The Erotics of Revolution, Part II
Joyful perversion is only a thresshold, what will we build on the other side?
Happy New Year!
This is a conclusion, here is Part I. This is a draft and may change over time.
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“We can only live changes: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create.” – Ivan Ilich
O you think pervy old Aunty D is just out here relishing her degenerate German philosophers? Springing open her trench coat of raw desire and bafflement, maniacally devouring your provocation?
Look, at least half of my day job is sex and drugs.
People love sex and drugs!!!! Sex and drugs are powerful!!! Yes, the power comes with significant mortal and spiritual risk. But sex and drugs are that good! “Good” = soothing, pleasurable, addresses a deep need, relieves boredom, provides distraction, is compelling. Sex and drugs are formidable tools, and we wield them.
Sex and drugs are also shamed and repressed in our society. Sexuality is sanctioned to sell cotton briefs and dermatologic procedures, but often not for ordinary people to just enjoy ordinarily (especially queer or “undisciplined” bodies).
Is the erotic creepy? Sure, perhaps that’s the point: it dwells in the shadow. Also, (quoting again celebrated writer Brandon Taylor): “Grow up!”
Sublimation #2
Freud prophesied that we will murder our fathers and fuck our mothers; the child destroys her first gods. What does that say about us, that our great sage claimed Oedipus and generational curse as prototype? Infinite stories about parents and children, why this one?
Freud naturalized the disposal of our most intimate caregivers. Did he sense we needed this, to cope with the betrayals demanded of both parents and children? Is this what we need in a world that rapidly displaces us, that thinks nothing of generational rupture?
Did I replace parental love with ambition? Or transmute it?
Ryan Lackey wrote, on both religious and erotic ecstasy, that “desire inhabits a realm reason can only glimpse.” Maybe, but reason (consciously and subconsciously) is ever busy containing, prodding, and alchemizing desire.
Reason furiously heats filial piety under pressure, sublimating it into erotic attachments, religious yearning, worldly ambition. Reason is not mere Boolean linkage. It is a reason for: a justification, a making of meaning, consciously or unconsciously. Reason is an assertion of pattern, causality (if this, then that), a justification, a story.
You know you Want: you want the stars, to please your parents, for Austin Menendez from second period math class to sit next to you. You want to be admired and feel safe and drive your beat-down Honda Civic at a 100 miles per hour down empty freeways at midnight. You are restless and hungry, for what, you do not understand. Desire is inchoate, jumbled, conflicted: in conflict with survival, social belonging, other desires. Reason chaperones desire through the world.
Medicine #2
Say you settle on achievement as the conduit for social approval (say, through medical training). Transmute your love, redirect it to books, studying, gold stars, class navigation. Let objects take on the sacred sheen of your proxy hunger: white coats, the numerology of MCATs, the names of prestigious hospitals, NIH grant codes (K23, R21, and most coveted: R01). You will find a congregation in the same pursuit, affirming the reasonableness of this all. You are bidding to belong, and every acceptance and rejection is an exhilarating indictment of your worth (or lack). In medicine you find a lineage, a celebrated ancestry (to make up for the ones from which you were severed).
Love becomes tangled in pleasing authority and exerting authority; in camaraderie and intoxicating frenemies; in idealistic sentiment and petty competition.
(But does it get you laid? Your dude med student friends brag that on the apps, their dick is made of gold. You are annoyed, this does not work for you. Your dates are intimidated. When you meet your man, he is charming and deliciously unintimidated, not even by the menacing caffeinated glint in your eye. You joke to him you already have an abusive wife to whom you are loyal, it is medicine. Many years later, you both joke darkly, about how that was not a joke.)
Ok, so dramatic! Why repeatedly choose a drafty library cubicle with Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, over your beautiful warm-bodied man, over mental health and fleeting youth? How delusional do you have to be? To transmute love and pain for real-life family, friends, justice, gods, into devotion to cold extractive institutions, that certainly will not love you back?
Obviously, because people. Patients and their families, mentors and enemies, colleagues. We forged strange relationships under duress, amid bizarre power differences and hallucinatory amounts of sleep deprivation. Stranded together under the cold lights of sprawling medical compounds, we relied on each other, complained to each other, tenderly protected, resented and lashed out at each other.
That is the alchemical power of transmuting love.
Counterinsurgency
LISTEN:
Empire will set its most powerful resources to stop you from feeling, imagining, remembering, connecting, organizing. These are existential threats
Revolution—the kind that toppled colonial rule, reasserted economic and land sovereignty—the Algerians, Zapatistas, Black Panther Party—these meaningful threats against the hegemony of the capitalist global order—have faced the full force of imperial violence.
But brute force was never enough. The CIA, FBI, Western militaries know the threat of the Charismatic Revolutionary, so they assassinated, imprisoned, and exiled them. But that’s not enough either – you need a culture war: “Counterinsurgency, because it is a type of warfare, involves all the means of the war, including political, economic, military, cultural and ideological as well as psychological measures,” say the experts.
You’ve heard all this! Conspiracy theory not required, since it’s all very open conspiratorial strategy, published in textbooks (e.g. Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, by British military officer Frank Kitson); the “nation building” library of the Rand Corporation; or Tactics in Counterinsurgency, a field manual by the United States Army. The last has some useful advice:
“Counterinsurgency is fundamentally a competition between each side to mobilize the population in support of its agenda. So you must understand what motivates the people and how to mobilize them. You need to know why and how the insurgents are getting followers…The enemy is adaptive, resourceful, and probably grew up in the region where you will be operating. The locals have known him since he was a boy; how long have they known you? Your worst opponent is not the psychopathic terrorist of Hollywood; it is the charismatic follow-me warrior who would make your best platoon leader. His followers are not misled or naïve; much of his success may be due to bad government policies or security forces that alienate the population.”
“Enemy” = anyone who does not align with the agenda of the US Army, who have dropped in specifically to enforce that agenda. And as Hannah Arendt has exquisitely described, the imperial theater serves as laboratory, from where tactics are brought home to the imperial core, to control one’s own unruly populations.
In any case, the Charismatic is only a figure head, the vision they conjured is already loose. Again, the US Army:
“Stories about a community’s history provide models of how actions and consequences are linked. Stories are often the basis for strategies and actions, as well as for interpreting others’ intentions. Insurgent organizations use narratives and religious-based concepts very effectively in developing, spreading, and mobilizing followers.”
Empire uses stories too. Propaganda must alchemize our attention away from our grievances. "The atomic unit of propaganda isn't lies, it's emphasis," says Adam Johnson of Citations Needed.
Propaganda must distract us with something else (The US Army: “To undercut their influence you must exploit an alternative narrative, or better yet, tap into an existing narrative that excludes the insurgents. This narrative is often worked out for you by higher headquarters.”).
After all this, if you still cannot crush or marginalize a movement, then you must co-opt it. You might transmute the anti-imperial socialism of Martin Luther King, Jr, into sentimental bon mots.
Art is frivolous? No art is a weapon! Art is propaganda, advertisement, population control. Art is a mesmerism that commands blindness to repression and fealty to master. Listen, you know this: the CIA funded the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the Paris Review, abstract art. It sent the nation’s most illustrious jazz musicians to the Congo, were they inadvertently served as cover to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. In more mundane ways, industry owners concoct The Academy Awards to derail unionization. Grant a tiny subset of working artists outsized visibility and success, while subjecting the rest to precarity, call it a meritocracy (divide/conquer). Empire is art too.
Traditional & social media, academia, arts, mass entertainment have astronomic resources to enchant us into not seeing. Every time a celebrity hires a PR for crisis management, they stage public theater. The state does the same: a national election, manufacturing consent, engineering a culture war amid the chattering classes, or targeting a vulnerable scape goat. All this redirects our frustration into completely impotent ends, distracts us from the material grievances of our suffering—and from those who cause it.
Art scales more cheaply than soldiers and prisons. But when the theater fails, violence is ever on standby. Walt Disney turned his unionizing cartoonists into the FBI; the rest of Hollywood purged its leftists under McCarthy. Universities purr free speech, then attack dissent and beat students with outsized force. We have already discussed, that those with a brilliance for unifying and mobilizing people (Fred Hampton gathering the working class across races—Ferguson activists collaborating with Palestinians under occupation–Lumumba calling together pan-Africanism—) were taken. When the theater of liberalism falters (its multiplex show of elections, consumerism, “free choice” healthcare), fascism is reliable, not as bug but as regular feature of liberalism. And we are in that rerun right now: the escalation of policing, misogyny/anti-transgenderism, nativism, and the importing of imperial weapons to domestic fronts. Empire is practiced.
Revolution as feast
Pleasure deprivation, Gabes Torres warns joyless activists, is the road to resenting the pleasure of others. In the essay “Eros and the Revolution: Why Activism Needs Pleasure,” Torres argues that undervaluing pleasure becomes another way to divide and conquer. Per W.H Auden “As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.”
Marcuse portrayed our current oppressive system as one that reroutes our bodies and eros into labor and consumption, thereby causing division and mass alienation. The pleasure activists tell us to fight back, by reclaiming our bodies and eros.
Rested, nourished bodies are better at problem solving. But more importantly: why fight miserable repression at great risk to one’s own survival, if one is going stay miserable? What are we fighting for? We should at least have a good time! ESPECIALLY if they don’t want us to.
Look, also, “We revolt simply because, for many reasons we can no longer breathe,” said Frantz Fanon. A few people holding the vast majority of people hostage by violence and deprivation is not a stable system! It is a mess of internal contradiction, frequent crisis, and (rapidly approaching) ecological limits. As Olin summarized, “Sometimes those crises reach an intensity which makes the system as a whole fragile, vulnerable to challenge.”
Repression is not sustainable. Desire for freedom threatens the social arrangement. Is transgression enough to build a new world order?
Transgression by itself is only an opening. There is nothing about destabilization that guarantees something other than chaos or worse.
But everything needs a beginning! Art, psychedelics, religious ecstasy, a very good fuck, speech, or poem –these dramatically reconfigure subjective experience of reality. We didn’t even know we could feel like this! We didn’t even know we could imagine it! If we can imagine it…then why not?
The revolution is joyful! It counters the absurdity of repression with its own absurdity! The singing crowds of the Arab Spring, Sri Lankans swimming in the presidential pool, Koreans blasting Kpop (“(the president’s actions) were so irrational that explanations weren’t needed. As a result, simply playing K-pop music and allowing people to have fun and sustain the protest for a longer time seems to have become the primary goal.”)
The revolution is hot! Serbian group Otpor! elevated arrested dissidents into sex symbols, turning “arrests into events, with elaborate pre-arranged systems for notifying parents and colleagues of arrests, crowds outside the prisons singing pop songs and chanting the prisoners’ names, and ‘rock star receptions’ (and T shirts) when people were released.”
Revolution is commanding, it tugs deep in the belly, in the South Africans’ toyi-toyi, the Maori’s Haka, the Standing Rock Water Protectors astride horses—their courage and intimidating beauty seduces us, call us to remember something, to join.
The revolution is sensuous and quiet too: hushed meetings in the church basements over coffee and cake, the voodoo ceremony, all this heightened pleasure and intimacy of subterfuge. The revolution is humorous and juicy, like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, in the darkest days of the HIV crisis: alluring, exuberant, witty—a reminder that joy, sex, touch, connection, tenderness—could keep us alive—not merely not-dead, but alive.
The empire uses theater and so do we. We do it better. We will have to build something on the other side to take its place; to build it, we must imagine, experiment, build now. When the thresshold cracks open, we will be ready. Do not let them lie to you, that the revolution is no fun. The erotic makes us brave.
Manhunt #2
The alleged Hot CEO Assassin has been caught and named.
But you must remember, for a second, we were suspended above a precipice. A shocking transgression had happened. People of good conscious, felt something deeply forbidden – openly glad about a murder?
This grisliness still catches in my chest. This is a normal response! Because most normal people value the lives of others. Most normal people are not ghouls, that crush every last drop of wealth and life out of people, during their time of greatest suffering. We recognize the pain of losing a father, a brother. We recognize also, that United Healthcare does not give a fuck about our fathers, brothers, pain.
Someone brave made a joke. Then there wer a lot of jokes. Then joyful unadulterated lust.
Ok, yes, sure, we are being creeps. The man is only 26 and is now in the hands of the state. It is unclear if even all this—his race, class, wealth, education, bone structure, fame—will be enough to protect him. Even if this farce of justice is flimsy, the transgression was a steep one.
But also what is more delightfully transgressive than horror, hilarity, and horniness all together? These are maniacal energies, trap doors into oceanic bliss. Something has been breeched, the shadow and light have pressed each convex to each concave and--for a moment—we feel whole.
The gears of counterinsurgency are turning (imprisonment, talking point, media propaganda), and so too, intentionally or not, is sublimation. There is a familiar and frenzied grind of consumptive co-optation. They joke he is an assassin influencer; the expensive back pack he wears in security footage has completely sold out.
Maybe this eroticization, this consumerization, might save him, and us, opening a window to meaningful organization. Or maybe tgius brief flash of class consciousness will be neutralized in the spectacle of pop culture.
Desire #3
There are many paths to the child. Say you are blessed with this mundane miracle. Maybe even in the conventional way, in ecstatic rapture with your beloved. The child arrives already obtained. It grows inside you. To desire the child is to pray it will grow and leave you. Maybe you shove all this desire down, to stave heart break. Maybe you hold your breath for nine and half months.
Then he arrives, and you are stupidly surprised. He turns to you, expectantly, already, he remembers your voice. You are frightened to breathe yet. This creature is too fragile, how can something so fucking precious, be this fragile? Impossible. This is impossible.
You feel a confused emptiness. You venture out to Target, a week later, the rip in your abdomen still held together by tape, the baby in the car seat in the jolly red cart. Your man is solid, gentle, doting, guiding you back into the wild world.
The cart is gone. The baby is gone. You panic. A wail is rising in your throat. You grab your mouth. You pace wildly, scanning the rows of beeping registers, a stalking animal. A yawning hole is opening inside of you. You fucking fool, why did you leave the baby?? You are going to scream. You are going to turn to dust. You will be swallowed by the earth, in this stupid fucking Target.
But there is your man, waiving cheerfully, not even 6 feet away, with the cart, with the baby. You run, feeling little rips inside your belly, because you are not supposed to run so soon, even this short distance. You clutch the edge of the shopping cart, its plastic digging into your hands still swollen with IV fluid. You lock onto the baby, his round little sleeping face. “I will never fucking leave you again,” you hiss.
Your man’s eyes grow big, taking this in. He asks no questions. He loads the plastic bags quickly and gently ushers everyone out.
For another 6 months still, you hold your breath. You sob without breathing, willing your tears to inspire your tits, begging for enough milk, to keep this child.
You think about dehydration, SIDS, meningitis, croup. You are certain you will crush him while you sleep. You think of dairy cows, separated from their calves, as you feed your child formula, made by those grieving mothers. You think of history, you think of the news, of the infanticide in the fall of Troy, of children taken from their mother’s arms, again and again and again. Your job is to protect him, but you will fail. You stand braced for grief.
Sometimes he smiles. But mostly he cries, and you frantically try to please him. Even when he miraculously sleeps, you bolt upright and creep to his bassinet, to make sure he breathes, his tiny lungs holding air for you both.
And one day, for no reason, you look at him and think…o gods, they will let me have you. He is guzzling milk now and smashing avocados with his fists. He is round and fat. His wails are loud enough for the neighbors to complain. You marvel. You fall madly, desperately, terrifyingly in love, gulping in the air even as you are hurtling. You have never felt this much relief, this much terrifying ecstasy. He is yours.
He is not yours. The more he becomes himself, the more you relinquish. You do leave him. You leave him in his crib, then at daycare. You let him play out of your sight, ears perked. Even more, he leaves you. He rolls away, crawls away, runs away. You drop him off at school, and before you can say goodbye, he is already with his friends, other curly-headed little moppets, digging bent Pokemon cards out of their pockets. He stops looking to see if you are there.
Medicine #3
Medical training remakes the body. Hands become raw from soap and water and the pager dents into your hip flesh. Repetition of movements shapes muscles. You can discern the pallor of decreased circulation, subtle slackening of the nasolabial fold, the calluses and repetitions that also shape other humans.
Through the training apparatus, what began as desire, ambition, (then spiteful tenacity), has remade your flesh: your body has become a specific kind of instrument, that attends to other bodies.
In the clinic, bodies are de-eroticized, de-contextualized, de-personalized. You are two strangers in a room. You are asking and divulging the taboo, undressing, touching, sometimes rearranging flesh. It is intimate. We use the specific theater of the clinic to make this intimacy safe (if not very well).
The theater is elaborate –a vast infrastructure of regulation (training, licensing), visual cues (white coats, clinical equipment), rituals (vitals, hand washing). A medical vocabulary remakes reality, dense with syllables from ancient languages. Physicians channel the millenia by intoning the Hippocratic oath. The theater, its language and rituals, conjures strong purpose and boundaries. These are now familiar markers globally. The rune of a bright red cross or crescent against white, this signals the widely recognizable and protected status of medicine.
Dr. Mary Turfah is a surgeon, writer, and Palestinian American, she writes:
“We live in a society that grants doctors a presumed goodness, in which doctors are understood to be moral at an average exceeding that of the general population…As someone who has jumped through the hoops of medical training and chosen to spend her time in operating rooms, I can say that exposure to neither medicine broadly nor surgery specifically necessarily makes one a good person, although it can certainly make a person less patient, more confident—for both better and worse. Medicine, like any technical skill set, is a tool, wielded one way or another depending on the user’s intentions.”
As Turfah describes: “Among the doctor’s tasks is to make a new world—or resuscitate an old one. To look straight at death. But ‘death’ has many faces, and doctors—people—will see different things depending on what they’re looking for”
In her incredible essay “The Most Moral Army,” she analyzes the cruel deception, of using medicine (its language, practitioners) as a cover for the necropolitics of violent colonialism. A spokesperson for the IDF
“described a so-called rescue operation as ‘a surgical operation, like a brain operation; it has to be so accurate.’
“Surgical—like brain surgery…The words presented the military operation as an exceptional feat. Perhaps the brain surgery in question was a lobotomy, performed on the listener: the actual mission—one that killed 274 Palestinians and retrieved four Israelis while killing multiple other hostages in the process—involved Israeli soldiers (and, more than likely, American Special Forces) committing one of the most sadistic cases of perfidy documented, against a population their government is actively starving, by disguising themselves as aid workers and riding in an aid truck allegedly en route to deliver food to those starving people.”
“…By associating its actions with medicine, the Israeli military borrows this presumed morality to lend those actions certain moral valences—which are otherwise not self-evident at all.”
The obliterating military exploits medicine’s epistemic authority within the public theater, to lie to us. In the genocidal project, empire also targets for elimination a people’s medicine itself. Turfa interviewed Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a Palestinian British plastic/reconstructive surgeon based in London, who has worked extensively amid civilian bombardment. They discuss the long-standing IDF practice of targeting of medical infrastructure, in open violation of international law. Dr. Abu-Sittah:
“The Israeli military has insisted on dismantling and then destroying every aspect of the health system—not just the physical destruction of hospitals, but the killing of 340 doctors, nurses, and paramedics, and destruction of the medical schools, prevention of access to medication and to fuel, all of these things, they’re taking away the health system brick by brick–is an indication that in the modern era, you cannot ethnically cleanse areas without destroying the health system, because the health system anchors people in their communities.”
Medicine is exploited and targeted because it is a people’s capacity to repair and rebuild. It is a commitment to tending to each other, to protecting each other and collective generational knowledge.
Medicine has served empire; it has also served liberation. Rudoph Virchow (“father of pathology”), days after filing his investigation (that a typhus outbreak was due to government failure) joined the barracks of armed revolution in Berlin in 1848. He famously declared, “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale.”
To serve in such a way, medicine must be re-routed from individual bourgeois achievement, towards the collective. Dr. Ernesto Che Guevera wrote, “I dreamed of becoming a famous medical research scientist; I dreamed of working indefatigably to discover something which would be used to help humanity, but which signified a personal triumph for me.”
He becomes radicalized. “I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland.” To be effective, the revolutionary doctor cannot act as individual hero, but as part of “the mobilization of a whole people” (a greater sense of oceanic oneness).
Medicine is built on expertise gathered over generations—so is politics. If eros and imagination open the threshold to a new world, then deep generational knowledge, organization (building trust), and work deliver it. Dr. Abu-Sittah observed:
“It’s not about the medicine, but rather about what medicine allows you to do, that immediate ability to reach into people’s lives and to reach into their struggle and to see up close. Medicine allows you to stand at the coalface, and politics allows you to see what you are looking at. That’s what shapes that kind of medical activism if you want to call it that, or medical liberation ideology.”
Revolutionary
Taylor described the Revolutionary as a Great Man. But the revolutionary is not Exceptional, she is not Christ Savior, granted from the Patriarch on high. We are full of charismatics and potential leaders. We are the ones who make the charismatics. We birth, nurture and educate them (us), we fuck and inspire and rally around them (us), we radicalize each other. We are many.
We make the charismatics, just like we make the ships, the bombs, the doctors, and the soldiers, all of it, we are the ones that make all the wealth, that is hoarded by the few. We staff their ships and houses and drive their cars and manufacture all the stupid plastic things in their drawers. We make the theater of the empire, with our own creativity and brilliant art. We contort ourselves to steward the imperial propaganda, as careerist academics and legacy journalists. We are also the police, who protect this parasitic ruling class, we beat each other amid a scramble for crumbs from the table of those above. We repair each other, as this system slowly or quickly crushes us. They need us to do all of it, any of it. Each day they cut us down, and and each day we remake their vision, like the bread. We also rediscover what the generations before kept alive for us, we remember it was not always like this.
We see cracks, that things are more vulnerable than they appear, that it would take less than one would think, to tip things over. We are the revolution, and we are also the ones in the way of it.
Medicine #4
Perhaps it is all I ever write about, this fundamental betrayal I have felt, by medicine. It began with motherhood, tore open during COVID pandemic, then solidified in the silence of medical establishments in the escalation of the genocide in Gaza. The medicine i have devoted myself is a bunch of cowards. My alma mater, UCSF, has brazenly shut down all speech around Palestine and fired professors. The “decolonize global health” researchers, DEI statement makers, the AMA, APHA, IDSA with their charters full of life and justice—silent. They will not stand up for their colleagues in Gaza, their own medical kin.
Maybe this is the routine loss of innocence in middle age. We are cursed to murder and defile our gods—our parents, then whatever illusions we have created to take their place.
The IDF has been regularly torturing health workers to death, and I still cannot believe my medical peers remain silent. The last standing hospital in Gaza, Kama Adwan was bombed and set on fire. Its director Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was beaten and kidnapped. Where the institutions and leadership have failed, the medical workers have stepped up, demanding institutions, media and government pressure the IDF to free Dr. Safiya. I am reminded of medicine’s liberatory potential. The capacity for a people to protect, care for and repair itself is a great power.
Lightness
I started this study of eros because my writing is very heavy. I know this because people say, “D, wow, that was heavy.” I have tried to explain the vastness of my grief and rage and urgency. I try to explain using public health data. And history. And Marx. And anthropology and Freud. I try using poetry, literature, fashion, memes. Motherhood, sex, Frankenstein, astrology? I talk to my husband, my mom friends, my coworkers, to the socialist reading group. I run across the country to meet writers and researchers and artists and my family. To whom, all this time, had I been explaining?
If you have made it this far, generous reader, you’ve endured many thousands of words of coaxing myself into remembering what it feels like to feel good, instead of like a small intractable knot. If remembering joy/desire/pleasure can be a compass for navigating the fog of formless grief, I will try it. Maybe this cracks the spell of empire. Maybe it gets us through another day. That’s a good enough start.
Medicine and caring and revolution and art and imagining and love, are practices of care, persistence, defiance, connection. They are there for us, as is the earth and sky. They can give us the courage and inspiration to work together to figure this out. To keep practicing these, is to remake the future, over and over and over.
Before the War
Ilya Kaminsky wrote these lines:
“I kissed a woman
whose freckles
arouse the neighbors.
Later he says:
“Yes, I thieved her off to bed on the chair
of my hairy arms—
but parted lips
The name of the poem is “Before the War, We Made a Child.”
“The things we did.”
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(1) You can support Gaza Educate Medics - an initiative to continue medical training for the students who are still in Gaza. The genocide has physically destroyed the existing medical universities in Gaza, but this project commits to a future of care and its talented students: https://palmedacademy.com/projects/
(2) Please reach out to your institutions, media and congressional representatives to demand the return of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya https://theintercept.com/2024/12/31/israel-gaza-hospital-doctors-hussam-abu-safiya/
(3) Raksha Vasudevan asks some profound and rigorous questions in her piece “Against ‘Community’” - is “community” like “therapy,” a facile catch phrase to propagate through social media? What does it mean to build community amid fractured and displaced families and peoples? She makes excellent points, and I will meditate on these and try to work through them.
Happy anniversary to the revolutions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Zapatistas!