How was your Memorial Day weekend?
Dear Americans,
I hear the way you talk about it.
War for you means having to think about the economy and gas prices.
If you have loved ones in the military, then war might involve a more personal sacrifice in the form of the precious family member whose return you anxiously await.
But do you wonder what war means to the ones your leaders send your children to fight?
The “enemy,” so to speak?
Has it been normalized to you that war is always fought on someone else’s turf?
Do you buy the logic that the US and Israel need to invade the homelands of others or overthrow their leaders in order to keep the world safe from the terrorism of Palestine and Lebanon and Iran and Venezuela and Cuba and a list of countries I don’t have the patience to list and you don’t have the patience to read?
- Even though it is not Iran that is dictating what America should do with its ports and uranium; it is not Iran that bombed America’s elementary school or medical facilities or heritage sites.
- Even though it is not Lebanon that targets Israel’s paramedics; it is not Lebanon that has destroyed tens of thousands of housing units and displaced over a million people, a fifth of the entire country’s population, within months.
- Even though it is not Palestine that illegally occupied and ethnically cleansed Israel; it is not Palestine that imposed an apartheid system and starves Israelis to have an easier time stealing even more of their land.
- Even though it was not Muslims who kidnapped and tortured humanitarian activists from around the world on camera last week, and then, upon their deportation, beat the torture survivors in front of their families right at the airport to prevent evidence of war crimes from getting out.
War, to your enemies, means losing the house they grew up in and everyone they’ve ever loved on the same day and the air losing its oxygen and the green of homeland turning to gray; it is rubble on street corners and metal plates in the severed legs of children, and there is no “back home” to return to.
I got a company email yesterday with a boilerplate Memorial Day message, something to the effect of “honoring our fallen troops who gave their lives in the conflict in the Middle East.”
He says this while Gaza burns, and we burned it.
But to acknowledge America’s atrocities would be “talking politics at the workplace,” while honoring invading soldiers is for some reason standard practice.
I am horrified to live here sometimes, and I wonder if you ever feel the same way.
Before anyone makes any suggestions about where I should go instead if I have complaints, bear in mind that I didn’t choose this, that I wouldn’t be here at all if the US hadn’t attacked Iraq.
I know you remember that one.
I don’t know if you remember it the same way I do.
The thought brings me anguish, dear Americans, that you might live your whole life feeling inconvenienced about the stock market and arguing about petty shit like cancel culture, that you might die never having realized that this whole time, we were part of an incredibly evil machine.
That one day, history books will be written about the sadism of the Zionist colonizer, the unparalleled oppression around the world at the hands of the Western empire, and if you were to read one of these books, you might not even recognize yourself from the pages you are living through right now.
The blame is not all on you; you have the illusion of freedom.
Rather than a total media blackout, you have a suppression of all media that doesn’t conform, so it’s harder to recognize the tyranny you live under.
Rather than a dictatorship, you have an electoral system where you can choose between one of two pre-approved war criminal parties who align on everything that actually matters to the empire, but they lie in different ways and keep us occupied enough with their spectacle of democracy.
I honestly don’t know anymore if for the average American I’m preaching to the choir or ruffling feathers with these words.
The reality I describe seems obvious to me, but war for me has a very different meaning than the way it gets talked about in company emails, and don’t get me started on genocide.
Home will always be a very loaded term for me.
Do you ever wonder what your loved ones died for after they were sent overseas?
I’m sure you do.
Please don’t stop wondering; it is not an insult to their memory, and that question desperately needs to be asked.
I genuinely hope you had a meaningful time at your barbecue, and that your kid comes home safe from their tour, maybe asking some questions you’re not sure how to answer yet.
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