Cindy Milstein (they) on Nostr: On this October 6, a day before a date that now signals (or should) the onset of ...

On this October 6, a day before a date that now signals (or should) the onset of mourning for all the lives stolen by a genocide—that is, if we truly believe that all walls and borders should be broken down— there is no wall between “big grief” and “small grief,” for the personal is political, and the political is personal. Or “griefs.” For grief must be plural if it is to have a human(e) face, bound up in each and every name, each and every martyr, each and every beloved, now of blessed memory. Plural sorrow, plural rage, plural pain, shared in our cries of anguish, and captured for me in a phrase I saw spray-painted on a wall in a neighborhood being stolen by gentrification (and thus also displacement, dispossession, and even death) — a wall of another kind that, too, must be broken down.

Oy vey. Woe is me. Woe is thy. Woe is us. Those of us who have been banging our heads against walls, also in anguish, to create cracks. Cracks that just might make people see and say “genocide.” Cracks of resistance to genocide in Gaza, to genocides anywhere and everywhere, past and present. Cracks that also let the light in — of solidarity in our sorrows, of visions of liberation in which all states become only an accursed memory.

These past three walls have cracked so many of us that I fear we’ve built walls within ourselves, as protective layer against losses so enormous, they’ve shattered countless worlds. For as ancient words within Jewish thought assert, to paraphrase, if we destroy a single person, it is as if we’ve destroyed an entire world. And equally, if we save a single life, it is as if we’ve saved an entire world.

The pains and traumas of not being able to “save” so many, many lives these three years — unnecessarily stolen by sadistic power regime of -isms, not least of which is the fascisms sweeping this globe — weighs monumental on rebel hearts. Some of those hearts, including among anarchists, have turned to stone — seeking protective layer in embracing blood lust, authoritarianism, or antisemitism. Others have shut down. And others lament “Oy vey,” but as collective embrace that holds every lost life in its freedom-seeking, loving arms.

May it be so.

(photos: “Oy vey” as seen scrawled in black paint against an already-graffitied wall in Exarcheia; “A wall is just a wall and nothing more. It can be broken down. — Assata Shakur,” as seen painted in green on a brick wall in Amsterdam)