“Freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
I don’t know much about all the geopolitical nuances of what is happening currently in the Middle East. However, if my past years of work in research and learning through deconstruction and anti-racism have taught me anything, it was to advocate for the less fortunate, downtrodden, and oppressed. When listening to black voices, indigenous voices, and the voices of other people of color, when fellow christians call for repentance, when our Jewish siblings call for a stop to this genocide and join our Muslim siblings’ calls for an urgent ceasefire to this one-sided war with rules which the Israeli state government indicates they do not care to honor - I am compelled to take some form of action.
I heard the terrorist attack from October 7th being compared on a scale worse than September 11, 2001, and I remember that day. I remember the fear, confusion, sadness and resulting anger, rage, resentment, and advocation for the war afterward. Now being on the other side of that war and learning the motivations behind it, the havoc it caused, hatred it fed, families it displaced, people it disabled, and lives it took, I can say this type of senseless revenge in the form of erasure of an entire people is not the answer. Silence and neutrality during a time such as this only favors the oppressor. At this time, from what history I learned and voices I listened to so far, that oppressor is the Israeli state government. I beg the state government of Israel to stop this collective violent and intolerant act against the Palestinian people.
Call to Action
If you are a citizen of the United States, please call your House and Senate representatives now.
Below you will find links to tools to contact your representatives along with with scripts you may use as a guide if you do not know what to say. To use these tools, you will need to provide information such as your home address in order to determine who your representatives are. Please use the first link to the official United States government tool if you do not wish to provide that information for either of the non-profit organizations’ links provided below.