Uprooting the Unkindness and Falsehood Within Ourselves
“Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.” - Edward Said
It’s hard to write these days. It’s even harder to live. I’m not familiar with this feeling; writing has always been my way of making sense of the world—a sort of conversation with myself before letting you in on it. Spending time wrestling with a blank page, even when it takes days to craft a single decent paragraph, is like molding a vase on a spinning pottery wheel to me—it both frustrates and invigorates me.
Recently, I’ve found myself both overwhelmed and underwhelmed by reality, as I navigate the end of a frustrating, month-long creative block. It’s as if I can’t fully engage with the world—there’s too much happening, yet the reactions from people and their responses are so disengaged. I have been writing fiction for the past month; this is how bad it’s gotten. I hate fiction; I think it’s a waste of a good experience—and I would rather make stories up than deal with what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
I’m sure you noticed the lack of my opinions landing in your inbox every week. It's hard to write because it’s hard to be these days. It’s exceptionally tough because there’s no one way to be these days. Sometimes I truly envy the people who can see what’s happening in this world and occupy this weightless, unbothered space full of “just nice things”.
It’s hard to be these days because we’re swimming in a sea of grey right now, and grey isn’t tolerated well on social media. People seem to have trouble existing in a space where something or someone they strongly support might have flaws.
Nuance is highly offensive.
When I try to highlight the depravity, deception, and lies gaslit by the Democratic Party, to their own base—people flood my comment section or inbox with an automatic, built-in default But what about Trump? And when I point out the United States does more harm to this world than the conveniently named Axis of Evil, I’m bombarded with Islamophobic tropes that people just can’t seem to shake, like a bad addiction.
It fills me with hopelessness, to see how many people can't forsake the simplistic Marvel good-versus-evil paradigm and resist the urge to align with one side unequivocally. I wrote about this in April, check it out:
It disheartens me to see people clinging to the false belief that cultural or customary differences imply inferiority. It’s even more disheartening to witness my own friends thinking their Western birthplace grants them moral superiority.
And what could I give you, my reader, if I can’t give you hope?
Hence my creative blockade.
I open my phone and just feel hopeless.
What snapped me out of it and opened the floodgates (I wrote six pieces in four days) was a quote from Edward Said, posted by his daughter:
“Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.”
It was a call to action.
My hopelessness is simply not allowed. My submission is not allowed. My hopelessness, and yours; if you’re in the same boat as me—is immoral, at the time of a live genocide.
It wasn’t easy, shaking off my despair. How could it be; witnessing a war criminal in Congress lie his way into getting approved for a global war—to 58 instances of standing ovation? Daily massacres. Another 20 billion in arms sent to an occupying force holding a civilian population under siege, trapped, bombed to oblivion. How could it be, watching dismembered children with a single sniper shot in the head—in pursuit of “self-defense” and the “protection” of our Western values?
This is where I regained my hope and renewed my pursuit of humanity in a deprived and unjust world. I realized that while I may not have the power to end unkindness, injustice, propaganda, and lies on a global scale, I do have the power to disrupt these within myself.
I realized that I must exist in a creative space where I continuously confront and highlight the falsehoods surrounding us, reminding myself and those who are willing to listen about the realities of what our governments are endorsing and funding. I must exist in the space where I rebuff legacy media in shaping our perceptions through their extensive control over information.
As these thoughts conceptualized in my mind, I read a brilliant piece by Caitlin Johnstone - We Need Both Outer Work And Inner Work To Truly Free Ourselves. It might be exactly what your soul needs if you, like me, spend most days swinging between we’re completely doomed and we CAN build a better world together.
This is just what we needed to hear:
“It’s brutal keeping track of the criminality of the empire lately. I personally don’t see how anyone could do it without an accompanying discipline like healing work, meditation, mindfulness, self inquiry, or other forms of inner work.
Whenever I talk about the importance of inner work with this stuff I’ll get people dismissing it as self-indulgent navel gazing nonsense and a distraction from the outer work of actually changing our material circumstances, but really nothing could be further from the truth.
To have a consistent discipline of inner work is to take responsibility for your own psychological bullshit instead of spreading it around in ways that hurt the people near you and make the world a worse place.
It is absolutely true that the world and the cruel systems which guide it urgently need to change, and it is absolutely true that much of the suffering and mental illness we see in our society is due to the material, financial and psychological stress that people are placed under in this sick capitalist dystopia we find ourselves in.
As well as it might play in some circles, it’s just not good enough to blame all our suffering on the system. Doing so just encourages people to keep masturbating their inner wounds on everyone around them instead of growing up and doing the hard, uncomfortable work of becoming a conscious human being.”
PLEASE read the following paragraph and keep reminding yourself of it, every time you stumble:
“As individuals, none of us have the ability to single-handedly uproot all the unkindness and falsehood in our world, but we can each as individuals uproot the unkindness and falsehood within ourselves. And by doing so we make the world a kinder and more truthful place by just that much, because we tended the little plot of land we were given—our own personal slice of the human plight—with care and responsibility.”
“What matters is your intention to uproot any untruth and disharmony within yourself, and a sincere curiosity about where such things might exist within you.”
In her recent speech, Kamala Harris gaslit the need for a path toward a two-state solution, while urging Americans to be aware of the nature of the conflict.
The nature of the conflict IS the struggle for freedom.It's time for this war to end, Kamala said after the conversation at the White House.
However, the occupation can continue.Netanyahu called the protesters outside his genocidal speech “Iran’s useful idiots”.
Then, by equivalence, USA congressmen are the useful idiots of Israel?“Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.”
We simply cannot afford to succumb to hopelessness. That’s precisely why the ruling class conducts their atrocities in full view of the public—to make us feel disoriented and powerless, as if we can’t affect change within the system. Their strategy is to instill a sense of futility, driving us to retreat into the manageable aspects of our lives. But neither we nor the Palestinian people under siege can afford our hopelessness.
