Please Let Us Have Our Sons and Daughters

When violence begets violence.

*This has been a traumatic week. I understand if you don’t want to read more on Israel/Palestine. I felt called to speak to what’s on my heart. This post will not go into graphic details.

After 9/11, nearly every adult I knew agreed that we needed to attack Afghanistan. One or two teachers quietly whispered to us that they had concerns, that we should ask more questions before jumping in. It struck me how much these teachers were afraid to be heard saying this. My brother Craig died from opioids in 2004 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to ramp up. At one point, I pleaded with family members. “Don’t you understand you’re signing other people’s sons up to die? Would you support this if it meant re-sacrificing Craig?” “These people are evil,” they said. “They want us dead.” Never mind that these extremists, who represented a tiny percentage of the countries they lived in, were halfway across the world, without anything like our military resources.

Since then, I’ve rarely heard anyone apologize for believing the “weapons of mass destruction” claims, just as I never got apologies from the people who told me in 2016 that Trump and Republicans weren’t coming for abortion rights. They all seem to have marched on to the next imperative. The new fights they’re willing to sacrifice other people’s children for.

My brother’s drug use didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in a world where it felt unsafe for him to be visibly queer for almost his entire life. It happened in a world where his psychiatrist prescribed him Oxycontin for “cluster migraines” at age 21. A world where I once saw four different pharmaceutical reps jockey for my primary care physician’s attention in the waiting room, plying him with pamphlets, medication samples, and a very fancy looking cake. That same doctor gave me free samples for anti-depressants and I took them. Because neither therapy nor medication were covered under my insurance. We worked with what we had. And it was more than 15 years after my brother’s death before I had access to a psychiatrist or therapist.  

In our culture, it seems that so many of us are meant to sacrifice our sons and daughters. To war, to mass shootings, to opioids, to police brutality, to suicide from experiencing severe transphobia. And afterwards people throw up their hands. Thoughts and prayers. If only there was something we could do. We rarely connect the dots that all these things have the same root cause – profit at all costs. The profits of gun companies, the military industrial complex, the prison industry, the property values of our racially segregated towns, and a need for gender norms to keep us all in line, pumping out babies for cheap labor, and sometimes slaughter. We trivialize the lives lost by acting like they were freak accidents, like their pain doesn’t directly harm the wellbeing of each subsequent generation.

Many mothers these days are trying to support the wellbeing of ourselves and our children by breaking these cycles of subtle and not so subtle violence. Our elder relatives often mock us for progressive behaviors like letting our sons wear dresses. It feels like they’re saying, “suppress his joy, kill his spirit just a little, because it’s the ‘right’ thing to do.” Those of us born into violence often struggle not to perpetuate it.

I think Americans need to understand that we are nearly all displaced peoples. Even those native to this continent have been moved off their original lands. Many of our white ancestors came here under duress whether fleeing famine, war, or economically pressured to do the dirty work of colonization while their richer countrymen kept their hands “clean.” From the crusades up until today we’ve been cut off from our own indigenous knowledge, our connections with nature cycles, ecosystems, from ideas of true community care.

My grandparents had a Sunday night tradition of popcorn and a can of soup. It was economical. They really only needed a light meal. And when family was visiting, they would often do the same thing, just the one can, trying to make it stretch. My aunt and uncle once took themselves to McDonalds after because they were so hungry. We laugh about it. And yet I still feel a certain guilt when I treat myself to something like an avocado, the remnants of depression era thinking seared into my DNA.

It was overwhelming to me, this week, how quickly the pro-war messaging came after the Hamas’ attacks. Many Jewish people were understandably alarmed by how the deaths of Israelis were so quickly written off by some of the supporters of Palestinian freedom. As an American whose government funds billions in Israeli military aid, which has enabled far greater casualties for Palestinians over the years, deaths that helped garner support for Hamas in the first place, I was concerned with the calls to support Israel. The phrase “I stand with Israel” felt triggering. I’m sure many meant it as an indication that they stand for the safety of Israeli citizens and not necessarily the military actions of their government. But to me, it had echoes of “Never forget,” a statement seeming to honor victims, that very rapidly became a rallying cry for war.

I have to wonder, if you jump to claim Israel’s right to defend itself with enormous military support from the U.S. after one weekend of violence, what makes you think you wouldn’t be just as easily radicalized by Hamas, were you a Palestinian experiencing decades of death, violence, and imprisonment inflicted on your people?

I want to be clear, I have known and loved Israeli people. And it has not escaped my notice that they carry the wounds of their own militarization. My freshman year, I shared classes with a cheerful Israeli girl, who I’ll call Yael. She was older than us because she’d had to do her compulsory military service. Nearly everyone in our drawing class carried blades to sharpen our charcoal pencils, and one day a student cut himself and passed out from the sight of blood. Yael caught him, held his arm up above his head and got out the military first aid kit she still carried everywhere. The kit alone might signal preparedness, but she carried much more than that. She spoke vaguely of her time in the army. “It’s hard.” I saw a graph this week charting U.S. military deaths. The total suicides dwarfed those lost in action by more than four to one. There is also an opioid epidemic quietly raging on our military bases.

There’s a lot of talk about allyship now, with many saying we must stand with the Jewish Community. I agree with the sentiment but I think we should be thoughtful about what support means. Jewish schools and synagogues pay a fortune for security to prevent the very real threat of shootings and hate crimes, things they know may ramp up this week as Hamas calls for the killing of jews. So why are we not, once again, trying to do more to keep semi-automatic weapons out of the hands of hate groups and domestic terrorists? Why didn’t the United States open our doors to more Jewish refugees during and after WW2? If we care so much about justice and freedom, why are we so closed off to providing real tangible, non-weapons-based aid to persecuted and displaced people worldwide? Why aren’t we questioning the fight response that has been drilled into us since birth via our own nationalist, flag-waving holidays and rituals?

I hope we can give thought to the protection of Jews as well as Palestinians. I hope we can allow protests for peace and freedom. And if one person shows up to these rallies spreading hate, I hope we can take it in stride, just as I hope we would not deem one “kill cops” sign as representative of the entire Black Lives Matter movement.

There’s been a trend online recently, talking about how often men think about Rome. I’ve seen few discussions around why men have been fed such an unending stream of propaganda articulating the “genius” of imperialist history. Men keep explaining the “logic” of why it makes sense to study such an “important” culture. I never hear them wonder why they don’t know more about the archeological evidence for goddess worship in ancient Europe, about matrilineal societies throughout world history, or restorative justice models. These have all been erased and diminished, with many examples of entire populations eviscerated. And so men of the Western world don’t know what they don’t know.  

In high school, I learned about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I loved it. It shows how a person must meet their basic needs for things like food, shelter, and safety (which increasingly may Palestinians cannot) before they are able to pursue more advanced needs like love and belonging. What I later learned, is that Maslow took this idea from The Blackfoot Nation in Alberta. And in doing so, he removed the top tiers of the pyramid (in their case represented by a tipi), which were about community and cultural perpetuity. In doing so, he moved self-actualization from the bottom to the top of the pyramid and served the Western ideals of rugged individualism. And the American and Canadian governments suppressed the source of his knowledge because they didn’t want to elevate a positive narrative about Blackfoot people.

I think it’s okay to think somewhat selfishly. Collective wellbeing doesn’t require self-sacrifice if you’re willing to take yourself out of a competitive, militaristic mindset. And in thinking selfishly, me might see how our wars hurt us. The Iraq war alone cost us 1.8 Trillion Dollars, while some put that number closer to 3 Trillion if you factor hidden costs and the ongoing care for veterans. Imagine if the money we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan had been spent at home on housing, infrastructure, or healthcare? Imagine if more of it had gone to the care of 9/11 first responders, some of whom, years later, were fighting for government aid from their deathbeds, begging with their last breaths for their relatives not to be saddled with medical debt. Imagine if more had been done for the traumatized residents of lower Manhattan whose mental and physical health suffered for years to come.

Each interceptor missile we send to re-arm Israel’s Iron Dome costs about $50k. That’s fifty thousand dollars that will line the pockets of arms dealers instead of contributing to the wellbeing of our children, of our people. I worry that Gaza, with a population larger than Manhattan, nearly half of whom are children, will be bombed to oblivion (if that’s not in fact already happening). Biden and Netanyahu have both openly declared this a valid option. I worry I will live to see another half dozen news cycles of violent U.S. imperialism before I am dead. And throughout I will remain powerless, still just a girl, standing in front of her country, asking them not to kill our kids. All of our kids.

I don’t know what horrors will be enacted this weekend by Hamas or the Israeli military. But it feels foreboding. And as much as I abhor the violence on all sides, I have empathy for those stuck in these trickle-down cycles of abuse. We can’t beat or cage the violence out of others. As Alexander Den Heijer says, “When a flower doesn't bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” Even Maslow, beholden to Western ideals as he was, knew that.

Our liberation requires empathy for all sides. Our liberation can only be collective.