crystallize my values in the form of some DMs
i'm thankful, even though it pissed me off, that yesterday morning [redacted] shared this post to her instagram story 
 
and that after reading it several times while eating my breakfast i was pissed off enough (after snarkily sending it to deborah to highlight the sentence "WHERE DO THEY PEE?" which sorry i'm not a parent and i know my humor is dark and maybe way too dark for the kind of gratitude newsletter you might have thought you signed up for but to me that is objectively a very funny OUTRAGE SENTENCE choice (feel free to smash that unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email)), to respond to the post with my own story:
and i'm thankful that later in the day, the person i follow sent me a DM responding to my story saying she understood my post and explaining how she felt and condemning the actions of both the Israeli government and Hamas but asking whether there was "space to be outraged at both" and i'm thankful to have written and sent her this response:
It’s such a horrible time :(. You’re entitled to your feelings (and also I understand we can’t necessarily directly control how we feel and what kinds of things are triggers for us individually—it is indeed crushing), but at this point in this awful “war”, I’m at a place where I don’t really personally have energy for the rhetoric of “space to be outraged and devastated for both” because I think that it elides a monumental asymmetry of scale between the resources and power available to Palestinians and those that are arrayed behind the state of Israel.
There are inarguably horrible, disgusting things that have been done to people on both sides of the wall in the last month but only one of those sides has billions of dollars worth of US weapons and carte blanche from our government to carpet bomb a society into rubble. Only one of those sides (to our knowledge) is continuing to indiscriminately kill children, both directly (blowing them up) and indirectly (removing them from their homes, preventing essential resources and services). Only one side has built and maintained a state of apartheid, has spent decades putting down nonviolent protest and resistance movements, has continued to encroach further and further into the tiny slices of land that the Palestinian people are allowed to live on.
Seeing that particular post this morning really triggered me personally :(. I understand that in the absence of news, our minds will find horrible things to imagine (and that from the horrible massacre on October 7th, there is plenty of fuel for those imaginings), but all the (admittedly limited) evidence that we have thus far from the hostages that have been returned are of them being treated with some measure of kindness and dignity (I know they’re still hostages and, again, of course, they shouldn’t be!). In that light, to me, dropping statements like “ARE THEY STILL BEING RAPED?” reinforces the dehumanizing “human animals” rhetoric provided by the (I agree, fucked!) Israeli government to support a campaign of genocide.
I believe that every human life is valuable and it is very sad that there are 32 Israeli children who are being held captive—I’m sure they must be scared and that their parents must be (metaphorically) torn apart. But this morning, I read this post and all I could think about was the way that the millions of children of Gaza have, in a fundamental way, been hostages all their lives (and that’s speaking, again, in a kind of metaphor and not counting the hundreds of Palestinian children, some as young as 12, who are being held in literal Israeli prisons without any kind of justice). That knowledge makes it difficult for me to hold space in the discourse for the kind of sentiments expressed in this person’s post and given that I, like all of us, am powerless to do almost anything constructive, I responded to the post to express my own frustration.
i'm thankful, since she is a person i otherwise like and respect, that she responded humbly and thoughtfully and expressing a desire to grow, but even if she hadn't, i was thankful for the opportunity she gave me to crystallize my values in the form of some DMs. free palestine, from the river to the sea.