We Only Have Each Other

It's just after 6am here in Colombia on Saturday 28th September 2024.

It's been nearly a year of the genocide in Gaza,

and I wasn't watching television news hardly at all for it. I was paying attention to it, like, on Twitter, and I was devastated by it.

There were plenty of videos and photos from first hand accounts.

Yesterday, though I was watching Al Jazeera,

watching the Israelis bomb Beirut in Lebanon.

The news presenter, a white man with an English accent,

could see the live feed of the bombings as he interviewed people from the studio.

He would physically jolt when he saw a big explosion. And he said, “I feel really uncomfortable talking while this is going on.”

I have been watching Al Jazeera more recently,

the way they cover

the genocide

is how a

a human being who still has their humanity would want a genocide to be covered.

When they speak to people who are from the affected countries, they ask how they are.

Twitter gets a bad name you know.

(You know, I specifically using the name Twitter when I refer to the positive aspects of the social media app owned by Elon Musk. When I refer to the negative side, the bad things that happen on the site because of Elon Musk, I refer to it as X.)

Twitter has kept me in community, actually, because the people that I follow express, daily, the emotional devastation of what is happening.

They express, daily, the impact of the ongoing Covid crisis.

I follow scientists and doctors, who everyone, apart from conspiracy theorists, respected, and whose advice they followed in 2020 and 2021.

And now they are now outliers,

And the majority of the people seem to be in the same camp as the conspiracy theorists.

Just go on as normal, and pretend that people aren’t getting ill wave after wave with all the implications related to it.

And the people I follow on Twitter, well,

we’re astonished.

But these attacks, the genocide, the bombing of residential areas in Beirut and elsewhere are allowed to continue, and yet they reveal

the reality about the people elected to power, so-called leaders in the United States and the UK, who wring their hands

and say that they want a ceasefire, yet continue to arm the fire --

billions of dollars,

while people in their own countries, and countries all over the world, suffer for lack of access to what they need,

and are told there is no money.

People in the United States are begging for the democratic US presidential candidate to say

something, anything,

that will give them even a hint that she would do something differently if she were president,

And she refuses to even say that she would,

even if we could trust what she would say.

While I was watching Beirut be bombed last night on my laptop,

I was on my phone, on Twitter, watching devastating flooding happening in the United States, fast food restaurants under water.

There's a Telegram channel that shows all similar disasters happening around the world every day,

many In the Global South,

and some in France and other European countries.

And so, on the one hand,

we have the effects of climate change, destroying places.

We have on the other hand, we have this war, destroying places

committing genocide, terrorising people, killing people and destroying land.

The environmental costs of all those bombs.

I know there are people who seem to only care about climate change. They say, “Well, if we don't do something about climate change, no one will be alive to worry about war, racism, ableism, sexism anyway.”

So, for you people, look at what Israel is doing to the earth. Someone must be calculating carbon emissions, like all the efforts to lower carbon emissions, and how many years is this bombing setting humanity back in terms of carbon emissions only?

N one stops them, and even without war emissions keep going up.

It's not in their best interests to stop war, to stop climate change and to stop oppression because it goes against money and power.

They are not going to save us. They have no incentive to do so. Only we can save us.

We need to hang on to our humanity. We need to grieve.

We need to resist. Grieving is part of the resistance, you know.

They'd rather we be numb and distract ourselves.

What is happening is overwhelming, and I will not tell anyone that they cannot take a break.

We need rest time. We need downtime,

but not because we are numb

because on top of trying to feed each other and get the health care we need,

we need to be in resistance. We need to keep up our strength.

If we have access to more resources than we need, they need to be put toward the resistance and the building of networks so that we can take care of each other and keep each other as safe as possible.

In the face of more and more devastating conflict,

oppression, conflict, and disasters.

Last week, when the hurricane evacuations in the United States were happening, they left 3,000 human beings locked up in cages in Florida, even though there was a mandatory evacuation.

And the week before that? These people with all of these weapons, power, resources,

they bought, they had bought a bunch of pagers and

redesigned the batteries so that they were laced with explosive material, and likely a little detonator,

so that when a particular message was sent, the pager would explode.

And because of this act of terror,

not only

have there been deaths and mutilations, but now other people can see that with just a mere $15,000

and a bit of engineering and chemical expertise, they too, can do something similar, which could be undetectable, beforehand, on an airplane, for example.

And the batteries can last for years and the same could be done for a battery pack.

I’ve put a link to this information in the show notes.

How do we live

knowing that the people with the most power, political power, military power in the world

deliberately do these things,

deliberately not do the things that would allow us to survive,

not to mention flourish, which is what we deserve.

We need each other. We need each other.

it's important that we don't do witness all this by ourselves and

it's important that we know that we have each other.

We all have different capacities and resources. We get to be gentle about that as well,

but we do have the opportunity, throughout the day,

to be a part of the resistance,

through how we treat each other and how we take care of ourselves each other,

That's a lot, and most of us can do much more as well —

especially the type of person who would be listening to this podcast.

So, let's do it together.

If you would like to connect, find me here. I offer coaching on a gift economy basis, as well as facilitation, consultation, conflict engagement, and EDI/DEI.