Today I saw a wounded Palestinian child dying on a ruined hospital floor. Still gasping for breath but obviously fated, peace be with him. I couldn't watch but I saw. I have children. It cuts me to the core. Today I also saw that they finally killed Abu Shujaa, a brave fighter I've seen cheat death before. Now he's really martyred. At least he died fighting, while I'm fighting useless tears. How many more? How much can one people take? How much can all people witness? The Genocide of Gaza is not stopping, indeed, Abu Shujaa was martyred in the West Bank, where it's spreading. Along with disease, famine, and all the horsemen these wicked people are riding.

We are deep in the extermination phase of genocide which—as per the 10 Stages Of Genocide—means, “At this stage, only rapid and overwhelming armed intervention can stop genocide. Real safe areas or refugee escape corridors should be established with heavily armed international protection.” And yet the armed resistance of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, etc is condemned in the ruling press, and the support of Iran, Yemen, and Hezbollah is suppressed by naked censorship. What a topsy-turvy world we live in. What a mindfuck it is just waking up every morning, into the same Groundhog Day of genocidal madness.

The actual, official response to genocide is shut up. Shut up to students, shut up to writers, shut up to anyone with a shred of humanity in them, shut up to entire social networks. Shut up and let us 'finish them' or 'finish the job' (an 'Israeli' bumper sticker and American campaign slogan, respectively). Shut up until we lecture you about genocide a few years later. In addition to watching people burn to death quite regularly, I also have to deal with the constant gaslighting and reheated rhetoric from the people doing it ('Israel', America, same White Empire). Under the rule-based-order of these mendacious morons, the people opposing terror are terrorists, the people condemning racism are racists, and the people opposing war crimes are criminals. These killers don't just take life, they try to take death from you also. They don't just take your last breath, they want the last word on top of it. Then they'll throw flowers on your grave generations later, as a land acknowledgment. Hell is truly empty and all the devils are here, in high places.

I know the Buddha said this world is suffering, I've heard Allah say, “the most excellent abode is with God,” I believe Jesus when he said store up your treasure in heaven. God knows They've told us enough, but it still hurts to realize it for yourself. I had been coming to a theoretical understanding that America was the Great Satan years ago, COVID made it clear that they were at least passively anti-human, and the Genocide of Gaza has shown how actively evil they are. But, I must admit, I was happy when this was an academic exercise. As much as I knew this great evil was real, I didn't really want to know. The Buddha said this life was illusion but I always liked the illusion. But now all illusions are falling apart and I'm left with Siddhartha's dilemma, at least 100 lives too early. I just have to suffer through this one.

The illusions turned obvious delusions are the press, free speech, elections, international institutions; all the things that were supposed to protect us turn out to just empty slogans painted on our prison walls. The decent journalists I knew were relegated to obscure corners of the Internet, and now they're being arrested or harassed in their homes. The platforms that I read them on are censored or prosecuted. Even a lowly blogger like me has a file with Whitey Bulger's real crew and can't travel reliably anymore. In the long run (where I work), I know that the Empire will fall, but in the short term (where I live) it feels like they're striking back just fine. As Gramsci sorta said, the old world is dying and the new one is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.

We are, too many of us, trapped inside a White Empire that will only crush more and more of us as it falls, including most of God's creation (the animals). They both paved paradise and want to bomb it to rubble on the way out. They'd rather make money on complete destruction than admit they've gone wrong. They'd rather crash the whole ecosystem than see their precious economy be uncomfortable for even a quarter. And they'd rather kill children every day for years than admit even one colony is wrong. 'Israel' is, as I've said, just the collapse within collapse within collapse (Collapse³) and all the illusions in the world can't keep reality out much longer. People have been calling it for centuries (millennia, really) but now the apocalypse has shown up with all of its horsepower. As William Gibson said, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. We are all Palestinian in the long run.

For years I've been able to write about the end of the world (as we know it) and still feel fine. As if I'll be able to eat ‘I told you so,’ I don't know what I've been thinking, I honestly turn that part of my brain off when I close my laptop. My job has been analyzing the perilous state of the world, but I haven't had to struggle to survive. It was really an academic exercise. But now my subjective perspective is bleeding into my objective reality and everywhere I look, I see blood out of the corner of my eye. One cannot gaze so long into the abyss without the abyss gazing back, and it's dark inside. I'm empathetically exhausted. I'm compassionately cratered. And I'm doing the least. I think about the people directly living through this, directly losing through this, and I feel even worse.

As Karim Wafa-Al Hussaini said, “I’m tired of seeing my people slowly fade away every single day. I’m exhausted. The world doesn’t care. It’s been almost a year and nothing has changed. Look at this tiny angel with his birds. Imagine the thousands of other kids who died as well. They all had hopes and dreams.” Or as Refaat Al-Areer said before he was martyred, “As a parent, I feel desperate and helpless. I can’t provide the love and protection I am supposed to give my kids. Instead of often telling my kids “I love you,” I have been repeating for the past two weeks: “Kids, eat less. Kids, drink less.” And I imagine this being my last thing I say to them and it is devastating.”

I feel what they're saying empathetically, and I've read such things before, but it's every day now, and I know I'm just scratching the surface. A million voices cry out in hunger and hundreds are silenced forever, every night. The doses keep adding up and it's well past a humanly tolerable level. Empathy is no longer something I feel for other people, it feels for me, and it feels like I'm losing my mind. Every single day, some new atrocity is discovered, some old abomination is repeated, and then they do it again tomorrow, after lying and arresting the messengers for trying. The little doses of distant pain add up, till it all hits way too close to home. Till it actually hurts, inside.

A lot of people I know have turned away. I don't begrudge them this, I do it myself all the time. But if I just look out a window, or see undisassembled concrete, or drink water, it all comes back to me, like a bat out of hell. Perhaps we're all like this, mourners at a wedding, pretending that the bride hasn't died. Perhaps we're all falling apart inside and only pretending on the outside. Like Poe's Masque of the Red Death, where everyone pretends until they all drop dead. I feel like everyone has been stacking trauma since COVID-19 and just pretending to go back to a 'normal' that doesn't exist. We keep expecting something from a culture that has long since become unacceptable. Younger generations won't be burdened with such delusions of grandeur. Olds like me have known the peak of a wave that was supposed to raise all boats, but they'll only know decline and rising sea levels. They'll expect the worst, and they won't be disappointed.

As I writer, I must admit that I always wanted to live through history, but hoo-boy does it suck in real-time. I grew up in the 90s, which I thought was mind-numbingly boring, but those were the good drugs, in hindsight. Now I'm on the cusp of history and I just feel like throwing up and/or crying all the time. The more I learn, the less I want to know, the more I dig, the deeper it gets, the more I understand, the more it's beyond understanding. How do you analyze when you're emotionally paralyzed? How do you write such wrong? How are we expected to live, through so much dying?