Loralee > Recent Status Updates

“America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior.”

“Only some of these acts will be formally labeled terror, though, because in the hierarchy of the Western world—of the world entire—revenge is a carefully delineated thing, around which whole histories and peoples must be ordered to make certain violence regrettable but understandable and other violence savage and infinitely punishable.”

“Maybe this is the truly weightless time, after the front page loses interest but before the history books arrive.”

“In the final moments of Aaron Bushnell’s life, officers rush to the site of his burning. One asks for a fire extinguisher, another points his gun at the flames.”

“When the bigger wildfires come—as they already have—the industries whose callous disregard helped bring this about will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for calamity.”

“The system, predicated on endless feeding, is unable to imagine anything outside itself, let alone forms of resistance to itself.”

“It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power—the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more.”

“A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.”

…Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi: “Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it’s a handful, throw it. If it’s a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can.”

“Negation—the power to turn away—is a dangerous thing, and the narrative changes wildly depending on who’s doing it.”

“Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization … The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate.”

“What is the word for what she felt? Because on the other side of the planet countless people cheering on this liquidation will wake up and say that they too are afraid. But if these are equal and offsetting fears then the word means nothing.”

“The implicit accusation is that certain people are incapable of responding to their mistreatment with grace, with patience, with love, and that this incapacity, not any external injustice, is responsible for the misery inflicted upon them.”

“…in the end there is no international rules-based order, no universal human rights, no equal justice for all, simply fleeting arrangements of convenience in which any amount of human collateral is deemed acceptable so long as it works in the empire’s interest.”

“We don’t like to talk about these things. We prefer our monsters materialized, not made.”

“It moves armies, obliterates thousands. As with rage, there is an invisible force to fear, a gravity.”

“The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one’s opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one’s own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.”

“So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting.”

“But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit, exclaim even, that no description of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it.”

“this is where the poets will interject they will say: show, dont tell but that assumes most people can see.” - Marwa Helal

“What is the statute of limitations on resentment, on rage, on revenge?”

And so, Zhou Zishu’s journey was foreordained to not be a peaceful one.

“In this life, you will be the only one in my heart. In the next life, and the one after that, I will forever remember you, so long as my soul hasn’t scattered.
…I don’t know who I’ll be…
The head won’t remember, but the heart will.”