Ceasefire Now… But Then What?

It’s been an exhausting couple of months.

I don’t really think that I have a huge right to complain in a lot of respects as someone who sees no real danger in my position as a Jewish man typing this polemic from my mid-rise apartment in Austin, Texas while on the other side of the world there are thousands upon thousands suffering and dying, but my ability to engage with regular life gives me the privilege of time to compose my thoughts; I figure that I should use that privilege. I’ve let some thoughts slip in the form of walls of text on instagram story posts, but I’ve been really trying to make a more concerted effort to rein in my frustrations, not reply to anyone’s posts, and be very intentional about how I articulate a stance that I know most people I know and love will disagree with. Nonetheless, after two months of stress, tears, irritation, anger, sadness, guilt, and tense exchanges with loved ones about our ideological differences, I feel as though there is one thing that needs to be asked of anyone who cares enough about the people of Palestine and Israel to make their voices heard on one side or another of this issue:

What’s next?

It seems simple and one would imagine that there are many avenues that the politically involved may go down when such a question is posed to them, but I think many would be surprised to know that there hasn’t been a lot of critical thought regarding what a post-war Gaza and Israel will look like from the some of the loudest voices on this topic. It seems as though any intellectual musing has been reduced to slogans and hashtags. It’s hard to explain to anyone who is new to the Israel-Palestine conflict why chants of “Ceasefire now!” can’t just be boiled down to “pro genocide” or “anti genocide” because for many of these people, there is no space for nuance between “Israel bad, Palestine good”. Frankly, I’m not here to give anyone a history lesson, but suffice to say that if you care to work towards an end to the tragic bloodshed that’s occurring in Gaza, you’re going to have to dig a little deeper than the headlines.

Before I go on, I’m going to just knock out some easy talking points so that we can have a conversation about this like adults who don’t get all their news from twitter hot takes:

1. Over forty percent of the world’s Jewish population lives in Israel. For perspective, about thirty six percent of the world’s Jewish population was lost in the Holocaust. By current estimates, Jews are about one and a half million people away from returning to pre-Holocaust numbers. I can’t attempt to apply objectivity to emotion, but I would attempt to appeal to anyone who is against the existence of Israel to understand the attachment that countless members of the Jewish population around the world have to the concept of Jewish self-determination and how that has manifested in the Israel project.

2. Over fifty percent of the population of Israel is not the image of the Israeli citizen that is often being evoked in conversations regarding settler-colonialism in relation to the Israeli populace (read as: white). This includes over three million Mizrahi Jews (which, for those who are unfamiliar, is a term applied to descendants of Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa; in this classification are the descendants of Mashriqi Jews who had lived in Middle Eastern countries, such as Yemenite, Egyptian, Iranian, Kurdish, Lebanese, Syrian, Turkish and Iraqi Jews; as well as the descendants of Maghrebi Jews who had lived in North African countries, such as Algerian, Libyan, Moroccan, and Tunisian Jews) as well as a touch under two million Israeli Muslims. Therefore, I will insist that breaking this conflict down to “white settlers vs. an indigenous population” is not only reductive, but tragically indicative of an attempt to apply American power dynamics to an inapplicable scenario.

3. Hamas is anti-Jewish. I really won’t entertain any argument to the contrary with consideration that leaders of this organization have gone on record to make this clear. Political Islam is a relatively new concept that Hamas was born out of and while Islam is absolutely not an anti-Jewish religion, political Islam as a concept has often been weaponized against Jews. There’s lots of history to this and I’m firmly aware of the fact that these antisemitic sentiments have been sharpened as a response to settler violence in the West Bank and various incursions from the Israeli government since 1967. The relevance of pointing out Hamas’s anti-Jewish sentiments is to highlight that religious pluralism is already a pretty foreign concept in many Arab countries in which very little exists in the way of religious or ethnic minorities, so the idea that we could simply abolish Israel and leave the aforementioned huge number of Jewish people who would call this area home whether or not Israel existed in a state of safety is a bold claim.

4. Many Jews see anti-Zionism as antisemitism. I have complicated feelings about this, but it is helpful to realize that Zionism isn’t just some abstract concept that seeks to establish a Jewish state in the middle east, but rather a political strategy that has already been fully realized in many respects. Zionism established Israel and while there was once a time in which Zionism could once not be mutually exclusive with the specific geography of Israel as we currently know it, that ceased to be the case over seventy five years ago. Like it or not, Zionism no longer asks the question of whether or not Israel has the right to exist, but rather if one supports the safety, self-determination, and prosperity of the nearly ten million people that now exist within Israel’s borders of which include seven million of the world’s sixteen million Jews. Whether or not you agree with the actions of Israel’s government or the path that has led us from the time of Israel’s founding to now, one must accept that these people are there now and that there is no viable reality in which they will no longer be there. So when we debate the efficacy and/or ethics of Zionism, I would implore you to allow this perspective into the framework of these discussions.

5. Criticism of Israel, Israel’s government, or of Israel’s conduct in their relationship with Palestine is not antisemitic. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that criticisms that fall into these categories are inherently absolved of antisemitism. In fact, much of the framework used in these criticisms has slipped into antisemitism by voicing calls for a free Palestine to Jews who have nothing to do with the conflict (read as: almost fucking all of us) for simply existing and having the audacity to celebrate our holidays while the world is falling apart around us. Alternatively, much of the rhetoric that is shared on social media is propagated by think tanks that are literally funded by the Qatari and Saudi Arabian governments which… is obviously a problem. It doesn’t feel as though many of us are engaging critically with this sort of propaganda in the same way that we would criticize people on the other side for not contending with obvious Israeli propaganda coming from a far-right government. It’s worthy of consideration that there is an incomprehensible amount of information floating around the internet these days about this conflict and that much of it will inherently be misleading or outright false. While mindless regurgitation of this propaganda isn’t necessarily consciously antisemitic, we have to contend with the fact that sometimes, it just is– regardless of intention– in the same way that failing to dispel the obvious attempts of Israel’s government to dehumanize the innocent people in Gaza is orientalist and racist.

6. Nothing we post matters in the grand scheme of things. Even this. Despite losing international support of the assault on Gaza, Netenyahu’s government has not altered their tactics in the slightest. In other words, despite two months of marches, outcry, and attempts at a strike, the IDF is still killing Palestinians by the thousands and it doesn’t really seem to show any sign of stopping. This is not to say that we should all shrug our shoulders and not care about this human rights atrocity,  but we should go into these discussions fully knowing that our instagram stories aren’t a form of activism. I would like to think that this understanding of the futility of social media will give us all agency to have these discussions like adults instead of terminally-online children.

Now, having read all of that, I think you may be surprised to know that I am, in fact, in favor of a ceasefire. Not that it super matters what I think, but I would just like to make it clear that someone can, in fact, represent all of the ideas that I just espoused and still be in favor of achieving peace and ending the bloodshed that we’ve been seeing for two months. That said, I do believe that I still owe a follow up to the original query: what’s next?

Well, if you asked a lot of the people whose political leanings on this issue can be summed up in a hashtag, the obvious next step is to prosecute several key members of the Israeli government for war crimes and begin the process of giving the land currently known as Israel back to Palestine. As much as I agree that Netanyahu and several other members of his cabinet need to answer for the massive civilian casualties at the Hague, the idea that Israel is just going to go away in some one-state-solution pipe dream is an insane suggestion. I would like to make one thing very clear: despite my or anyone else’s feelings on the existence of Israel, its origins, or its government’s conduct as of late, Israel is here to stay; “from the river to the sea” Palestine will never again be. I’m not typing that out with a smile on my face, but I’m attempting to grapple with this with a sense of realism. There are literal billions of dollars worth of arms and funding from the west flowing through Israel’s proverbial veins. Israel boasts one of the strongest military and intelligence operations in the world. Israel has damn near unconditional support from the United States which, in case anyone’s tuned out recently, is basically an unstoppable force of capital and military might. Again, I’m not boasting about this, but anyone who refuses to admit that these are key factors that will ensure the continued existence of Israel for the foreseeable future is deluded at best.

Equipped with the understanding that Israel isn’t going anywhere and that our collective “revolutionary spirit” is serving our egos more than it’s serving the Palestinian people, we need to find a collective understanding of what we expect the next steps to be. I’m no expert; the thought of trying to present a fully fleshed out action plan for the resolution of this conflict feels pretty cringe with consideration to the fact that I (surprise) do not work for the state department and do, in fact, work at a restaurant. That said, I think we should build upon a collective agreement of what the viable next steps in the process will be, but to do that, we should be considerate of the fact that there is a difference between what we want versus what we can reasonably expect to get here if the immediate preservation of human life is the goal post we’re working towards.

Most pressing of all things here is the demand for a ceasefire to end the needless bloodshed in Gaza. To get a more permanent version of this from the Israeli government, the hostages need to be returned and Hamas needs to surrender. If there is any inkling that anyone is still carrying for some hope of Hamas victory, you’re putting some adventurist desire for “revolution” in front of the lives and safety of tens of thousands of people which, coming from the sidelines in the states, is a despicable prioritization of your desire to cosplay as a revolutionary over actual human beings that you chauvinistically think you know better than. Whether or not you agree with Hamas is obviously a matter of concern for me, but ultimately, not something that is relevant to the argument at hand. At the end of the day, we want the people of Palestine to stop dying and we have to be realistic about what it’s going to take to make that happen - morally correct or not, we can debate that when we have the luxury of people not dying as a result of our inaction.

Unfortunately, even such a loaded, divisive question of how we can successfully demand a ceasefire is still the easiest question to contend with because in case this is anyone’s first go around with the cycle of “Hamas attack, brutal Israeli response, ceasefire, Hamas attack, etc”, I have news: we’ve been down this road before. Ending the violence now has never in the history of this conflict been a guarantee to end this violence going forward. I think it goes without saying that the Israeli government has committed untold atrocities that have exacerbated the violence and cruelty of Hamas. For my friends who are staunchly pro-Israel, I would like to ask you to let go of the tribalist dogma for a moment and consider that the Israeli government has done a lot to sour relations with Palestine since 1967 and that there is a tremendous responsibility upon the shoulders of Israeli policymakers and military leaders for the loss of life and the state of diplomacy between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. Consider that, whether we like it or not, Israel now represents the Jewish people on the world stage and that we have to pressure Israel to demonstrate Jewish values among which senseless killing and terror is not welcome. To my friends who are staunchly anti-Israel, I would like to ask you to consider that Fatah/the Palestinian Authority has lost a grasp on Palestine outside of some areas of the West Bank due to Hamas’s insistence that terrorism is the only path forward for their idea of a liberated Palestine. Consider that Israel was beginning to expand upon Palestinian citizenship and job opportunities while normalizing relations with the rest of the Arab world which is - on record - the primary reason why Hamas attacked - so that the world would reignite their vitriol towards Israel and continue to martyrize the Palestinian people with which the leaders of Hamas keep their distance from the safety of their homes in Qatar and Lebanon.

With these considerations made, we must all come together and demand new leadership in both Israel and in Palestine. The current Israeli administration and Hamas must be unceremoniously removed and tried for their crimes against both the Palestinian people and the Israeli people. The new Israeli administration must rise in tandem with Fatah so that true diplomacy can be achieved and Israel can invest in the infrastructure and future prosperity of Palestine - which is action that other countries such as the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar need to be taken to task for as well for their contributions to this perpetual violence so that we can expedite the process of getting Palestinians back on their feet after the great suffering that they have experienced. But if we continue to live in denial of each side’s contribution to the suffering of one another, we are doomed to continue upon this path to be consumed by violence and hatred ad nauseam.

But where does that leave us? In my deepest hopes and aspirations, it leaves us to find the common ground necessary to affect change instead of screaming at each other from the insurmountable peaks of partisan self-reverence that we stand upon when we insist on correctness over victory or progress. I am just one voice advocating for us to look at the picture of death and despair that’s been painted for us through the eyes of another so that we can achieve a sense of humanity that may carry us forward into an era of peace and prosperity. I am begging for us all to stop assuming that we can dumb down complex geopolitical struggles of which I would need several novels worth of pages to provide a poignant historical context to inflate our sense of self-righteousness while denying the compassion and consideration of those who see things differently than us. It is only through a relinquishment of our egos and our insistence upon being the smartest person in the room or the best ally that we will actually take the first steps towards the preservation of human life that, despite our differences, we all care about very deeply. We may not see justice in the way that we fantasize justice to look like, but if we try hard enough and all try to engage the fight for peace in good faith, we may see peace and that has to be good enough for us at some point.

Said much more eloquently than I am capable of:

“We are trapped, you and I, in a seemingly hopeless cycle. Not a "cycle of violence" -- a lazy formulation that tells us nothing about why our conflict exists, let alone how to end it. Instead, we're trapped in what may be called a "cycle of denial." Your side denies my people's legitimacy, my right to self-determination, and my side prevents your people from achieving national sovereignty. The cycle of denial defines our shared existence, an impossible intimacy of violence, suppression, rage, despair.

That is the cycle we can only break together.”

― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

zen and the art of utter institutional failure

Here’s one quick thing I’ll say that’s tangentially related to the broader topic at hand to clarify in case there was any confusion whatsoever before we get going with this thing: I’m not going to debate with a single person about the morality or justification for abortion. I have a hard-line stance that anyone who needs or wants an abortion should be able to easily get one for free, no questions asked. If you don’t agree with that, I don’t care. If you have something to say to me about that, don’t. Once again, if you possess an opinion that would serve to undermine the right to bodily autonomy for people who have uteruses, then I do not care about your opinion and, furthermore, I do not care about you. In fact, I would venture to say that very few, if anyone cares about you. You are a roadblock to progress and your opinion is drenched in the blood of the thousands of vulnerable people with unwanted pregnancies that you have assisted in condemning to death and despair. Unkindly, go read a book and leave me the fuck out of your backwards attemp to subvert the eyes of your life’s audience from the facets of your person that cause you insecurity by attempting to strip away the humanity of others. Full send.

Now back our regularly scheduled musings.

…

Hell, I can’t believe that I’m saying this (and those of you who are close to me might also reel a bit from the shock), but I was actually somewhat wrong last time. Just a few days ago, Biden signed the first gun safety legislation since the 90’s into law which, albeit didn’t do everything that we could have wanted to do to protect our children from gun violence, was a really refreshing step in the right (read as left) direction for us. I was nearly bamboozled into having some of my faith in the legislative process restored.

How silly of me.

I’m sure that I don’t need to remind anyone about the state of the union at the moment. I know that we collectively feel the foundation of whatever faith we had in our institutions crumbling beneath our feet and nobody is unjustified in feeling hopeless. If you made the trek through my last post about a month ago, you would know that I’m not only prone to such hopelessness myself, but also that I’m on the borderline of being an advocate for hopelessness as a means of survival. Not to be a broken record, but I feel even more justified in my routine post-massive-societal-loss defeatism than I did a month ago.

They finally fucking did it. On Friday, June 24th, 2022, five vile, soulless husks decided that they were doing their best to represent the interests and wellbeing of three hundred twenty nine million people by effectively denying the right to uterus-possessing-persons to have autonomy over their own bodies that is supported by some sixty odd percent of our country’s population. Three of said ravenous, rapacious, misogynist dipshits were appointed to their undemocratic lifetime appointments by reality TV star and conman, Donald J Trump, during his four year stint as America’s daddy. 

Cue hand-wringing from virtue-signal-happy democrats who are just dying to say “I told you so” for not voting for Hillary Clinton. As if the party that’s had the popular support of the majority of the country for eighty years hasn’t at some point surely had the power to codify Roe into law, but actively chosen not to in a play to continue dangling the lives and well being of human beings that they claim to support and care about in front of our faces to convince us to throw our votes away on them election after election. But if we’re being honest, this issue that will never personally affect any of our top-level elected officials was always just smoke and mirrors to distract the broader American populace from the endless spending on oil and bloodshed that lines said top-level politicians’ pockets (also known as one of the sole remaining pillars of the United States of America with bipartisan support from all members of the legislative and executive branch).

If I may ask, how long can we sleep at night while continuously blaming “Republican obstructionism” and Trump for the failures of the Democratic Party as the only viable voting option to the left of David Duke? If the entirety of the Democratic Party’s legacy can be undone in four years by one of dumbest human beings that has ever emerged into the public spotlight, then that speaks tragic volumes of energy and momentum that’s been wasted on our collective efforts to keep them in power for as long as they’ve had this infuriating stranglehold on us.  I reiterate that the Democratic Party has held popular support in this country for eighty fucking years and yet, they allow themselves to get steamrolled by Republican efforts to gerrymander and con their way into positions of power because they need the proverbial boogeyman (look up where that term came from by the way) to hold our votes ransom so we don’t do something “foolish” like vote for the Green Party or some other entity that doesn’t support their imperialist fiscal interests. If Democrats actually cared to mobilize voters, they could do so easily by showing any sort of tepid support for progressive policies that would empower the working class in even the slightest. But instead they threaten you with violence and the stripping away of your basic humanity so that Nancy Pelosi can fire off a banger email telling you that you need to donate money to her re-election campaign for an area of the country where a democrat will never lose the house seat.

Are you not tired of this shit yet? I mean, how many times are we going to just let them drag our noses through the mud before we at least *entertain* the notion that there needs to be some sort of viable alternative to just voting for democrats over and over again while they continuously disappoint us at every conceivable opportunity?

I’m posing some mighty tall questions and criticisms for someone who doesn’t really have any answers, huh? Like I haven’t voted in every single election that I’ve been of age to vote for in my life and sighed while I tapped the box next to a (D). Who am I kidding? I voted for my late friend, Mimi Soltysik for president in 2016 after myself and a couple of friends of mine went around the state of Texas and gathered signatures to see to it that votes for our friend, the Socialist Party candidate for president, would be counted. Did he win? Obviously not, but it felt nice to try and exercise an alternative. Many would say that we were few of many that split the vote and made way for Trump to be president, but I’ve written dissertations about why that couldn’t be further from the truth and I’m not inclined to delve into that again at this juncture (though I’m sure that I may be inclined to do so come election season 2024). That said, my protest vote, in hindsight, didn’t accomplish much because it wasn’t a part of a broader organizational effort to push forward an agenda. The Socialist Party too realized this in 2020 and instead of putting forth their own candidate, co-signed the much more popular and successful Green Party’s candidate. I’ve long felt as though the Green’s would be a really good place to start if we want to start investing in a party that actually has more than corporate interests in the driver’s seat on this road-trip/descent into the capitalist hellscape that we’re all on together. It may sound far fetched, but let’s be honest: doesn’t reforming the democratic party sound even more of a fantasy?

That said, I’m screaming into the void more than I’m actually here to offer solutions because, if I’m being honest with you, dear audience, I’m in no way qualified to offer solutions here. It’s hard times. Give your friends with uteruses a hug. Or give them the money that you were considering donating to democrats. Maybe both. I don’t know. You should probably still vote, but maybe approach with more skepticism than you have previously and with more intention to broaden your activism beyond the voting booth. It feels like a little too late to settle for “a good start”, but what else have we got?

thoughts, prayers, action

I was at a McDonald’s on December 14th, 2012. I recall standing there with my at-the-time girlfriend who I would later marry, have children with, and divorce getting a snack before going into our respective shifts at the restaurant that employed both of us at the time. There was a television in the back that would usually crank out CNN’s twenty-four hour news cycle on repeat throughout the day and, at the time, I was a freshly-minted adult-a mere eighteen years of age-and therefore, had neither the life experience nor the desire to be informed or interested in anything that I would generally find meeting my eye on that screen.

But that day was different because it was on that day that the United States would be sent into collective shock and grief when a man not much older than I was at the time walked into Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut and took twenty-six lives including those of twenty elementary school-aged children. The murder of a child has always been and will always be impossibly difficult to stomach, but such a senseless, reasonless murder on this scale was one of the most disgusting, blood-curdling acts to slip into my stream of perception at this point in my life. I had grown up in the shadow of the tragic Columbine shooting, but there was an immediately perceptible, yet somehow very difficult to explain line of demarcation between that and what happened in Newtown that day.

I’m sure many people my age can relate to the notion of coming into a form of consciousness in the post-9/11 world in which the world seemed so constantly engulfed in chaos that it would take something truly jarring-something so unthinkable-to truly rattle us. I was no different than many of my peers in that respect. My family was vaguely conservative, but rarely was there ever a truly coherent opinion presented to me that gave cause to any sort of exploration into my own political identity. Instead, my ideological development came from a common, but nonetheless very dangerous place: the internet. In today’s climate of non-stop, in your face online political activism (or at the very least virtue-signaling and posturing), you can assume that if you start to veer into the dark side of politics (read as conservatism if you’re in the US), someone, somewhere will be there to jump out and scare the wrong out of you from their corner of the internet. But a mere decade ago, this was extraordinarily less of the case and you were always just a YouTube rabbit hole or two away from finding some unabashed libertarianism or worse. I personally realized how easy it was to fall into this trap at that age and, were it not for the help of some extraordinary women in my life, I likely would have succumbed to such a nugget of ideological nonsense as that in a much more difficult-to-repair way.

But not everyone is as fortunate as I was in that respect. In the past decade, we’ve seen thousands of mass shootings in the US and little (if any) legislative action to mitigate the horrific violence that we’ve all started becoming desensitized to. The predominant motivating ideology for the perpetrators of these heinous acts is white nationalism/white supremacy. This is not an opinion of mine, but rather a cold, uncomfortable, and indisputable fact. There is nothing particularly easy or pleasant about confronting this vile underbelly of society that has become all too comfortable in recent years to show its ugly face repeatedly, but if we hope to stop these people from continuing to violently seize power from us by means of dominating the attention economy, it is our duty to do so.

Now surely, some of those who will read this diatribe of mine will read that last sentence and say “there’s nothing hard or uncomfortable about confronting racism/racists and it’s cowardly to frame it as such”. I would’ve once been one of those people, but that’s only because I would have at that point in my own political development not confronted how deeply the darkness of racism and white supremacy had infected every facet of the United States both in domestic and foreign policy. See, how are we to condemn the prejudiced attack of the man who took the lives of ten black people in a grocery store in Buffalo if we do not condemn our country’s ally Israel in its creation of an apartheid state with dominion over the Palestinian people? How do we condemn the man who killed nine black people at a church in Charleston if we do not condemn our own government’s plunder and pillage of the global south? And even if we remove race from the equation, how the fuck am I, a parent, supposed to condem the murder of nineteen elementary school aged children children two hours away from me in Uvalde, Texas and in the same breath be complicit in the bombing and shelling of schools and hospitals by our government’s hand in the middle east?

The short answer is that I cannot hold such cognitive dissonance so I instead choose rage over all of it. Living with such a rage is difficult. The unfettered cynicism that consumes me when it comes to every political/politicized issue that arises has not only had a hugely negative impact on my person but on countless personal relationships. My faith in the institutions that we are supposed to be able to rely on to serve justice to those who would prioritize their own capital gain and/or power over human life has long since faded and I’m left feeling powerless, hopeless, and defeated when yet another senseless loss of life enters my periphery such as the aforementioned massacre in Uvalde.

However, this one struck a different chord for me. It is only in these very moments in which I type these words that it occurs to me how much the predominant emotion that I’ve experienced through every global tragedy for years has been anger; how much my knee-jerk reaction has always been to let rage inspire action instead of sitting back and allowing myself to feel. With Uvalde, I felt my immediate response differently.

Today, I’m sad. Very sad. Like, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve cried since I first read the news last night kind of sad. Today, I realized that the last time I felt sadness hit me like a brick due to some form of current event was nearly ten years ago in the lobby of a McDonalds when an eighteen-year-old Alexander learned that twenty kids my younger siblings’ ages had just been massacred in Connecticut. Today, I realized that nearly a decade later, nineteen children barely older than my children had just been massacred in Texas and that not a god damn thing has been done about it by the powers that be who are supposed to make the decisions necessary to protect us. None of the letters to my representatives, none of the petitions, none of the organizing, none of the rallying and protesting, none of the volunteer work, none of the donations, none of the voting that I’ve done in my career as an adult have done a single fucking thing to keep something like this from happening. The saddest part about this is knowing it will happen again and knowing that I possess no power to stop it.

Now what? Now my daughters start school this fall and I just have to send them off to class every day hoping that they come back? Is that the world I live in now? Has it always been? I guess there’s no fair way to answer that last one, but I now feel confident in saying that even if the world was not always this way that it, at least, always will be. How am I to get frustrated with people for expressing “thoughts and prayers” when shit like this happens when their thoughts and prayers are effectually identical to the countless actions that myself and so many others have taken to try and repair the broken institutions that have so unabashedly failed us so many times?

The system is broken and that’s not new news, but it hurts when one of its many cracks and faultlines shows itself in such a way as this. This dissertation doesn’t turn around and become happy, poignant, and full of solutions either. I’ve been trying to encourage everyone to do the “right” thing and act to stop such tragedy over and over again until I’ve gone blue in the face for a decade and accomplished nothing. I’ve written countless polemics rallying against hopelessness in an era of never-ending darkness and atrocities for as long as I remember.

But today? Today, I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m scared, and I have no solutions. Today, I have about as much to offer as that kid ten years ago wiping tears from underneath his eyes in between bites of a quarter pounder with cheese. Today, I guess it’s just thoughts and prayers.