WE STRUGGLE TO MAKE LOVE MEANINGFUL
at the end of the world
The people of Gaza are living through unimaginable suffering. Every day, they face relentless bombings, destruction, and death. Families are torn apart, children wake up to the sounds of explosions, and parents struggle to find food and water for their little ones.
There is no safety, no escape, no moment of peace. The nights are filled with fear, the days with loss. People are starving, wounded, and exhausted—not just physically, but emotionally and mentally. They have lost their homes, their loved ones, and their sense of security.
More than anything, the people of Gaza just want to live. To sleep without fear, to wake up knowing they will see their families again, to have food, water, and shelter. To be treated as human beings
Their voices must be heard
Their pain must not be ignored
No one deserves to live like this
These words are from my best long distance friend, Ghadir. If you want to support her, please go to https://chuffed.org/project/115180-warmth-and-food-in-nuseirat-camp
I am completely focused on her family's survival, and there is no way I can possibly find beautiful enough words and images to send her. If you want to send her love notes, please contact me so I can put you in touch. We will need a lot of emotional and financial support for her family during and after the genocide. They need the will to stay alive now, and will need to rebuild their lives after. I don't know how many lifetimes of therapy they will need to be able to live well, but I want to make sure they have support and money when they are ready. And if you support Ghadir, you help me support many families in Gaza. Ghadir is who I write about because we have a deep and creative friendship, but I am working with several families in Gaza and we will make sure as many families get what they need as possible.
What is happening is heartbreaking and beyond description, but the people of Gaza are strong despite everything. The pain cannot be ignored, but the hope for justice never dies. Having people like you who feel with us means a lot.
-Ghadir
It's another end of the world this week. What is important to do right now? Some of us are living in the Flat White Dimension, drinking coffee, doing vigorous exercise. It's spring. We're ready to start new things, to make plans, to have ideas, to fall in love. I feel all of that, but I'm wondering, “What do I say to a person who has reasonably lost all hope from surviving the very worst the planet has to offer?”
The one who was bombed last night died hungry and afraid.
This sentence is utterly terrifying.
We need a word beyond sorrow, beyond brokenness, beyond regret, beyond betrayal and pain.
We don’t want anything but a safe life.
We are exhausted from everything we’ve seen and endured. We are tired, so tired, world.
-Ghadir
Yesterday, someone in Berlin who grew up in Gaza stopped me in the middle of a sentence to tell me that most white people, most Germans and Europeans and Americans, don't understand what death means to People from Gaza. He told me how strange it is to not tell people about what has happened to his family and friends, because the support that many of us have been trained to give doesn't honor life the way that Palestinian culture does. My friend who wants to be anonymous, will offer a bit of guidance tonight at The Casino. I'll share what I learn if it seems appropriate.
الاستشهاد والتراث الفلسطيني
الخميس 20 مارس، من الساعة 6 إلى 7:30 مساءً
https://www.casinoooo.org/
قد لا يعرف غير الفلسطينيين كيفية مواساة شخص من غزة فقد عزيزًا عليه. بالنسبة للفلسطيني، الموت ليس خسارة. تعالوا لنناقش نظرة الفلسطينيين للموت والاستشهاد واحتفالهم بهما. في نهاية الحوار، سنبدأ نقاشًا حول أهم الطرق التي يمكننا من خلالها دعم سكان غزة في الوقت الحالي.
كيف ندعم الشعب الفلسطيني الذي يفقد كل شيء؟ كيف نجد طريقة لوقف الغزو، مع تخصيص وقت لكل شخص من حولنا شهد نهاية عالمه؟
Martyrdom and the Palestinian Tradition
Thursday March 20, 6-7:30pm
https://www.casinoooo.org/
Non-Palestinian people might not know how to offer comfort to a person from Gaza who has “lost” someone close to them. For the Palestinian person, a death is not a loss. Come discuss the way that Palestinians look at and celebrate death and martyrdom. At the end of the conversation we will begin a discussion about the most important ways we can support people living in Gaza right now.
How do we support Palestinian people? How do we find a way to stop the invasion while we also take time for each person around us who has literally witnessed the end of their world?
In the past weeks, I've taught Hologram workshops for people living in Thessaloniki, Greece, in Lucerne, Switzerland, and in Copenhagen, Denmark. In each group, we spoke (whipped ourselves?) about privilege. What is privilege in the apocalypse? It's not the first time or the last time that I'll write or talk about this, but I am frustrated because it feels like an excuse to shut things down, one person at a time. It feels like an excuse to feel shame and guilt, to think more about ourselves, our whiteness, our privilege, our golden cage. We can think of all the things we don't deserve while we binge on all the things we want but can't afford.
What about everybody else? Why can't we think about everybody else? What if privilege is just misused or blocked energy? How do we change it collectively and not keep shaming individual people? How can privilege become useful? I'm so tired of being told that I shouldn't do things because of my privilege.
Lesson one of the Flat White Dimension is that the beneficiaries of empire are taught that we have no power. We are animals meant to be serviced. To think. And now we are justified in that, because we are simply too privileged to do anything right. We are stuck.
Go down to get stuck:
Cramp up your hips,making space for invisible weightin your hand,which holds something precious.You are afraid it will fall down
This is the description of a stuck dance I did at 10am in Lucerne Switzerland within a Hologram workshop for 40 people, as a part of a care symposium called Care in the Dark. The stuck dance is the way we start each Hologram practice. You can learn about it here.
This image is of the stuck dance, as portrayed by Franz von Stuck, Hitler's favorite painter. I have been doing stuck dances lately with so many people from Northern Europe. It's as if Mr. Stuck has painted us into the world he was living in. Now, once again, we are not allowed to speak openly. We need secret languages in order to speak about justice. How many words are we not allowed to say? Did Google really just erase the photos from the demo that were on my phone?
It's not just me or you that needs to stop. Everything needs to stop. Everything needs to stop. When I couldn't sleep on Monday night, I looked at my phone at 1:30 in the morning, and Ghadir had written to me and said, from Gaza, we are all dying.
I stayed up all night speaking to different people in Palestine, or whose families are in Palestine, watching the news, talking to my mom in Indiana, talking to people in the US who are afraid to organize at their school. I couldn't believe that when I woke up on Tuesday after an hour of sleep, everything was normal. Everything was the same, the Flat White Dimension maintained itself.
People went to work, airplanes took off, restaurants served expensive food to rich people, Amazon deliveries arrived on time, and the world continued. It's not individuals that need to stop, it's everything. In the middle of the night I wrote to people I barely know and to friends, asking why we can't have a general strike. For most people in my life, the answer was no. I get it.
WE CONSCIOUSLY REJECT RELATIONSHIPS IN THIS SYSTEM, AND WE STRUGGLE TO MAKE LOVE MEANINGFUL
What is the opposite of living with privilege in the apocalypse? Would it be to be free people? I'm not sure.
I'm not sure if it's because I've been trained to think relationally as my profession, or because I've been practicing the Hologram for so many years. But the only thing that inspires me right now about the possibility of continuing to live on a planet that sacrifices my friends and keeps serving coffee at yoga studios to support ignorance and neoliberal survival, is an idea that we read about the other night at a reading group at the Casino for Social MedicineThe Kurdish Women's Movement: History, Theory, Practice by Dilar Dirik, published by Pluto press. We read about relationships. We read about love.
“Love is not a phenomenon that can be separated from social conditions. It can manifest itself more genuinely in a liberated society that abolishes unfree relations. Above all, you need to create a new type of human being, new terms of relating that can make love possible. The patriarchal family as it stands today is like a black hole that swallows women up, segregating them from society and life. How can we be our true, loving, social selves in a capitalist, Liberalist system that glorifies individualism and domesticates women, isolating them in patriarchal homes and relationships. How can we be ourselves when this system destroys our culture and history daily? Another form of relationship is possible, one that creates equal partners as well as social relations that have the power to embrace the entire world in their hearts through a struggle for justice. For that to happen against the toxic patriarchal system, we must figure out what kind of man is lovable, we say, the one that struggles for a different society, the one whose approach to us is not objectifying, exploitative and power driven. If such men don't exist, we must develop and create them through struggle, we refuse to accept the dominant male in our lives. Likewise, without liberation, women can't be lovable either. True love must be based on principles. If you love me, then let us struggle for freedom together for a world in which love can be set free.”
(for me it is important to abolish the genders here– we are all men and we are all women in the text above)
In the name of love and rent, please join us for a ridiculously cute and funny event at Casino on Saturday:
THE PEOPLES’ COMMUNAL LUXURY DATING
All day long we struggle to make love meaningful. But for one night, we create new relationship energy collectively, to pay rent.
Everyone is hot. Meanwhile our collective addiction to the family and the couple produces a black hole that swallows all the hottest people up. Not today, Satan! Stuff your pockets and come to Casino for some very accessible Communal Luxury Dating! For a sliding scale you can help keep Casino pay rent, and we will support you to gamble with social relations of all kinds, for another month. Experience a really fast date! Get help on your feeld profile! Discuss the revolutionary potential of your polycule! Get help with your romantic or institutional breakup! Participate in a completely meaningless auction! Spend 7 minutes in heaven OR HELL!!!
And everyone is invited to meet me at my table:
BREAK UP WITH THE BULL SHIT
Who's been treating you bad and distracting you from your revolutionary work. Time to break up? We may be able to help. We have a 3 step recipe that will make you very hard to fuck with so that you don't stay mad at yourself. There's so much bad shit to be mad at out there and we need you and your anger for the revolution! So whether you need to break up with a very bad man, a very good man, an institution, a narcissist, a nation, an ideology, a whole family, a city, a ghost of your former self or a friend, we can hold your hand as you sign a contract with yourself. Because the end is just the beginning.