongside you to find whatever will be most helpful in our collective journey of growth and learning. Don’t despair my friends, hope is a constant effort.
Side Items
Argentinian Protests: Thousands of Argentinian union members and labor activists took to the streets of Buenos Aires yesterday to protest a decree from their self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei that imposes sweeping deregulation and austerity measures on the country’s struggling economy. Since taking power in early December, Milei has devalued the country’s currency by 50%, cut transportation and energy subsidies, refused to renew the contracts for more than 5,000 recently-hired state employees, and proposed repealing or modifying about 300 laws. This is a man who takes political direction from the ghost of his dead dog, so it shouldn’t come as a major surprise that he’s taken a bad situation and made it infinitely worse