Instead
Good morning, friends.
I’ve been writing an essay for weeks now called something like “Virtue and Villains”, in which I try to unpick the way conservative media power continues to frame every conversation, so much so that even the idea of “virtue signalling”—the allegation of pretending to care—has become more stigmatised than actual villainy. In today’s mediated world it is both easier and better to be a villain—to not care, to applaud the empire’s many violences—than it is to be seen to care, to agitate and advocate for a better, sustainable, and compassionate way of living.
Anyway, I got too depressed to finish it.
Lebanon, my mother’s birth country, is collapsing. There is little to no power, little to no fuel, little to no food, little to no medicine, the currency is virtually worthless, and the wealthy politicians refuse to reform the colonial system that made them rich, even as people starve and die and the many functions of society grind to a catastrophic halt. I have family there I was hoping desperately to meet, family who have survived so much, from the civil war to multiple Israeli invasions and attacks, from the Beirut blast to the incompetent cruelty of daily life. I hope they are okay, but they don’t have power, so I don’t know. [Update since posting: they’re okay, but the bakeries are closed. There’s no bread. The airport is packed with people fleeing. People are desperate.]
I look at Lebanon and I see the future of the world. The status quo will not change. The pandemic has proven this, once and for all; a global disaster not in the future, but present, and all the many existing inequalities are only growing worse. Instead of global cooperation, we have a handful of vaccines whose copyright is protected; we have rich nations stockpiling life-saving medicine; we have governments who are withholding our resources even as they crush our ability to work and confine us to our homes. This is not based on health requirements, or even economic requirements, it’s simply the conservative ideology at work: give as little as possible to the working poor, and as much as possible to the undeserving rich.
No matter how much evidence is provided that there is a better way, a more ethical and sustainable way, even a more economically sound way, the status quo will not change. There is too much concentrated power in the hands of the very few and they believe that no matter what, they will ride out whatever catastrophe occurs, or else that it doesn’t matter because everything is fucked anyway so they might as well do nothing. They are wrong on both counts, and the world we know is being strangled by their sickening grasp.
I haven’t even got to Afghanistan, or Palestine, or Haiti, or or or. I can’t do it today. The mind revolts when confronted with the indifferent evil of Western imperialism and its disgusting discourses. The mind revolts, too, when confronted with the puerile patriarchal prisons so-called Muslim men have constructed in their insecure desperation to flee from the Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) example of grace; this is true as well of so-called Christian men, who are so far from the Prophet Isa they are incapable of recognising him today. Every day I pray to God to help us out of this and sometimes I wonder if these cascading calamities aren’t His answer.
I know that’s not true, however. These are horrors entirely of our own making, and it’s too easy to refuse accountability for what we have allowed. We do not have to live like this; every cruelty is preventable. We do not have to give into fascism out of futility or fear, we do not have to give up on the future; on the contrary, we have to fight for it. Despite my despair, I will continue to try. I will continue to write. I will show up for my friends, my family, my community. I will put my faith in every act of kindness. I hope you will, too.