Aaron and Gaza Last Sunday, Airman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire by Israeli Embassy in D.C. to protest US involvement in Gaza genocide. He died later after being transported to a local hospital on Sunday afternoon. What are we doing to stop the Gaza war? “My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he says in a video of the incident....
For someone my age who was in the civil rights movement, and in other struggles of the 1960s, I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless. I’ve always been influenced by the poems Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the Second World War, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, well, it’s a new dark ages … how do people resist in the dark ages?...
In the dark time, to act is more important than to hope. Samantha Rose Hill once wrote that “for Hannah Arendt, hope is a dangerous barrier to courageous action. In dark times, the miracle that saves the world is to act.” Life is always about hope. Then in an interview, Saidiya Hartman said the follows about the advice of “Don’t despair.” Here is the excerpt: “What is joy? What is joy?...