To be completely honest, educating myself about what’s going on in Israel/Palestine has felt like too much lately. My privilege whispers, “But you’re working on being anti-racist! You’re calling out misogyny! You’re getting your head around prison abolition and Asian-American fetishization and doing your own work in therapy and isn’t that all enough?” But the thing about intersectionality (and just being a good human) is–you gotta care about it all. And caring also means learning. So I will start.
This poem was in Laura Olin’s newsletter two weeks ago and it shook me. You don’t need to know the history of the West Bank or the origins of the conflict to feel the panic at the end: “It doesn’t matter/ that 58 seconds isn’t long enough/ to find your wedding album/ or your son’s favorite blanket”. You don’t need to know a lot to know that bombing civilians is wrong.
Running Orders
By Lena Khalaf Tuffaha