I’ve been struggling with my association with Christianity for a long time, but like many of us who grew up evangelical, the inflection point was the 2016 election cycle.
When Supreme Court Justices began to be appointed during that presidential term, they included someone credibly accused of sexual assault, and another person shoehorned in just before the next presidential election. That’s the very thing the Republicans had blocked the Democrats from doing prior to the previous election, except in the case of the Republican appointee, the timeline was so much shorter that the hypocrisy was eye watering.
This is all tied intimately to evangelical support of the Republican party, a party which regularly chooses to persecute the most vulnerable in our society. They look to force sexually nonconforming folks back into hiding. They would rather let immigrants die rather than give them safe passage into our country, which has plenty of resources for everyone, if we choose to share them. They oppose feeding food-insecure kids. They say All Lives Matter when their white lives matter more than Black lives in our society, if not in word, then in deed.
I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!
Matthew 25:40
I turned to the other party, only to have the carpet ripped out from under me this year as I’ve seen Uncle Joe become Genocide Joe before my eyes. A professed Catholic, no less.
At the Red Herring, there is exhaustive editing taking place behind the scenes. I read and reread my posts before publication to make sure I’ve gotten everything right. Even with every word forced through a fine tooth comb, I still regularly find errors after publication.
Sometimes, though, I miss the forest for the trees.
I attended March for Gaza on January 13, 2024 with six of my kids, along with thousands of other people. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when there was almost no news coverage of the event.
Even when I searched for coverage, anemic articles a couple of paragraphs long described the protest. Longer articles mentioned the DC event, but focused more on other protests that happened around the world the same day, particularly in Paris and London. Several articles implied that the DC protest was characterized by violence.
I was at the DC protest.
I will bear witness if the media won’t.
Last spring, I made a quilted body warmer. It was my fifth one. I was trying to be creative with it, because you justifiably can’t make five of the same thing.*
I am broken to pieces. I thought there would be an inflection point: when people realized that the civilian deaths in Palestine, the targeting of journalists and healthcare workers, the denial of aid and destruction of homes, hospitals, and cultural sites – I thought that the citizens of the world would rise up to demand justice.
I was horrified early on by the civilian death toll in Gaza. When the number reached 6,000, I started calling my reps. I was terrified – I hate talking on the phone and I had never called my representatives before. I called multiple times over the coming weeks, but discovered the most sustainable way of communicating, for me, was writing to them.
I don’t know if one way or the other has more of an impact, but I don’t have the stamina or emotional bandwidth to call every week, and I am able to write. I have continued to write letters to every person I can think of, including officials at the Department of Defense, my local and state representatives, our U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., the President and VP. There are four to five folks who get an email from me every week, demanding a ceasefire and providing them with the latest atrocities as they willfully turn the other way.
At first I got a couple of responses, even a thoughtful, reasoned response from one rep (I think it was President Biden, now known as Genocide Joe or Joe Genociden on the internets). That was a long time ago. Now we’re in January. I believe this is Day 90. Twenty-three thousand civilians have lost their lives, not counting those who are buried under the rubble. It also doesn’t count those dying of starvation, infection, and inadequate medical care.
The aid coming into Gaza is not even close to being enough. I watched a video of aid trucks driving through Northern Gaza. They could not stop driving to drop off supplies, because they knew they would be targeted if they braked. Instead, men ran next to the vehicles while people riding on the back of the trucks threw off as many supplies as they could as the trucks drove through.
I watched as coverage dropped further and further down the page on the news websites. Now, I have to go to the menu, scroll to “World,” then “Middle East” and then finally, there it is. You have to hunt for it. Like the Palestinians are hunting for food, water, and safety. Except there is no cost to searching for news, and there is a great cost for searching for anything in Gaza.
Meanwhile, I have slowly added to my Instagram feed Gazan journalists, Al Jazeera English, the accounts of American Palestinians, and others, and began for the first time to get my news from social media. You can argue about a lot of things, but you can’t argue with eye witness accounts accompanied by videos. Not just videos of what is happening in Gaza, but analysis, history, context.
What is happening in Gaza is such an atrocity that it’s difficult to find words to describe it. I regularly come across posts that are blurred out with a warning that the image may be upsetting. I upvote those because the traffic helps keep Palestine buoyed in the algorithm, but I know better than to click on any of them.
The reason I know is because the images that are not blurred are so horrible, I can’t imagine what the blurred ones depict. According to a piece in the Washington Post, one of the updates I had to hunt for, “The London-based charity Save the Children said Sunday that more than 10 Palestinian children per day, on average, have lost one or both of their legs since the conflict in Gaza began.”
I keep thinking there will be mass protests, but there is largely silence. Every time a new number of casualties is reached, every time another hospital is bombed, every time another journalist’s family member is targeted, I wonder how people can remain silent. Information is freely available online. Things still make mainstream headlines, like South Africa accusing Israel of genocide in the International Court of Justice. How can you not know what is happening? Do you not care?
My usage of the F bomb has increased steadily over the past year, but I think in the past two or three months I have used it more than I have in my entire life. Because there is a fucking genocide happening in Gaza, and it seems like NO ONE cares.
Don’t talk to me about Israel. If Hamas was underground the whole time, if the Israeli State gave one flying fuck about bringing their hostages back alive, there is a way to do targeted attacks that minimized civilian casualties. Israel has the technology and weapons for it, from the U.S. with love. Instead, the Israeli State and the IDF seem to have made a game of how many war crimes they can commit in the shortest amount of time.
This coming weekend, I will be taking my family to Washington, DC at the March on Washington for Gaza. Finally, I’ll be able to join with others in person, and have our voices heard. In some ways, it feels like too little, and too late, but it wouldn’t be right to stop crying out until someone in power listens and acts.
I won’t lie, and I’ve been pretty emotional lately. I’ve always worn my heart on my sleeve. Our world has become so hostile and uncaring that it’s hard to stomach living here – in the United States especially, but also on Planet Earth. I cry every day. I feel so helpless.
And that is it. You are living in a world where genocide is happening in real time. What are you doing about it?
“Wa ‘alaikum as-salam” is, literally translated, “and peace be upon you.” It is the response to the greeting, “as-salamu ‘alaikum” (“peace be upon you”). Source.
