For those who choose to bear witness

for those who choose to change and be changed by the times we're living in

The above is an audio version of everything below. Listen, listen + read along, or engage however you’d like. Thank you for your time, I know there are so many newsletters and emails to read through so I appreciate you being here 💌

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art by @yassindraws

Here’s the thing about what’s happening in Rafah. Everything happening there is also happening within us. Maybe that feels like a dramatic thing to say, maybe it feels like a stretch to you. And if it does, I invite you to think about what it is we’re collectively facing.

We’ve been in a global state of crisis for 4 years and even these 4 years have been an accumulation of years before that. Just as October 7 was the result of 100 years of deliberate dehumanization, occupation, and a multibillion-dollar campaign by modern day empires to justify the mass decimation of people. Of people’s universities, places of worship, libraries, markets, homes. Burning of books.

This is the stuff we read about as a kid, is it not? Here in the states, we had to read George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. I had to read about fascism and authoritarianism because, I’m hoping (and this is really the optimist, humanist in me speaking) that someone who decided the curriculum wanted us to learn our history so we could stop atrocities from repeating in our future.

But then I grew older, and I learned that most American textbooks gloss over the harm that America has caused and instead instills this idea of uninformed patriotism. And in doing so, we give up so much of our power, agency, choice, and essence of global interconnectedness. We put borders on our empathy, we tell ourselves it’s okay to be selective about our compassion. We tell ourselves survival is an individual act instead of a collective responsibility.

I’m a first generation Korean American. I’m the first in my lineage to be born on Turtle Island, to build roots here. And this gives me a unique perspective. As someone of the Korean diaspora, I’ll be confronting the impact of imperialism for the rest of my life— the intergenerational, somatic, psychological impact of being from a place that was violently subjected to empire and imperialism. I could write a whole other post about the importance of re-indigenizing as someone of the Asian diaspora, how it’s linked to the ways we care for each other and ourselves, how we heal our bodies. I could get into epigenetics and how those who descend from a lineage of people who have been enslaved, annihilated, slaughtered live with a type of pain and trauma in our bodies that sometimes takes a lifetime to understand and even then, we still have questions.

It’s this kind of robbing of our humanity and dignity that we’re fighting against.

So what’s happening in Rafah is also happening within me. Things are dying, things are being taken. There’s life and land and culture and knowledge and food and homes and traditions being brutally, unjustly, alarmingly attacked, burnt, singed, abused on the most diabolical scale possible.

What’s happening in Rafah is also happening within me, is also happening to me because our freedom is interconnected. Our safety is interconnected. And as all movements before have taught us, we’re not free until we’re all free.

What we’re witnessing cannot be normalized. We must be loud about how we feel. About how shocked we are. About how unacceptable this is. About how sick this is making us. Without this shouting, without this feeling out loud, we risk falling into cycles of apathy that continue to create these cycles of violence. We must look at the things within ourselves that contribute— even 1%— to these systems of dominance, to the bullshit justifications that have allowed for this to happen.

We’re always saying— what would you do if you were alive during the civil rights movement, what would you do during the Holocaust? What would you do? Who would you choose to be? How would you choose to live your life?

We have the chance to answer those questions right now.

And that doesn’t mean we have to act impulsively, it means we have to act urgently. As if every thought we think, every conversation we have, everything we consume, every habit we form, every pattern we perpetuate, contributes to the world we’re living in. We must live with intention and integrity.

History is not something outside of us, it’s something we create every single day. And I worry for our collective psyche, the heart of our collective humanity, I worry for us if we continue going at this rate.

page 10 from This Way to Change

page 11 from This Way to Change

page 12 from This Way to Change

I keep thinking, how many more wake up calls do we need? How many more alarm bells?

I understand everyone grows and evolves at a different rate. Even for me, as someone relatively well read and socially/politically/culturally engaged, I’ve accelerated my learnings deeply in the past 8 months. I’ve awakened to things I was asleep to, context I was unaware of.

I think it is our responsibility— as people who are alive during this time— to bear witness to the depth of our collective pain and not only that, to be moved and changed by it. To move forward from this point on knowing what is at stake, knowing what’s possible. Because we’re seeing the worst of humanity but we’re also capable of carrying out the best of humanity. We can choose to write a different history from here.

Some people will spend their whole lives ignoring wake up calls. Some people would rather learn to live with the sound of sirens than actually look into where the help is needed, where the calls for help are coming from. Because that means we would actually have to do something, we’d have to change a part of our lives.

So please, be open to change.

Be open to confronting the power within you to build a different world.

Our future is counting on it.