The weight on our souls now is not only to honor the lives of the more than thirty thousand Palestinians slaughtered by the Israeli government and its supporters, but to not lose, or not lose sight of the fight for which they were murdered. The fight for the right of return, for self-determination, for humanity among humanity. Against the empire, against colonialism and the lies told in its favor for centuries.

True enlightenment now might be revolting and horrifying, rather than light and beatific and transcendent. Not to say that there is no lightness and beatitude, only that they might not be appropriate just now.

The smallness of our worlds will be what destroys us, like our private pains and enjoyments, our private fantasies and travesties. The rest of the world, the shared world, can burn around these like so many inconveniences.

All the privileges that come with living in the United States are privileges soaked in blood and caked in delusion.

Some people had the gall and ghoulishness to sign the bombs on their way to destroy generations of Palestinian lives and their homes, while millions of us sign the bombs without moving a finger…precisely by not moving a finger.

You cannot prevent what has already occurred. The prevention of genocide must apply to warranted suspicions of occurring genocide, rather than only to acts and occasions that have been ruled as genocide.

It was some form of justice that got us to where we are now. Justice is impossible.

How many towns and cities in the United States are there that don’t want to hear a peep about Palestine, about genocide, about the rights of the oppressed? Key West, Florida is one of those towns, whose mask is a thick silence and the blindness the sunshine, or the alcohol or the fantasy, causes.

One of the only alternatives we have to perpetuating the systems of oppression is to throw our lives away without a care.

One says, “I want to eliminate the oppressor.” The other says, “I want to eliminate the oppressed in their very response to oppression, in their very reminder that they are oppressed.” Perhaps the latter will not put it so–eloquently, if they still put it as bluntly. To call them both genocidal might be accurate, but it is not honest.

States are cruel and stupid. All of them, to varying degrees. They are rooted in an irrationality so outrageous that any love of them is the result of steady training, or of coercion or force.

The entire military-industrial-prison complex is one prolonged mockery, the making-impossible, of the process of truth and reconciliation.

Humans seem not only headed for annihilation, but for annihilation with vindictiveness attached to it as though a natural growth.  Even at the end, we will make sure there is someone, or something, to blame.

One thing the nihilist has right is that we are still fighting a local fight even in the fight against genocide. There is still darkness and triple darkness and speechless stars all around us as we rage. Yet we cry, enraged, into this darkness, which darkness is part and parcel of the courage of the call.

The most reasonable reaction to lies and criminality on this scale is madness.