Reposting with a Preface

Changing This Would Change the World

There’s a reason I keep bringing up Ursula K. Le Guin’s, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, where “the narrator depicts a summer festival in the utopian city of Omelas, whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child.”

We’ve funded a genocide for over a year. When you treat anyone this way, you open the door to treating everyone this way.

Hearing that Arab professors in Harvard's Middle Eastern Studies Department did not 'step down' but were 'cleared out' or 'swept away' (like dirt, said the friend who told me), prompts me to repost this.

Treating red America or Arabs or anyone else as nonhuman is like cutting a small hole in a wool scarf: It seems harmless and unconnected, but eventually the whole thing unravels, as is happening now.

Whether you’re encountering this freshly or revisiting, welcome to a little bit of truth.

"White Rural Rage, Gaza, and the Black Ant Apocalypse

What’s “White Rural Rage”?

I first saw the term "White Rural Rage," in an article by political scientist Nicholas F. Jacobs titled, "What Liberals Get Wrong About 'White Rural Rage'—Almost Everything," and the phrase made a quiet explosion in my mind, that sensation you get when previously unrelated ideas snap together with a satisfying click. It was not an association I had seen before. In common U.S. parlance, whites do not have "rage". Perhaps they have justified anger, or maybe "resolve". Nobody wrote about American "rage" after 9/11.

So, Who Does Have Rage?

My realization came in several waves. First, who has rage? Easy peasy: Arabs and Muslims. (Black people used to have rage, but not anymore, at least not in the white media sense of irrational, incomprehensible fury, because the makers of movies, books, and a good chunk of public opinion have finally realized that Black people are human.) As distinguished from "rage," Jacobs acknowledges what he calls rural resentment.

But words matter; rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms. Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience. You may not agree that someone has been treated unfairly, but there is room to empathize.

Land People vs. Money People

In her novel Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver talks about "land people" versus "money people", pointing out that nobody can collect taxes on "what people grow and eat on the spot, or the work they swap with their neighbors. That's like a percent of blood from a turnip." She goes on to describe a centuries-old campaign to shame land people into joining the city version of America, including the military attempt to extract taxes on homemade corn liquor. "How do you get tax money out of moonshine? Answer: You and what army? It goes a ways to explaining people's feelings about taxes and guns."

“I Don’t Want the Cast of Deliverance in My Operating Room.”

One tactic in this ongoing project of disempowerment is making the land people a laughingstock, the butt of an ongoing joke, "an earlier stage of human, like junior varsity or cavemen. Weird-shaped heads." Tommy, Demon Copperhead's fellow foster-kid and later an independent journalist, points out that "a lot of our land-people things we do for getting by, like farmer (sic), fishing, hunting, making our own liquor, are the exact things that get turned into hateful jokes on us."

Their accent is another common target of supposed humor, rarely pointed out as prejudice. In one episode of the Netflix medical drama The Resident, a brilliant and arrogant Black surgeon hears a subordinate's voice and remarks, "I don't want the cast of Deliverance in my operating room."

Who Else Got This Treatment, and What Was Taken?

In passing, the character and the book acknowledge that hillbilly land people are not alone. "There were other land-type people in the boat with us. The Cherokees that got kicked off their land. All the other tribes, same. Black people after they were freed up, wanting their own farm but getting no end of grief for it, till they gave up and went to the city."

So, what was taken from Kingsolver's country people? The sweetness of life on the land, at times terribly hard but surrounded by family, neighbors, and the natural sights, sounds and scents she describes so beautifully. And increasingly, the ability to fend for themselves.

“I Owe My Soul to the Company Store”

Coal companies kept other industries and facilities out, making people dependent on them, calling to mind the old lyric, "I owe my soul to the company store," and the John Prine song "Paradise," which asks where everything has gone and answers, "Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away." Kingsolver writes

Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident . . .

[But] it’s still in your blood that coal is God’s gift and you want to believe. Because otherwise it was one more scam in the fuck-train that’s railroaded over these mountains since George Washington rode in and set his crew to cutting down our trees. Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black.

Jacobs’s Thoughts and Kingsolver’s Run Parallel.

Jacobs tells us these rural Americans "are most likely to say that if given the chance, they would never want to leave their community," but also acknowledge that their children will probably have no choice. He goes on to describe their motivations.

They are driven by a sense of place, community and often, a desire for recognition and respect. This . . . is the defining aspect of the rural-urban divide — a sense of shared fate among rural voters, what academics call a “politics of place,” that is expressed as a belief in self-reliance, rooted in local community and concerned that rural ways of living will soon be forced to disappear.

He tells us further that they are

not merely reacting against change but are actively seeking to preserve a sense of agency over their future and a continuity of their community’s values and social structures. Some might call this conservatism, but I think it is the same thing motivating fears of gentrification in urban areas, or the desire to “keep Portland weird.” Place matters for a whole bunch of people— but especially for rural folks . . .

In Case You Wondered . . .

References to 'our way of life' and 'our community values’ can trigger an automatic reaction of, 'Oh, yeah, slavery and then racism'. While not denying pervasive racism, Jacobs tells us, "About 20 percent of rural Americans are non-white, and research shows that they share the same geography-based grievances as their white neighbors and are increasingly voting Republican."

Then There’s Gaza

An Occupied People

Like the rural whites above, Arabs and Muslims in the so-called Middle East have many reasons to be angry. People talk as though October 7th came out of nowhere, as if life was normal and good when suddenly these crazy Arabs / Muslims / Palestinians did this horrible thing!

Understand, I'm not defending it. But Gaza has been an open air concentration camp since June 2007, and international law gives occupied people the right to fight back. And don’t call it a “war”. These people have no army, no navy, no Iron Dome, no bomb shelters. They're born into prison. A child growing up there won't be able to fly or sail or drive out of the country. They can't go elsewhere to see the world or pursue education or for any other reason. Harassment, unexplained arrests, and violent incursions by the Israeli authorities are common.

Are Aid Trucks a New Need?

Did you think the aid trucks started after the post 10/7 bombings? And if not, have you wondered why these people need to survive on aid from outside, why they can't be self-sufficient? The Guardian explains, in an article titled, "UN Report: 80% of Gaza inhabitants relied on international aid before [the] war." ¹

Israel’s blockade hollowed out Gaza’s economy and left 80% of its inhabitants dependent on international aid even before the current crisis erupted, the UN has said . . . the blockade, frequent military operations and restrictions on the entry and exit of people and essential goods have stifled the economy, impeded access to health and other essential services and undermined the living conditions of more than 2 million Palestinians . . . Living in Gaza in 2022 meant confinement in one of the most densely populated spaces in the world, without electricity half the time, and without adequate access to clean water or a proper sewage system.”

Gazans can't dig a well or put in a water purification system. If they do, the authorities come and destroy it. They can’t cover a hole blown in their roof from an Israeli incursion without a building permit, which can take months. They have separate roads from those used by Israelis, and there are checkpoints everywhere. Like Black people in the U.S., but in a formal rather than an informal system, they are frequently stopped, questioned, and asked for ID as they go about their daily lives. Unexplained arrests and uncharged detentions are frequent.

If It’s Unbearable to Read, Imagine Living It

So October 7th did not come out of nowhere. Even now, innocent people can't flee for safety. Early on, people with no cars, no fuel, no food and no water were told to leave their houses and communities immediately because these places would be bombed. When they did, the recommended destination was bombed as well.

Children are having amputations and mothers having C-sections without anesthetic because most hospitals have been destroyed. Medicines, beds, surgical and other hospital supplies are gone. Aid trucks are turned back for containing "dual use items," a long list which includes children's scissors, surgical scissors, and cancer drugs. A woman who had three rounds of IVF over 10 years lost her five-month-old twin girl and boy to Israeli bombs. A just-graduated art student lost both legs, one hand, and almost all her family.

“Maybe under the rubble with our families.'‘

In the most insensitive interview I've ever encountered, a scrap of NPR coming through my car radio², the Gaza spokesperson said the hostages were hard to find because different groups held them and some had been killed by the IDF. The interviewer, an impatient woman, asked again where they were and the man said, "Maybe under the rubble with our families." This did not penetrate her cold abruptness. He mentioned the number of Palestinian prisoners held without charges in Israeli jails and prisons and the woman said, "I don't have any information on those allegations. But what about the hostages?"

Who and What Are Dying?

Carpet bombing has destroyed neighborhoods, houses, apartments, markets, hospitals, and schools. Refugee camps and other places where people fled for shelter, including churches and mosques, have been bombed. (Though anti-Muslim hatred has been weaponized, some Gazans are Christians, and they are not spared³.) AbdelHakim ElWaer, Assistant Director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, told UN News that around 55 percent of agricultural land was now totally unusable in the north, along with half of all greenhouses, while food production has also been hit in the occupied West Bank⁴.

Artists, Journalists, Aid Workers, Doctors and Nurses: Killed

As talks drag on, the death toll continues to rise, now estimated at somewhere around 33,000, but always underestimated because "our families are under the rubble." In this culture of large, interconnected families, it is not uncommon for people to have lost 100 or 200 family members. According to Save the Children as reported by CNN, more than 10 children lose one or both legs in Gaza every day⁵.

Separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians. High walls and fences surrounding Palestinian areas so most Israelis never see them. This is the very definition of apartheid.

A word about Muslims in the 'Middle East'

In The Middle East Crisis Factory: Tyranny, Resilience and Resistance⁶, Eyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash focus on the deadly triangle of dictators, terrorists, and foreign colonial and neocolonial interference, each of which reinforces the others.

Among their many points: Not only were national borders drawn badly by western powers, something which led to endless difficulties, but the very idea of separate nation states was foreign and harmful. As in Native America, people of many cultures, origins, and belief systems traveled freely over broad expanses of territory, following ancient trade routes and seasonal migrations or observing religious obligations. Obviously not everyone got along, but there were few hard and fast boundaries such as we see today.

“An Evil Unmatched”

A less obvious aspect of the military, economic, and cultural oppression visited on the Middle East by the colonial powers, paralleling the attitudes toward hillbillies described above, was the pervasive assumption that they were subhuman. Less obvious than the outright violence for which it paved the way, but in a subtler manner just as destructive and cruel.

European colonisation was a kind of foreign rule that was markedly different from previous empires that had risen and fallen in the Middle East over millennia. It had a deep impact on the region's political order, indeed on its very psyche. Perhaps the most insidious was that it brought new narratives of a 'civilising mission' that called into question whether the natives were even fit to exercise any agency over their political affairs . . . In fact, colonialism is defined by its inherent racism. More fundamental than its enactment of occupation, subjugation, exploitation, and violence is the idea that no matter what the natives do, they will never be equal to the colonizers . . . We may try to assimilate, to literally become similar to the colonisers; while that might make us a bit more human-like in their eyes, we will never be equals . . . This is the essence of European colonialism, and this is why it was an evil unmatched by that of other numerous empires that had come and gone.

Othering

The now-common expression 'othering,' a sociological concept not widely known when I first encountered it as an Intercultural Relations masters student, talks about the first thing that happens leading up to a genocide: The first step toward slaughtering people wholesale is dehumanizing them. Target populations are regularly described as animals, rats, plagues, and swarms of invading insects — during the Rwandan genocide, cockroaches. Only a monster would kill and maim thousands or millions of human beings, but swarms of invading insects, rodents, and killer diseases must obviously be targeted until the last one is gone.

And Finally: The Black Ant Apocalypse

So, what does all this have to do with my personal black ant apocalypse? If this seems like an abrupt change of subject, trust me, it's not. (And nobody had better call me an Ant Racist about this, because — spoiler alert — no reasonable Black person on any continent would tolerate these creatures in their kitchen!)

I don't like killing anything, though I'm a reluctant meat-eater due to a chronic iron deficiency. But I recently murdered about a thousand of my fellow creatures. I acted with homicidal ferocity, fueled by panic and a conviction that, No, these monsters shall not exist here in my home!

Unwanted Visitors

It happened this way. For the last few months during an unusually mild winter, we'd been seeing the occasional large black ant in our kitchen. Unlike the tiny brown sugar ants we sometimes tolerate in summer due to their neat marching lines and limited scope, these things were horrifying and could turn up anywhere around the sink or on the counters. When we saw one we would kill it, but we hadn't really addressed the problem. I found out after my husband's return from a multi-day retreat that he'd thought they were termites. "They eat wood," he said. "Oh no they don't!" I replied.

A Chance to Declutter

During the absence of this man, my only current housemate, I took the rare opportunity to clear an enormous amount of clutter. In our big, beautiful, arts-and-crafts house, built in 1914, random posessions just seem to pile up, occupying every spare surface because neither of us knows if anyone wants them or where they're supposed to go.

The relevant objects here were a dark brown three-legged stool made by his grandfather, a hotplate I'd been using to get stains off a Pakistani rug, and a wooden chip and dip holder, round and heavy. As I do when clueless about where to put things, I had piled them up, putting the two smaller items on the stool, where they fit nicely. They'd been sitting there for weeks.

And I SCREAMED!

As part of exiling the clutter to the basement, I removed the hotplate, removed the wooden thing, and SCREAMED! This was the biggest horror movie moment of my long and varied life. On the round wooden stool was a solid mass of ants, all swarming and moving here and there, carrying what looked like small, soggy grains of short-grain rice. (I hope they were rice; it's just occurred to me at this moment that they could have been larvae!)

After giving forth a true horror movie shriek, loud and shrill as a steam whistle but less fun, I did the first thing that occurred to me: grabbed a spray bottle and started spraying them with water. This of course did nothing. Next I grabbed a series of paper towels and began squashing, destroying, and trashing them wholesale, probably looking like a maniac, but determined that not one of these hideous, nonhuman creatures should survive in my kitchen! I got 'em all, too. Haven't seen one since.

CONCLUSION

My home has been cleared of the invading, nonhuman monstrosities. Because when there's an evil horde (oh, that's another othering term), it's no shame to kill them all, though I didn't take triumphant pictures of myself over their bodies, as some jubilant Israeli soldiers have done over the bodies and bombed out living areas of Gazans, sharing photos and videos.

This behavior was appropriate in a kitchen infested with large ants which, as I learn now, probably were carrying their larvae. It is not appropriate in dealing with an imprisoned, oppressed, and utterly vulnerable population of human beings.

Who’s Responsible?

Not only those committing daily atrocities are guilty, but also those supporting and arming them: the planners, the enablers, and the funders on every level upholding what's recognized as genocide and ethnic cleansing by the U.N., all human rights organizations, and the vast majority of nations on this planet. Using mass starvation as a weapon of war is only one of the many ongoing crimes.

A Wider Lens Again: What Seeds Have We Planted?

The near destruction of a people can give rise to justified anger amounting to rage, enabling the election of a dictator—yes, even here in America—or unthinkable acts of retaliation, such as might be inspired by having one or two hundred of your innocent family members murdered. When you throw a population away, by whatever means, there's bound to be a boomerang effect.

“But we didn’t know!”

I believe the confessions, regrets, and sorrowful memoires will come later, if the planet survives that long. 'I didn't understand, I was young, I was brainwashed, I didn't know what I was doing.' Or what has been called "the treason of the intellectuals," the writers and thinkers and office holders and news organizations who valued their status and careers more than the dangerous, threatening, heartbreaking truth, and the citizens who believed and followed them, accepting easy answers.

'So just give back the hostages,' or 'Bomb 'em into the stone age', as though this were a video game. In this case, it's 'We didn't want to know.' The confessions and regrets and endless analysis will come later. But what good will it do then?

---

1. Larry Elliott Economics editor, 10.25.23

2. Brief excerpt from unidentified NPR program heard circa 4.11.24

3. Sojourner, God Is Under the Rubble in Gaza By Munther Isaac, 10.30.23 (See below)

4. UN News: Global perspective Human stories, 3.14.24

5. CNN's Radina Gigova in London, 1.7.24

6. Eyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash, The Middle East Crisis Factory: Tyranny, Resilience and Resistance, pgs. 24-25

Addendum

Norman Finkelstein and Chris Hedges discuss Israel, Gaza, and October 7th at Princeton

Professor Finkelstein: I spent the last 15 years chronicling what had been done to the people of Gaza, that they had been locked up in a concentration camp. That's not my opinion; it was the opinion of Giora Eiland who was the head of Israel's national security council and who is a person—Israel is off the spectrum, and he's off the Israeli spectrum now. Mr. Eiland is the one who's credited with probably the most insane remarks pertaining now to the situation in Gaza, and he said, in March 2004, he described Gaza as "a huge concentration camp". And that was before, that was before the blockade had been imposed in its strongest form, which began in January 2006, and then the blockade was then tightened even more in 2007. And I had read a lot, mostly if not entirely U.N. reports, UNCDAD, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and a slew of other international organizations, when they were describing the situation in Gaza over a sustained period of time which was inhuman."

— the Real News Network Podcasts, Princeton University, seen on YouTube.

Munthar Isaac in Sojourners, "God is Under the Rubble in Gaza" 10.30.23.

Editor’s note: This sermon of lament and anger, a cry against the ongoing war on Gaza, was preached in Palestine on Oct. 22 at both Evangelical Lutheran Church of Beit Sahour and the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. The sermon followed the Israel Defense Forces strike on Gaza's oldest active church, the historic St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church. The bombing killed 18 people, injured others, and displaced about 400 civilians who were taking shelter in the church’s complex.