To Speak is to Live

I stopped eating animal products when I was seventeen, and no other decision in my life has felt more sound or unimpeachable. I’m so grateful I didn’t stop; I’m so grateful to everyone who was derisive and scornful in the early days, because they made it easy to keep going. Veganism is an anchor and orientation, integral to who I understand myself to be and how I think about the world.

Yet in the many years since I changed my diet, I’ve not tried to convert another individual. I knew then and know now that most people refuse to see nonhuman animals as worthy of moral consideration, especially when it’s inconvenient, no matter how much they love their dog or cat. I knew my passion and speech would not move them, nor my quiet example. Because the secret is out, it’s been out: factory farming is an unmitigated nightmare, a supercharged hell of manufactured suffering, sadism, degradation, violation, and environmental decimation. Whatever bad things you think you know about the system, it’s worse. (I regularly learn new terrible facts and wish I hadn’t.) It’s a practice so horrific that it sounds fake, like a ham-handed dystopian detail designed to exceed the limits of the tolerable.

But it’s real and it does not induce change. Almost no one is vegetarian, let alone vegan, so how could I only form relationships with those who are? I’ve been antagonistic or confrontational about causes that meant less to me. But I decided not to go through life seeing everyone around me as first and foremost a blithe or eager participant in brutal, unnecessary evil. I had to stamp out any hope or expectation that those close to me would think and feel as I did when it came to this issue. I made peace with that, though admitting that I did (and still do) makes me despise myself a little. The fact remains: I don’t know how to make the truth enough. Why is the truth alone not enough?

Such abdication of judgement is not available for me when it comes to the genocide in Gaza. I see and hear others say the same, in anguish and hopelessness and rage: I will never forget those who’ve stayed silent, I will never forgive. The sentiment is not effortful, it is automatic. The work comes when trying to turn it off, which I’ve not been able to do.

What changed, that I find myself incapable of excusing the sort of political and social noninvolvement I used to overlook?¹ Partially it is the nakedness; the meticulous documentation; the repetition of such distinct, unequivocal sins; the glaring parallels between this and holocausts of the past. If this is not the tipping point for action, if tens of thousands of dead civilians, burned babies, sniper-shot children, mutilated women, dismembered men, bombed hospitals, and mortared homes, carried out with American-made weapons, paid for with our taxes, while our rulers insist these obscenities are just, moral, and negligible, and violently repress anyone objecting—if this doesn’t move you, nothing will. The harm could intensify, but there will be no new element. This is all of it, every flavor of hell, right here, right now.

The politicians who keep funding this, flouting the will of the people; the warmongers; lifelong Islamophobes; bloodthirsty Zionists; university presidents—I don’t really see them as human anyway. I only expect the worst. But people I’ve hugged, people I’ve worked with or laughed with who have refused to acknowledge what’s happening—I saw them as human. I see them that way still, and I am haunted by their behavior. How do they live with themselves, I wonder. What matters to them beyond their own momentary pleasure? I suppose I should ask, but I’m afraid of their answers. Their silence is a field of razor wire and I can’t extricate myself once I enter it, I can only flail and be harmed. Yet I can’t stay away, I can’t let it go. We share the world with these people, the people who gleefully inflict genocide, and the people who watch with their mouths closed.² They have, wittingly or otherwise, forfeited an essential part of themselves. Those who turn from the dying live as if they themselves are dead.

The people who are silent don’t like to hear this, of course. But if you don’t want other people to think of you as immoral, you need to show them what your morals are. And we needn’t be obtuse under the guise of being reasonable or polite. One cannot fail to talk about what consumes them, and people who care about this genocide talk about it because they’re thinking about it, always. Because it makes their souls cry out. Because being silent is an impossibility. To be silent is to be dead.

I’m sick of feeling drained by the people who are silent, sick of hoping, like a fool, that they’ll speak. I’d prefer to never think of them again, but their silence is part of what consumes me. They are one facet of this kaleidoscopic atrocity, and the patterns of horror hypnotize me, they make me dizzy. Forget being merely moved, how is anyone unchanged by this spectacle? It is a catastrophe so depraved, grotesque, and protracted that it has torn a hole in existence itself. And through that hole, I think, is God. That’s also why this feels different to me, because I am thinking this way for the first time.

From the start of this second nakba, the only language that seemed appropriate, to me, came from ancient and sacred texts. I see others reach for the same terms of extremity (demonic, sin, evil, damnation, hell) usually while they disavow their attachment to any religion or theism. Because an eradication this intentional and malevolent and thorough blows out the scope of daily life into the realm of the existential, the spiritual. I think this is what invocations of history try to get at: the perspective of eternal truth, ultimate truth, which is not bound by the material and temporal. Those who deny the value of other living beings deny truth, deny God; they deny meaning. It is the most corrupt, nihilistic position one can take and the irony of assuming it selfishly—through cowardice, selfishness, greed, or apathy—is that it annihilates the self that assumes it.

It seems to me that the bottomlessness of the evil being done in Gaza suggests a goodness and love and mercy that is equally relentless, unquenchable, and transcendent—more so, because the energy it takes to destroy is much poorer than the energy required to nurture and create. I’m not capable of conceiving, in the physical realm, a radiant force that would match the interminable loss and destruction. So what does that leave? That leaves God. To see the antithesis of God is to see proof of God.

Is this logical? Not at all, and yet completely. It is a supposition based on the way highs tend to match lows; the inevitability of balance and correction, reaction and response; karma; the web upon which not even the thinnest strand can be tugged without consequence. I want to explain myself more, if I can, though words can’t truly get at this, they are like pebbles thrown at the moon. And I will try again. But I wanted to send this much for now because articulation sometimes is a source of relief. I write with the hope of reaching those who feel similarly, so that realization of this unity might make us less lonely, and keep us loud. If God is real, God is with us when we speak, and while we speak we are alive.

1  While animal rights is one example, there are many others: the BLM movement, abortion access, Trump’s Muslim ban. I was galvanized but some of my friends, I reasoned, are just not “political” — they can talk the right talk, they are not apparent bigots, but they don’t protest, don’t organize, probably don’t donate. They just don’t think that way; liberation and justice are passing thoughts, not central concerns. Their social media is reserved for pictures of trips and clothes and food. I don’t recall dwelling on their choices in the past the way I do now.

2  None of us know the whole of another person’s heart, or what anyone else does in a day. I do think there’s danger in “policing” someone’s presence online. Theoretically, there could be people who say nothing publicly in any capacity, nor share how they feel with likeminded friends, but who donated to the gofundme campaigns or sent eSims, or I don’t know…wrote “uncommitted” on their primary ballot or gave to protestor bail funds and legal defense. But since early October, being vocal has been both the bare minimum and the most urgent, consistent ask that I’ve seen from Palestinians. Share what mainstream media won’t. Make your outrage and revulsion known. Agitate. Escalate. Boycott. Shut it down. You don’t have to get arrested or sleep in a tent or light yourself on fire. But you can’t do nothing and pretend you’re doing something.