by David A. Love, published on LA Progressive, December 19, 2024
Oh, my children, they tried to bury you, but they didn’t know you were seeds. Remember that it’s all connected.
We are gathered here today in these last days of the American Empire, and the beginning of the end of late-stage capitalism, to declare that none of this foolishness is working, and a system ain’t broken when it’s working like they had planned it.
And yet all of it is broken, the world is broken, and so are we. And here we are.
Rabbi Cat Zavis, a wise woman, said just a few days ago, “We can’t heal ourselves in a broken world, and we can’t heal the world if we’re broken.”
I keep thinking about that little Palestinian girl in Gaza. Hind Rijab was only 6 years old. On the phone for three hours, begging for her life, in the car with her dead family members. The most moral army in the world fired 355 bullets at her. I think a college named a building after her.
When I see Hind, I see those four little girls bombed in the Birmingham church. I see Emmett Till, I see Trayvon Martin. I see Anne Frank. Oh, my children, they tried to bury you, but they didn’t know you were seeds. Remember that it’s all connected.
All those children in Gaza looking like Baby Jesus, swaddled in a keffiyeh in the rubble, too many of them hastily wrapped in burial shrouds. The death camps of Gaza are the killing fields of the Congo and Sudan, the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, the Trail of Tears and Rwanda, Greenwood in Tulsa and Osage Avenue in Philly.
And the Middle Passage, the floating dungeons. The millions of African souls resting in the bottom of the Atlantic. All of this is connected. All of it.
Building your home on a mountain made from the skulls of the “bad” people will not protect you. Building a wall to keep out the migrants on stolen land built by stolen people will not make you safe. Because nobody is illegal. And rounding up 12 million for the camps makes you the prisoner – a prisoner to your own depravity, psychopathy and lack of humanity.
Genocide is killing past, present and future all at once – murdering all the storytellers and truthtellers, like Refaat Alareer; the journalists – I hope Lama Jamous, that little Black girl in Gaza is alright – and those who know where the crimes are hidden. Genocide is blowing up the mosques and the churches, the hospitals, the libraries, erasing all the schools and all the students, the teachers, the scholars.
Genocide is also building residential schools to kill the Indian and save the man, and bury those Native children in the yard behind the school – they’re still digging up those bodies – because savages need to be civilized. And human animals and terrorists must be exterminated, because the children of darkness are bad parents and don’t love their own children. “And they made us kill their kids,” they’ll tell us in any case.
Burning the sacred olive trees is cultural genocide and e.cocide, the way the White man slaughtered all the buffalo. And the Irish never forgot about the mass starvation imposed upon them by the British colonial power. This is all connected. Say it once again for everyone in the back row.
Lest we forget, Germany’s first genocide was against Africans, concentration camps in Namibia and everything, they’ll never tell you. Years later, the fascist brutality of European colonialism turned inward, and the Nazis wiped out six million Jews, and millions of others in the Shoah. And the Roma. And queer siblings. And those with disabilities. And dissidents. And others.
The Nazis burned the trans books before they burned the Torahs, and studied from Uncle Sam and Jim Crow, and took notes as they wrote the Nuremberg laws. But some of that Jim Crow racial purity stuff was too bonkers even for the Nazis to handle. Now, Germany – out of a guilty conscience, maybe selective historical amnesia, or maybe blinded by the whiteness – will stay silent and not speak out against Israel’s genocide of Falastin, because who are they to judge genociders when they, too, committed genocide? Now, Hitler’s descendants will arrest Jews in Germany and beat Palestinians who stand against genocide in Palestine.
Meanwhile, America, failing to come to terms with its own rotten harvest reaped through enslavement of the Black savages and annihilation of the Indigenous savages, will “stand with Israel” and supply the bombs to “finish the job” – complete with signatures – and arrest and expel student protesters. And arrest and fire professors, all in the name of protecting Jewish lives – or military contractors – and something about the only democracy in the Middle East, Judeo-Christian values, Western civilization, Israel having a right to exist, and whatever else.
Nations have no right to exist, no right to subjugate, no right to apartheid, occupation or genocide. The Jim Crow South had no such right, Uncle Sam still does not, apartheid South Africa had no right. Yet, all people have a right to be free, in a world where they are not scooping up pieces of their loved ones into plastic bags like Legos. All this sh*t is connected. Someone tell me where I am wrong.
Colonial genocide abroad is fascism at home. “Whenever I open the prayer book, I see before me images of children burning from napalm,” Rabbi Heschel said. And Dr. King called war an enemy of the poor, and America the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. King asked how young Black men were sent to Vietnam to guarantee liberties they did not have at home.
Meanwhile, in the present day, King’s words have returned like a boomerang with moral clarity. The White Moderates who told us to slow down, shut up and wait ‘til after the election – because now is not a convenient time for justice or saving lives – have made way for Orange Dictators financed by South African apartheid tech-bro oligarchs. A failure to come to terms with our ugly past will guarantee a brutal future.
And here we find ourselves in this hot mess, at a time when livestreamed genocide is our entertainment. America is an exceptional place – the land of medical bankruptcies, school shootings, corrupt leaders and college debt mortgages. And property rights come before human rights. And a handful of people hold most of the wealth in the world. And the CEO of a company who profits from killing patients was “one of the good guys,” while the vigilante who choked a Michael Jackson impersonator in the subway is a hero.
We need truth, justice and peace in the world today. Without justice there is no peace, and there will be no justice unless we seek the truth and repair the harm and injustices of the past.
Because it is all connected. We are all connected.
*Featured Image: Cagle Cartoons (distorted to fit the space – the message remains clear.)
David A. Love, JD, is the Executive Editor of BlackCommentator. He is a lawyer and journalist based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project, McClatchy-Tribune News Service, In These Times and Philadelphia Independent Media Center. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). His blog is davidalove.com.