Over the past week I’ve read of the deaths of two Palestinian poets, Refaat Alareer and Saleem Al-Naffar. More in the wake of the US vote defeating the UN call for ceasefire, and the Biden Administration’s insistence on funding Israel without strings or accountability. Selah, it is all the same. We’ve been here for generations, and our foreign policy in the Middle East is based on a post- World War II strategic decision.

And no. I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. That is an undeniable historical fact. Neither is the fact that the death of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazi Death Machine was the culmination of centuries of antisemitism. But insisting that a blank check to Israel to blanket bomb Gaza is a moral high ground and not a 75-year-old rinse and repeat military strategy is also ignoring fact. Selah, it is all the same.

All the World Death Machines are running, and the sky is cloudy with blood-soaked exhaust. This is the way of those machines.

But there are other machines working, too.

I figured out a long time ago that this world is machines layered upon machines. Somewhere underneath them all, there are other machines, organic machines, that continue to run. And that’s only the machines of this world. Down on the river, the great wound of the world, in the early hours of the morning, the curtains between the worlds get thin, and if you look you see other machines. This world is machines atop of machines atop of machines. Selah, it is all the same.

There are calls to strike, to close shops. Shows of solidarity, I suppose. This assumes that there are enough small businesses that could stop the corporate machine. I’m not optimistic enough to think that’s so. If these closures happen it will be a minor inconvienence and it will probably only really inconvience people who are sympathetically minded. Everyone who wants to feel like they’re doing something will feel it. The other machines, including the Death Machines, will continue to run.

The only thing I know to do is write and keep writing. That is the kind of machine I am. I write and in writing, I remember. Because we must, we must remember.