Mel > Recent Status Updates

"There was the question of why—the question of whether such gestures still make any sense in the face of all we know now; of whether it's time to accept the futility of actions that depend, for their effort, on the compassion, or conscience, or humanity, of Those whom they address. Whether more force, more sacrifice, is now required. The question: what kind of resistance is possible against a world without mercy?"

“Spectacle as the route to empathy means the atrocities itemized need to happen more often or get worse, to become more atrocious each round in hopes of being registered.” Scenes of border death maintain structures of racial violence and, as statistics of deaths pile up, we cannot evade an interrogation of the source of this violence shaped through imperial, racialized, and spatialized control.

"our era’s migration crisis is not marked by human mobility but rather the reality of mass displacement and immobility, produced by the multifarious and interwoven systems of globalized capitalism, imperialism, and climate catastrophe."

"neoliberalism is characterized by deregulation of financial and trade markets, privatization of public assets and institutions, social service cuts, protection of private property and corporate profits, an ideology of individualism and competition, and enhanced enforcement to coerce labor while policing impoverishment."

"According to BAJI, even though Black immigrants make up 7.2% of the total undocumented population, more than 20% of all migrants in deportation proceedings due to criminal convictions are Black..In an era where the word intersectionality has entered the public lexicon, the immigrant rights movement has failed at it. It is the deeply pervasive nature of anti-Black racism that erases the existence of Black migrants"

"The US–Mexico border must be understood not only as a racist weapon to exclude migrants and refugees, but as foundationally organized through, and hence inseparable from, imperialist expansion, Indigenous elimination, and anti-Black enslavement."

"Our movements must refuse both the vicious far right and the banal liberal center. Racist ethnonation-alism and liberal multiculturalism both serve to uphold racial regimes through a social organization of difference. A proclamation like “Immigrants steal our jobs,” and its rejoinder, “Our economy needs immigrants” treats immigrants as commodities to be traded in capitalist markets and discarded if deemed defective"

"The thing I fear most is that everything will come to seem like normal events, and that it will become normal to bomb a house, and the abnormal thing would just be not giving a warning in advance. It will become normal for a child to die, whereas the abnormal thing would be that he died screaming, as well as many other things that can’t be covered in a single text."

"I am searching for the meaning of our lives— of life— in war. Nothing has any meaning except imagining what will happen to us and our bodies when the bombs fall. How will we die? In one piece, two pieces… three? Will we be just body parts? Where will our blood splatter? How does death look like at that moment?"

"The whole world knows little of this struggle, except for a few stolen photos and scenes of suffering. The world thinks we’ve gotten used to it, that we’ve learnt to cope with the deprivation of life’s necessities by finding primitive alternatives. This perception allows the world to rid itself of guilt about Gaza, convincing itself with fantasies of heroism and the myth of enduring hardships."

Holy $#**!!! Didn't see that coming.

"Recounting the broad strokes of any genocide is like describing the ocean as a bowl of water. The real depth and dimension of the atrocities is in the specifics, most of which are now unknown— the moment a household’s hearth went cold for the last time, the rhythm of a particular bedtime story never again told, the exact tone of a man wailing."

😭

"The ways that fungi are seen as poisonous, disease-carrying, degenerate, deadly, freaky, gross, and weird—language historically leveled against queer and other marginalized people—are more than a metaphor. How they are treated, in many branches of science and in popular perception, is a representation of our society’s values. We live in a culture that demands control, predictability, and clear definitions."