powerpac.org [powerpac.org]
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💔How do you write about anything other than this when there is such terror & atrocity happening in Palestine & Israel. How do you do anything other than curl into the darkness until the light forces its way in. What The … is up with the fact that we so rarely get it right while it’s happening!? We splash our Never Again s onto our social media feeds & our t-shirts; we march through our days, our $8 coffee drinks in hand, filling up our gas tanks & over-watering our lives, while we wage a war against a war — at least quietly in our hearts & minds. But the hard truth is humanity Agains & Agains over & over (but no Crimson � there’s no love or flowers blooming here) & then we rewrite the facts, intentionally misinterpret them, or play possum while the truth checks to see if there’s any humanness left here. We say that if we’d been in Nazi Germany we’d have put our lives on the line to stand against the German Gestapo, we say that we’d have shielded John Lewis from American State Troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We pretend that 100,000 Japanese Americans didn’t find themselves in concentration camps, here, under the flag of the R, W � & that mass incarceration & mass shootings aren’t uniquely US. Again & again we hear people say they are allies of the LGBTQ+ community, but as you read this, hate filled & harmful rhetoric is being built into policies in schools & libraries across the country, where they’re also distorting historical narratives & denying the reality of slavery. We say we’d have stood up to the Bad Guys, but the truth of the matter is, until we are the ones the bad guys come for, We Carry on & Keep Out of It.
📺 It used to be that people could, somewhat honestly, say they weren’t aware of all the human wickedness in the world, or at least that they didn’t know how bad it was out there for others until it showed up in textbooks. The nightly news was not google-able or even rewatchable. It was on the air, & then it wasn’t. If only, they thought then, they’d known. They could have done something. But that’s not quite it, is it? You’d think that not being able to turn a blind eye would have made us a better, smarter, kinder society; that in the Information Age, where no dearth of 411 lives, we’d have cleared the air, Lysoled the stink of bigotry away. But it reeks more than ever. Now, we don’t have to wait for Walter or Dan or Barbara to tell us what on earth is happening. Because Everyone, Everywhere, All At Once is telling us. We enter the pit via our screens, we app into the trauma & tragedy of others. We see the bloodshed, the tears, the bodies, & then we watch cute animal videos or some other will-depleting, dystopian-provided mind candy until we are too tired to think clearly. We post & re-post our disdain or admiration of the issue du jour, creating our own personal panaceas for atrocity, little selfie pats on the back. We take our safe stands, then turn off the lights we take for granted & sleep. We click & swipe our way to absolution.
😖 Don’t get me wrong. I do it too. We have collectively become inoculated from caring about each other, from loving our neighbor. We are inundated with clips of pundits & politicians pointing, yelling, spin-doctoring, lying. This time it’s Hamas & Netanyahu; always it’s a figurehead or an entire people that can be condemned to reinforce our own world views. We don’t love, actually. Most of us, at least the ones in this current iteration of America the Beautiful (but not the Beatitude-inal, more like Blessed are Those Who Persecute ) insist we are in the right even if the path we took to get to that conclusion was all wrong. Even if the truth is blaring so loudly it causes blood to drip from our ears. We double-down prefering to bleed to death rather than admitting something we said or did was wrong. For crying out loud, we live in a medically-advanced world* where information is readily available, yet people dying of COVID used their last breath to deny that COVID existed. Never Again, though, right?
🦪🔘🫧Ultimately, never ever have we ever really, honestly Never Again-ed. We Keep Clam & Carry On. We hide the pearl of ourselves away, protect it so that we can cash it in when we need favor or fortune. We hoard our gems rather than give them away so that somewhere faraway in a land called Galilee, those in the Holy Land we enjoy allegories of on Sundays, can turn stone to bread. Every war against a people, through bombs or policy or lies, requires its own version of We Are The Chosen . The story of every war, every battle, every nationalist movement is built around the simulation of the anointed. But, chosen is the kind of word that relentlessly causes problems, like almost everything that looks through a binary lens does. It amplifies the chosen via the unsaid sentiment next to it — that someone else is not. That there is an unchosen.
🍞So what is there to do? We’ve given our power over to the money lenders in the temples, we have filled their pockets with whatever it takes so that they can Keep Claiming & Carrying On. While hate rises. While antisemitism rises. While Islamophobia rises. While racism rises. While LGBTQ+ hate rises. While misogyny rises. Rather than bringing loaves & fishes to those in need, we fill the pockets of the powerful with dough. Too many pretend they don’t understand that the attacks on the Palestinians in Gaza aren’t just war crimes, but crimes against all of our humanity, yet they understand that the abhorrent attack by Hamas at the Re’im music festival is terrorism. We have to stop seeing in twos, we have to stop believing that our choices must come down to one or the other, this or that, chosen or unchosen. We are high-centered as a society, plateaued, stuck on the apex of evolutionary progress, & we will not move forward from that until we can see wider, into the vastness of possibilities that so many, especially our queer children are trying to tell us — that we will Never Again!, over & over, until we are able to collectively comprehend that there are more choices than these exhausted binary options we’ve caged ourselves in with.
😮‍💨**Deep sigh.** Perhaps humans will just keep humaning, seeking power above all, no matter who is harmed. Or maybe, someday, we will actually say Never Again & mean it. Until then, all I know to do is choose love.
Keep On & Carry Calm,
Dc Lozano, Politi-Digital Director, PowerPAC
*It’s been speculated that there’s a cancer vaccine on the far but not impossible horizon. That’s real holy work, right there. Imagine if there were a vaccine that inoculated against hate. Would you take it? & what if that vaccine were just a pen? Would you pick it up & color in the ovals next to the names of people spreading love?
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PowerPAC is a social justice organization that strategically directs financial and human resources to local and state organizations working to deliver wins in legislative fights, ballot initiatives, and more. For years the money we've raised has, dollar for dollar, been given back to the communities we work with. We've made sure that your investments were being used to build power for our communities because too often we are underrepresented and ignored.
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