A Second Draft (Free Palestine)
To grow up is to realize that we live in a design that has not worked since the start of its creation.
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I grew up with an unwavering belief in human goodness. I winced at films that involved obscene violence and characters that treated each other as if they were bugs, brittle beings designed for personal gain. I screamed at novels in which the majority was exploited by the minority and morals were nowhere to be found. The idea that villains actually existed in the real world was a notion I could not accept, to the point that I refused to watch scary movies.
On a car ride to nowhere in high school, my friends and I debated over a made up situation: If a person had invented an electric car that could be manufactured and sold for a quarter of the price of a normal car, but they decided to sell it to a corporation instead, were they inherently bad? My friends said yes, what a soulless motherf*cker! I argued that they might have a reason, maybe their mother needed medicine or the corporate demons threatened the safety of the people in their life. Everyone was just trying to do their best.
No, one of my friends said, some people are inherently evil. Some people only think about themselves. Some people only want to get richer and richer and richer until they have so much that they forget what it feels like to be human. Or maybe that is human.
I still do not know whether or not they are right, whether or not there is a “right” to begin with. A decade later, however, I do know that there is evil in this world, politicians and CEOs and world leaders who have taken and taken and taken from people who simply want enough to exist. Say, every Western hero we read about in history books: Christopher Culumbus (who led the enslavement and genocide of the Taino people of Haiti, reducing a population of over 1M to 32,000), Andrew Jackson (responsible for the Indian Removal Act, which displaced over 100,000 Indigineous people and led to the Trail of Tears), Thomas Jefferson (a proponent of slavery who relied on slave labor for his plantation's operations), the list goes on. The American empire and the conglomeration of the West was built upon the skeletons of mothers and fathers and daughters and sons, a sea of innocence and decency stained red. Today is no different, as the United States attempts to maintain its position of influence by supporting a Western power in creating another generation of skeletons.
What we are witnessing in Gaza is a genocide. I do not believe that is up for debate. Genocide is defined as a deliberate attempt to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. This definition encompasses acts such as killing members of the group (over 34,000 Palestinian people killed), causing serious bodily or mental harm (over 77,816 Palestinian people injured), and creating conditions intended to bring about the group's destruction (preventing humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza). The Israeli military has strategically displaced over 1.7M Palestinian people from their homes, intentionally killing civilians in areas they designated as “safe,” causing widespread destruction and restricting access to basic needs — also known as carrying out a genocide.
To grow up is to realize that we live in a design that has not worked since the start of its creation. America was founded on genocide. Estimates suggest that tens of millions of Indigenous peoples lived in the Americas prior to European contact, and as a result of settler-led massacres, disease-spreading, and enslavement, 90% of the population was wiped out. The distance we associate with history is an illusion. It is not the past. It is a broken record, a mirror of our present realities.
The United States delivered over $1.5 billion worth of weapons to Africa between 1950 to 1989. The top recipients (Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, and the DRC) witnessed the largest conflicts of the 90s in regards to violence, instability, and economic collapse. The American empire is built upon extractive industries and international labor markets that require internal conflict, the exploitation of innocent bodies, unequal wealth distribution, and, if the numbers are high enough for the news to report on it: mass death. It is a war-making, war-profiting machine. And it will do anything it can to maintain its position of power.
In 2023, the Biden administration requested $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel, an addition to the $3.8 billion in aid the U.S. already sends on an annual basis. At the end of the year, Joe Biden surpassed the pending status of the aid to sell over $200 million of weapons to Israel. More than half of Americans do not support Israel’s war in Gaza. But our country has never been for the people, for freedom or liberty or happiness. It has always been for profit.
When the war in Gaza started, four of the largest weapons contractors in the United States saw record increases in stock valuation. One of those companies, Lockheed Martin, earned over 70% of its $51 billion in revenue from sales to the U.S. government in 2018. In 2020, a Sludge review of government finances showed that “51 members of Congress and their spouses own between $2.3 and $5.8 million worth of stocks in companies that are among the top 30 defense contractors in the world (The American Prospect).”
At times, I wonder if politics prevents us from seeing what is actually there: over 1.7M people who have had their homes torn to dust, their families killed and friends lost amidst the rubble. An entire generation pleading for their institutions to divest, to cut off their direct ties to funding and profiting from the war. The majority of a nation estranged from their own government, unable to afford groceries or entertain the companies profiting from inflation or protest without being put in jail, the basic promises like social security set to run out by 2034. It seems we are at a breaking point.
Last week I experienced something close to a mental unraveling. As I attempted to process everything going on in the world, sense was nowhere to be found. Videos condemning Biden and Trump, the two presidential candidates we will be forced to vote for, as if playing a game of russian roulette with a fully loaded revolver, flashed across my feed. I wondered how, when, and if change was a destination we would ever reach. The general consensus is that anyone with a sound mind should still vote for Biden. Trump has much worse in store. But how is this our democracy?
The simple answer is that it is not, it never was. American democracy, so far as we were taught about it in schools, does not exist. It is as bureaucratically corrupt and abstracted as any puppet government is. That is why we protest. Videos of students calling upon their institutions to divest from companies profiting from the war in Gaza, building encampments nationwide, have gone viral across platforms, paralleled by old footage of protests opposing the Vietnam War back in 1960’s.
I am proud of the students who are demanding divestment, a necessary means of supporting the Palestinian people and weakening American ties with the Israeli military. I am shocked by the people making fun of them. I am confused to see Jewish creators speak about anti-semitism in support of Israel, starting arguments that seem to miss the point: over 34,000 Palestinian people have been killed. While fighting anti-semitism is important, making it your life’s dissertation with the present genocide as a subnote seems selective, to say the least.
I laid on the soft foam of my bed, stared at the ceiling, and told my partner that I felt overwhelmed. We spoke for some time about everything going on, drifting between rant and therapy. There has been a war in every generation. Millions of people die. We do our best to change the course of history, to create policies, to fight and protest. And then we move on, we get “past” it. He was trying to console me.
But the thing is, many of us do not move on. The millions of Palestinian people who have been displaced, who have had their friends and families killed, do not get to move on. The 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu people killed in the Rwandan genocide do not get to move on, nor the 882,000 South Vietnamese people killed in the Vietnam War, nor the 10,000 people killed in Ukraine, nor the 6 million people killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, nor the upwards of 2 million Uyghur muslims being held in concentration camps in China. All of these numbers are underreported, consistently growing.
That is why we need to talk about these things. That is why we need to see what is at the center of politics: Millions of lives ending too soon. That is why we need to call on our institutions and governments to divest. That is why we need to ask each other how we’re doing and smile with a tender hello, to pause and read and learn and listen, getting closer to some semblance of the truth: This is genocide. Our government and our institutions are responsible, and so are we.
While humanitarian aid operations are being blocked from reaching Gaza, we can help Palestinians by protesting the institutions funding Israel and insisting upon calls for a ceasefire. If we cannot protest in person, donating to bail funds can help ensure that the protests for divestment continue until the demands are met.
At the end of my conversation with my partner, he told me that there was one thing that gives him hope: Humans took and took and took, we built machines to speed up the warming of the planet just so we could make more things and earn more money, to the point that one day we will not be able to survive. The climate will kill us. Maybe the billionaires are working on a way to save humanity on a place like Mars, but he hopes that does not happen. It will be better with us gone, for the world to be left alone to heal. A second draft.
Ten years ago, I would have disagreed with him: But look at how much we love each other! Look at the art we create! Look at the parties and the heartbreaks and the books and the films.
Now I agree with him. The world deserves a second draft without us. And while we are still in the first one, I will do my best to refine the language, to better the story, and most of all, to find the parts I like most and write in as much goodness and decency as I can. There are a lot of us who believe in goodness, who want better. Let’s edit this first draft together.
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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