A Meditation on the Day Before
Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of my father's suicide. He was many things, but more than most of them he was a firefighter and paramedic. He volunteered on the local fire department at 18, until he was able to get a job firefighting, and then he did that until it broke him physically and he was forced to retire. In that regard he is very much like a lot of people of that trade–they don't make it long into retirement for one reason or another.
A police helicopter is hovering nearby as I write this. For the last three years, unfailingly, the sky has been this hazy kind of blue that is now peculiar to early April–at least that's how it seems from my certainly slanted perspective. I think a lot about a firefighter going into the fire for the last time. I think about paramedics and rescue workers who rush into danger to save lives. This is public service at its most basic, most selfless, most sacred. Yet these people would never think or say that; in the United States, at least, they are bragging about getting to do a certain procedure or playing pranks on one another. They have to do this if they want to stay sane, because the work they do is at the threshold of what people should have to see and do. But they do it, routinely, give their bodies over to the work and they don't get much in recompense.
In Iran, and Lebanon, and Palestine, Israeli and US forces are deliberately bombing sites twice; once to kill whomever is there, and then a second time to kill the aid workers who come to rescue the survivors. There are no intact hospitals in Gaza. Over twenty medical facilities have been targeted for airstrikes in Iran. The IOF deliberately targets aid workers in Lebanon and Gaza.
Schools and universities in all three nations have been bombed, and schoolchildren slaughtered. Journalists in Gaza and Lebanon have been assassinated–assassinated–by Israel. Studiously located, targeted, and murdered, by the hundreds. People are pulled from their ancestral homes in the West Bank and beaten and killed by Israeli settlers–settlers who are, even by Israeli law, there illegally. Israel drops white phosphorus rounds on civilian targets and on farmland. They force the evacuation of over a million Lebanese people and then bomb the bridges they should cross. They root up olive trees and dump waste into the water supply just to make life worse for Palestinians. But you know these things. You've known them for nearly three years.
These are war crimes. They are lines the world has agreed should not be crossed at the risk of retaliation for their moral reprehensibility. And yet. Not only does the West not retaliate, but we hardly acknowledge that the lines have been crossed. The sanctity of human life has been so devalued since the genocide in Gaza began that you might have forgotten they are, in fact, war crimes. That we all agreed upon these things as unforgivable. These war crimes are perpetrated with our labor–yours and mine. Our tax dollars fund these conflicts directly, kill civilians and paramedics and doctors and schoolchildren directly. We fund arms manufacturers who bet on this conflict and are getting richer by the breath even as the rest of the world worries if it will have food next month.
Trump is threatening to use nuclear weapons to wipe out an entire nation. Not to make them surrender, or to cause them to see the error of their ways; to end them. It was more than time for us to stand up when the genocide in Gaza began. We should feel sorry for not dropping everything and marching on Washington then. But this is another line drawn, another line crossed. It is not enough that we prepare for this moment, that we coil in readiness. Stop what you're doing now. Speak to your people now. Organize now. For the sake of everyone on this planet, we have got to stop this.