A couple of weeks ago, I plunged into Lake Michigan. Unlike usual, the water felt warm. It was easy to run all the way in and easy to float over the waves. Montrose beach was crowded with families, pitching tents to keep out of the sun. Children played, laughed, and cried. Midwesterners who still hadn’t made it out into the sun crisped their pale shoulders. It would have been a perfectly relaxing day, but fighter jets circled above everyone’s heads — doing dives and turning every which way. Mothers plugged their children’s ears and I saw a baby wearing noise cancelling headphones.
It was the Air and Water show — an annual proud display of American military capabilities. They are the same jets that fly over the shores of Gaza, dropping bombs on families. That’s what I thought about — it was just by happen stance that we were there watching these planes as a performance rather than in Gaza as weapon of mass slaughter. The more places I travel to, the more I realize how much the world looks the same. People everywhere are really kind and generous — the only thing that separates us is if the stars align to have us born under the boot of the United States or not.
As the jets flew over our heads I felt my stomach sour. In two weeks, the Democratic National Convention would come to Chicago and it was a present opportunity to make clear the contradictions that kept me up at night. Once months and months away, the DNC was finally around the corner.
This week, members of the Democratic Party came from all parts of the country to convene in Chicago. They were coronating Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, a woman no one really voted for. Even in the face of this blatant lack of democracy, the party members were elated to choose her. They carried signs with her husband’s name and applause erupted from the tens of thousands of people in the United Center when she declared that the United States would have the “most lethal military” in the world under her leadership. To the people well aware of the millions of people the United States killed in the last twenty years alone, her statement was a threat.
The week was marked by the obvious gaps between the people going into the United Center and the people outside of it.
There was a young woman that sat outside the exit of the Democratic National Convention on its third night reading the names of the children Israel has killed in the last ten months. She did it for hours, until her speaker battery died. She did it alone, taking care to pronounce every child’s name correctly and to say their age at the time of their murder. Without her, many of the DNC guests wouldn’t necessarily be confronted with the carnage members of their party is carrying out.
Outside the gates of the DNC I saw a young woman making sure the children of Palestine weren’t just numbers, and I saw people laughing at her for doing so. They laughed loudly and mocked her voice. They mocked the names of the dead babies. They yelled at her to leave them alone. They left the coronation ceremony livid that they had to even hear about Gaza.
That night was demoralizing, and it’s something I will remember for the rest of my life. Democrats laugh at the names of dead children. They openly refuse to let a Palestinian speak for two minutes at their four day long event. They order riot cops on people protesting a genocide. They have their parties, fundraisers, and happy hours while bodies pile up. If they really didn’t think the genocide was so bad, they wouldn’t get so mad at us for reminding them. They knew that the people they were rallying behind are cheering on mass slaughter — they’ve just weighed their fun, their careers, and their vanity against the lives of 180,000 Palestinians and decided that nothing could be more important than themselves. I don’t care what they said to me, or my friends, but I hope our faces and our presence made them feel even an ounce of discomfort. In the best case scenario, I hope they went to sleep hearing the echoes of the martyrs names. I still foolishly hope they turn a corner at some point.
Hellbound and Down 