Opinion

Dear Senator Cruz, 

While millions of people across the world were marching to demand the end of the Gaza genocide, you were shaking hands with Crime Minister Netanyahu and busy criticizing a kid rapper at a foreign festival that we have never heard of in a country which is on the other side of the ocean since they dared to criticize a third country (Israel) that is thousands of miles away!

While your home state of Texas was going through a catastrophic flood where over 100 people were dead, injured, and missing, you were busy criticizing a rapper in the U.K. who dared to criticize a third country (Israel) for killing women and children every day during the last 20 months. How does that benefit the people of Texas?

How can an American Senator condone and defend Israel's genocide killing Palestinian civilians including children, babies and starve the rest... where are your American values gone?

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Eye-yii-yii! I’m trying to tell myself that I’m still learning about life, not drifting into doesn’t-matterness. You know, asleep on the couch in the middle of the day.

Cataract surgery on my second eye (the rightie) was almost a week ago now and it went well. my vision seems slightly more enthusiastic. Biggest noticeable change: I can read captions on the TV screen without my glasses, which suddenly don’t help with that at all, though I still need them for ordinary reading.

What’s going on with my life right now feels larger than post-cataract-surgery recovery . . . so much larger that I don’t want to write about it, but feel I must do so because I want to write about something. As I cuddle myself at my sister’s kitchen table with this notebook, feeling lost and subjectless, I nonetheless sense a return of emotional energy – simply because I’m doing something . . . so I hope, so I pray . . . that matters.

When that sense vanishes from my life, what happens isn’t just an emotional crash. The crash I feel is also physical. I start losing the will to stay awake! This is a phenomenon I’ve never experienced before in my life, or read about anywhere.

As an infant in Côte d'Ivoire (Currently known as Ivory Coast), Pierre Dupont knew nothing of the world except the arms of one woman who embraced him with tenderness and warmth: his nanny Aisha. She was more than just a maid. She was like a second mother, feeding him, rocking him, and holding him whenever he cried, showering him with unforgettable love. 

But fate separated them for 38 years. Pierre's family left for France, and all news of Aisha ceased. Years passed, Pierre grew up, studied, and moved on with his life, but something inside him remained there... in the arms of that kind woman with her tender smile and eyes filled with love. He didn't know where she was or if she was still alive but longing and gratitude drove him to begin a long and painful search. 

Whatever the outcomes of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Monday and the latest scenario for a ceasefire in Gaza, a bilateral policy of genocide has united the Israeli and U.S. governments in a pact of literally breath-taking cruelty. That pact and its horrific consequences for Palestinian people either continue to shock Americans or gradually normalize indifference toward ongoing atrocities on a massive scale.

 Recent news reporting that President Trump has pushed for a ceasefire in Gaza is an echo of a familiar refrain about peace-seeking efforts from the Biden and Trump administrations. The spin remained in sync with the killing – not only with American bombs and bullets but also with Israel’s refusal to allow more than a pittance of food and other essentials into Gaza.

A central motif of the new horror film 28 Years Later is its statement about what normal looks like. From the outset, normality is encoded in the battle between normal humans vs abnormal, zombified ones. But another subtler message also makes itself known: normal isn’t about diversity. The film ministers to the idea of the ‘unwelcome other’ by apparently only casting people of colour in the role of zombies. And so, the real horror is in the thinking that seems to have informed the casting.

The film re-centres whiteness, under the guise of genre convention and nostalgia. In so doing, it echoes a lingering cultural mood that quietly reinforces exclusion. I should know. I’m Black and I’ve seen this mood afoot in many instances of procedural fluency - that automatic application of actions and behaviours that, in the case of race, leads to exclusion.