How one sees the past year depends upon how deeply you look into what happened. Most people in this country don’t delve into issues like environmental chaos, rising authoritarianism, and war. That is aided by labeling those who insist on learning these things as “woke.” Aided by news and social media that doesn’t cover these things, or actively engages in disinformation. Rapidly developing authoritarianism violently quashes those fighting against the status quo. Fighting for a better world.
Truth is subverted. Helplessness and hopelessness reign supreme.
The Cost of Bearing Witness
Writing and photographing in wartime are acts of resistance, acts of faith. They affirm the belief that one day – a day the writers, journalists and photographers may never see – the words and images will evoke empathy, understanding, outrage and provide wisdom. They chronicle not only the facts, although facts are important, but the texture, sacredness and grief of lives and communities lost. They tell the world what war is like, how those caught in its maw of death endure, how there are those who sacrifice for others and those who do not, what fear and hunger are like, what death is like. They transmit the cries of children, the wails of grief of the mothers, the daily struggle in the face of savage industrial violence, the triumph of their humanity through filth, sickness, humiliation and fear. This is why writers, photographers and journalists are targeted by aggressors in war — including the Israelis — for obliteration. They stand as witnesses to evil, an evil the aggressors want buried and forgotten. They expose the lies. They condemn, even from the grave, their killers. Israel has killed at least 13 Palestinian poets and writers along with at least 67 journalists and media workers in Gaza, and three in Lebanon since Oct. 7.
The Cost of Bearing Witness. There are scores of Palestinian writers and photographers, many of whom have been killed, who are determined to make us see the horror of this genocide. They will vanquish the lies of the killers by Chris Hedges, SCHEERPOST, December 24, 2023
But you go on because to do nothing is to be complicit.
Chris Hedges
The Massacre of the Innocents
The Massacre (or Slaughter) of the Innocents is an incident in the Nativity narrative of the Gospel of Matthew (2:16–18) in which Herod the Great, king of Judea, orders the execution of all male children who are two years old and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem. Christians venerate the Holy Innocents as the first Christian martyrs, but a majority of Herod biographers, and “probably a majority of current biblical scholars” consider the story fabricated or unhistorical.
Massacre of the Innocents, Wikipedia
I was in a refugee camp in the early 1980s for Guatemalans who had fled the war into Honduras. The peasant farmers and their families, living in filth and mud, their villages and homes burned or abandoned, were decorating their tents with strips of colored paper to celebrate the Massacre of the Innocents.
“Why is this such an important day?” I asked.
“It was on this day that Christ became a refugee,” a farmer answered.
The Christmas story was not written for the oppressors. It was written for the oppressed. We are called to protect the innocents. We are called to defy the occupying power. Atef, Refaat and those like them, who speak to us at the risk of death, echo this Biblical injunction. They speak so we will not be silent. They speak so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world — the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and privileged, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the Israel lobby groups — who are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza. The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete.
Evil has not changed down the millenia. Neither has goodness.
The Cost of Bearing Witness. There are scores of Palestinian writers and photographers, many of whom have been killed, who are determined to make us see the horror of this genocide. They will vanquish the lies of the killers by Chris Hedges, SCHEERPOST, December 24, 2023
The Cost of Not Bearing Witness
I experienced futility and outrage when I covered war. I wondered if I had done enough, or if it was even worth the risk. But you go on because to do nothing is to be complicit. You report because you care. You will make it hard for the killers to deny their crimes.
The Cost of Bearing Witness. There are scores of Palestinian writers and photographers, many of whom have been killed, who are determined to make us see the horror of this genocide. They will vanquish the lies of the killers by Chris Hedges, SCHEERPOST, December 24, 2023
The utter devastation of Gaza, of children waiting in the rubble for more bombs to fall, so many orphaned, the lone survivors of their families, starving, is the worst thing I have ever witnessed.
To do nothing is to be complicit. To do nothing is to diminish your spirit, your Inner Light.
This diminution seems a small thing compared to the genocide. But to not follow what the Spirit is telling us is what makes it possible for these horrors to occur. And hinders doing what we can in our communities now. Because helping our neighbors is what we can do in the face of these atrocities. There are so many among us who have little or no food, shelter, clothing, medicines, and community.
I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.
Matthew 25:36
I often share this quote from my good friend, Ronnie James, who works tirelessly to help those struggling in our community. He taught me about Mutual Aid by example, as we put together boxes of food to give out every week. I’ve written a lot about Mutual Aid: https://quakersandreligioussocialism.com/mutual-aid/
things to remember as this world dies
you did not come here to pay bills and die
nor did you come to build the fortunes
of those destroying the Earth
Imagine instead:
that you came to gather precious things
fallen from the pockets of Ancient Ones
as they fled the desert’s march –
each a reminder of something
they pledged never to forget
Things like:
how to call birds by name with your whistle
which news to tell the bees
and which to share only with the moon
how to tell a parliament from a conspiracy
a colony from a convocation
Things like:
Nature has no race or nation, class or creed
except when humans seek to deceive –
division designed to sever you
from kith and kin and buddha-mind
Things like:
the antidote to oppression
is not freedom but belonging
the opposite of domination is communion
the medicine you need
is always outside your door
and there’s likely a wise woman
two streets away
to show you how to use it
These things were left to help us remember
how each world before has ended
and how each death became a door to new life
and how this world wants to take you in her arms
and make of your a lover
and have you listen to the land
talk to the stream
find meaning in the silence of trees
and wisdom on the singing breeze
Listen awhile to discover
the right season for all the ten thousand things
the ninety-nine names we use for our own divinity
how to keep the reins of power
from the hands of the vain and greedy
how to step into the flow of life
and make of the Earth a common treasury for all
how to map the stars
learn the lesson of each constellation
and still know there is more in heaven and earth
than any of us were ever meant to know
So fill your pockets as this world dies
knowing some of it will guide you to the next
and some will fall to the ground
in time to be found
by those who’ll bring the world back to life.
Polycrisis Center 
If Chris Hedges thinks he is doing something as opposed to nothing, he is completely mistaken. Is he thus “complicit,” in the meaningless term he throws around with his nonsensical Jesus H. Christ fixation?
Yes, yes he is. We get nowhere with quixotic self-ennobling fantasies. War machines love their tiny quasi-oppositional sects.
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