Let us reclaim the rebellion from the marketing campaign of extinction of the rebellion and other bougie white rhetoric of “causes”! Justice is the only cause, and abolition is the future!

However enraged or sad we may be at this moment in which we find ourselves glued to our screens watching genocide in real time, however much in a state of shock and disbelief we may continue to move through time as if the seconds, minutes, hours, days, 42 days have merged into one; however much we may struggle with trying to stay alert, not to be desensitised, to not give into apathy; the truth stands: In comfort we eat the earth.

I want to be in Gaza because I thrive in a life in praxis. In this life of comfort, I struggle with value making, money making, housing, stability, and really any sense of self-worth. I struggle here because the life of comfort steals from me the very essence of my being: To live in symbiosis with the earth. To live embraced in the unruly, unpredictable, unfathomable, and completely bonkers bosom of life. To live. Not to exist as a hollow replica of life itself, dressed in the fancy costume of life valued only by that which is perceived. Does the tree make a sound when nobody is there to hear her? The tree dances to the song of the wind, but hollow ears are not attuned to her tongue. So we exist in dualisms as a lie shoved down our throats, an imposition in replication of the imposition upon the earth where boots dig heavily upon the ground, saying ownership for worth. What becomes of a body devoid of spirit? Well, this! Glitter, glamour, comfort, and genocide of people, of land, of rivers, of seas, of the earth.

I wish to be in Gaza. My heart and soul longs to be in Gaza. For this, we have worked many lifetimes ago and many to come. Life lived in service of life itself is a life worth living.

Comfort imposes itself onto the host, then it eases the host into a life of routine and stress. Comfort is a meagre reward for such a high price: The Spirit itself! Hollow beings adorned in the fancy costumes of insatiable capitalism, regurgitating itself, leaving only waste in its wake. Capitalism is the pathogen. Comfort is the virus. Compassion is the cure; community is the antidote.

Senses are awoken momentarily as we cry and rage for Gaza. But in the land of all things hollow, comfort is always the greater force. I wish upon us all madness to revel in discomfort!

Madness is essential to a life in revolutionary praxis. This takes a huge degree of love because, without it, rage manifests as self-doubt, apathy or anger, all of which, in fact, are forces to divide and individualise the struggle.

Solidarity is love as the central element of water around which we gather; earth upon which we rest and through which we are sustained; air, the force which brings us together; and fire, the fuel of life. Fire, which feeds our conscience. Fire, which breathes life into the material. Fire is the somatic factor that binds the unreal (or really real; the ineffable) to the real (or material). Fire moves the wind, creates the earth, and at water finally meets the yin to her yang. Fire is madness. Fire is rage. But we want, even in our call for revolution, to be comfortable and civil when the very mission of civilising is maddening in that it enforces standards, denies the diversity of life, and creates unnatural dualisms and hierarchies, all of which inevitably are violent regimes of domination. We fight oppression while careful not to disrupt its orderly form. This is madness.

I think the time has come that we embrace feeling, uncontrolled, irrational, chaotic, and allow from this Chaos the birth of Eros, which is love.

We are in a paradigm shift. The very thing necessary for us to respond to the call of return, like fallen leaves, back to our roots, to live in symbiosis with that which we know only as a romantic ideal distant from us, reserved for holidays and spiritual breaks: Nature! The mother of all!

We are given to sensationalise, and while we all arise for the liberation of Palestine, could it be that we will deplete our energy and return to the hollow lives of comfort so familiar to us? Or could it be that we will fall with the shifting of the pendulum into the realm of madness, the irrational, that which diametrically opposes the “real” we have been imagined into at the cost of the lives of others, the climate, the spirit?

Here am I, an anarchist to the core, devoted to a life on the battleground against forces of domination, exploitation, oppression, looking to structures of power as domination, hierarchies that I have denounced in every aspect of my life, for that call to end the genocide. Please. Because I cannot take it any more. Here I am, the one who is known to fight charities, laugh at governments because we are not of the same species, looking to dominant powers for any sign of hope. Here I am, an anarchist to the core, annoyed by political figures stubborn in their fascism or hopeful when the leftist says something that should be the bare minimum.

We, as a people, exert control upon us, the people. We demand civility and comfort even when we protest the cost of the comfort that has shaken the hollow shells so that the spirit can shine. Momentarily. We rage. Peacefully. We rage in neo-liberalism, calling for an end to the massacre. We centre the white bourgeoisie when we insist that we are not hateful or violent. I, for one, hate. My rage is unforgiving. I hate. I hate. I hate. I hate. I hate. And my hate is full of vengeance.

We privilege the neck up even in our call for an end to genocide. Brawn is where we gather. This is radical feminism. To gather in our bodies, privileging ourselves from the neck down so that we can shout, scream, cry, and gather whatever may be within reach to get that white foot in the black boot off our necks! And if you, person watching, did not help get the foot off the neck, then you have no right to have an opinion about the method used to get the foot off the neck!

~ manizha khaos