The eleventh presentation of "Eight Families in Gaza: Amplifying Their Voices" was yesterday, and tonight I am reflecting on that, and on so many other things. I am grateful to everyone who turned out for this event, both returning friends and supporters and also new people too. Thank you for wanting to learn more about these families. Thank you for wanting to help them survive. Thank you for becoming involved in efforts to end the genocide.
Prior to the presentation, I spent many hours updating it, and I changed a great deal from previous ones, with new words, photos, and videos from almost all of the featured families, including a very special video one of my friends made specifically for this presentation, where he spoke to us directly. His words affected all of us, and it was almost as though he was there with us.
He spoke about not being able to trust the ceasefire. He spoke about how everyone was shattered. He spoke about how the ceasefire could not bring back his loved ones, his home, his things, his books, his life. He shared his feelings, thoughts, insights and words with us so generously. I carried the feeling of this with me through the rest of the evening, into the night. I have felt the presence of what he gave to us all day today. I will carry it with me tomorrow.
I am always so grateful to be able to speak about these families, my friends who I care about so deeply, to bring them closer to my local community, to see the transformations that come into being once people feel connected to them and the distance of time and space is collapsed. I am grateful and honored and moved. And I am also always very very tired afterwards. It takes me a day to recover. I have some chronic health conditions that I do my best to manage, and I always know the day after a presentation will be a day of recovery, where it is difficult to do many things.
Planning ahead based on this knowledge and past experience, I let myself sleep longer than usual this morning. When I finally awoke and checked my phone, there was this message from another one of my dear friends: "They are bombing all around us. The world is unfair, my love." And I felt my heart break into a million pieces.
I spent part of the intro to yesterday's presentation talking about disability justice, media literacy, and the questions we should be asking when we encounter information from our mainstream media sources here in the U.S. Today's headlines and framing in American media gives us ample examples of how we can apply the things I spoke about yesterday. There is so much I could say about this, about the context of constant dehumanization and anti-Palestinian racism that is so pervasive in our media and our institutions–the constant biased framing and misappropriation of language that seeks to justify the continuation of efforts to annihilate the Palestinian people, and how the media upholds this, and how this supports the ongoing genocide--and this is a subject I will return to in more depth with more resources later.
But for now, in my heartsick despondency, I will keep my focus on the families who have given us so much, and thank you again for your support, and ask you again to please not let it waver. We must do more to end the genocide. And we must do everything we can to help people survive. I have said these exact words countless times. And I know I will repeat them again. And I look forward to the day when they are no longer needed.
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