The Things I Cannot Say
“No individual can live alone. No nation can live alone. And anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution.” (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)
“One of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses that the new situation demands and they end up sleeping through a revolution.” (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution)
Micro Rage:
Grocery Shopping. I used to love going to the grocery store. Lingering through the aisles, perusing an inordinate number of choices for every single item. It was comforting to go when I just needed bananas, and it was relaxing when I had a long list. Now, in whatever post-pandemic iteration we exist in today, I hate it. It’s inherently anxiety-provoking. I have shifted over to curbside, where I desperately want to stay, save for the fact that they insist on packing every single individual item in a single plastic bag. Sigh.
Macro Rage:
(Preamble) Towards the end of the year, I had visions of evolving my time with this newsletter from monthly to weekly. Not so much because of demand. In all honesty, nobody has requested I write more here (though feel free to leave a request in the comments). Rather, I have a lot of interconnected thoughts, and I wanted to be able to address them without having to create a neat little silo each month. Rage is wildly intersectional. Then I became aware of Nazis on Substack (Washington Post gift link), my kids were never in school, and quite frankly it was easier to ignore the space.
Which brings me to this January newsletter, where, as of today, I am staying on the platform. For nothing other than at this moment, as someone that neither profits nor contributes towards it, staying seems a mediocre compromise. Like the way I still use Instagram even though “Facebook owner Meta’s dangerous algorithms and reckless pursuit of profit substantially contributed to the atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people in 2017.” I try to stay cognizant of my complicity, though it’s always much easier when I never used the platform to begin with, such as was the case with the Spotify controversy. I would appreciate hearing how others are navigating these platforms and any recommendations.
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I have felt my voice suffocated by fear and grief since October, so here are the things I cannot say, but others say so well.
“Under the genocide convention, though, the term describes an intent to wipe out a defined group of people and taking steps to achieve that end. There is no threshold of death or proportion of death that must be reached. It is possible to kill a relatively small number of people but still commit an act of genocide. We should approach this question humbly, because we — Americans, the West — have repeatedly shown that we are good at recognizing genocide only in retrospect. Virtually every cataclysm we now know as genocide, including the Holocaust, was met, first, with doubt and linguistic quibbling until finally — and much too late — a declaration was made.” Don’t Turn Away From the Charges of Genocide Against Israel, New York Times (Gift Link)
Growing Up Irooni with Noam Shuster-Eliassi, Chai and Conversation (Video link)
Human Rights Watch, World Health Organization (WHO), Doctors without Borders, Oxfam
A brief video of Dr. Myriam Francois, shared by Amanda Seales
“No individual can live alone. No nation can live alone. And anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution.” (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution)
A Small Thing
Season Reese’s peanut butter cups (currently snacking on hearts).
A Big(ger) Thing
I am in the midst of things small and slow, and I would love to hear bigger things from this community.
Yes to hearing more from you! Also validating your choice to stay here despite founder sh*tiness. There is no perfect place. *sigh*