I stand by my grandma’s bed, stroking her arm as she passes in and out of awareness of our presence together, the heart monitor beeps on. It’s Christmas Day. I watch Toy Story 4 on the hospital room tv from the corner of my eye to find a distraction. I know that people in the birthplace of the messiah, in Palestine, are being killed indiscriminately, they will not celebrate this year.
I know that we don’t believe in that messiah, and that we are just puppeting the tradition of believers for the sake of what free gatherings and festivities are permitted in the UK under capitalism. It’s perverse.
She’s dying still, as I write this. My grandmother. That scares me.
That day I heard about other things, from my Great Uncle who told me, as we talked after seeing her, that he thinks the world will end in our lifetimes. If not his, at around 70, definitely mine.
Later my mum tells me something, after she explained to people who can take information face on, in the other room, the process of withdrawing care from my grandma’s body that will take place. She says, hugging me, with a knowing laugh of an almost indescribable emotion “if i ever get like that, shoot me.”
I nod and laugh and say “me too.”
My great-uncle, after participating in racist conversation with my grandad, and telling me the racist conspiracy theories he’s heard from the Daily Mail, tells me of his deep pain for the people in Gaza right now. His surprise that there are Christians there. That it’s war crimes all the way down. My grandad, who had once tried to join the IOF in the 60s, from the Jewish side of my family, agrees.
My great uncle reads the Daily Mail, watches Al Jazeera, speaks Russian, hates Thatcher.
My grandfather once told me that he thought Hell was here, that life was Hell, in a literal sense. Metaphysically. I was a kid at the time.
I generally stay quiet. My family might seem overdramatic, theatrical, but I don’t think they are. I think this is how most people are.
I don’t think many people are equipped to compartmentalise the violence we experience daily, in so many ways, in a pragmatic, rationalist, sensible fashion. I think that, being as we are, exposed generally to streams of information and enclosures of our ideas and items, we generally rely on submitting to the idea that death and dehumanisation is only logical.
In the rationale of the killers who use this reliance, it’s logical to kill a person. It’s normal to kill a person in this situation because you have decided that this person is not a person. They are, ideologically, already dead. Already without humanity, they are corpse by necessity.
I am in the process of accepting the death of my grandmother. But the humanity there, and our connection, is something that lives in superposition, able to be conjured in my flesh. We live together, and part of me, my presence dies in her.
How dare they do that, enact this state of multiple dying, of ultimate grief, to so many, with such brutal violence? How dare they? How dare our world be set up to destroy with such disgusting lack of care for the bonds between us? How incredibly ugly, how pathetic.
The imperialist, racially driven murder of millions of human beings in the course of Colonial Nation Building and Capitalism, in the USA, in Occupied Palestine, in the Nazi regime, in the European regime across Africa, Asia, Australasia, South, Central and North America, via the so called “First World”… it’s the most heinous crime ever committed against the very idea of what being a person is.
It is total degradation, it is impossible to accept and remain the same, and yet it continues.
It’s what we’re left with. The money that goes to create these conditions robs life from all the oppressed. We are joint. My grandmother’s life as a poor person, having worked, wages underpaid as a woman, for the NHS all her life, is inextricably tied to the fact that the healthcare she has been giving, and receiving, is healthcare that has been deliberately underfunded, by a government selling weaponry to cause the mass slaughter of civilians. A decisive neglect to act in favour of life.
This has been intensely visible this past 4 years, during the ongoing global viral pandemic, creating hundreds of thousands of instances of massively avoidable death. Hundreds of thousands of lives made nil by intent to retain violent systems.
On a broader scale, the foundation of the UK currently is funded through the money of empire, the existence of our economy, our trade routes, our food, all things we have is linked into our violence. Me and my grandmother’s connection through our life together these 27 years has been one lived in the unprotective arms of a historically genocidally motivated state. Our life is death. All of us live on the carcasses of the people murdered to found our institutions. The DNA of hers, that exists in me, is that of life inside an oppressor.
To put it another way, there is no separation, all the parts of the machine link into each other, any attempt to divise its true structure is ridiculous. It’s a humunculus of bone and blood.
To put it another way. It’s murder. They choose you to die. The context of it is the framing of the violence. Desperation as motive. The desperate acts of murder of people as a political act. The choice to kill a child on Christmas. The choice to lie to intensify the image of the oppressed people as evil. The way the machine works is this, you put a coin in and it does something, the coin does as much as the machine does, the coin is part of the machine, in fact, it’s the whole thing.
Put a coin in your loved one’s mouth. They can’t reply but they can hear you. This assemblage of blood and guts, it’s listening for your heartbeat. You breathe the same air. Your components communicate. You touch. And in the morning when you hear she is dead, you will hear the cries of a million other people, all feeling that violent wrenching, as their people die too. Sent there by accumulation.
I write this because I do not know how to untangle it all, and that I do know I can’t ever hope to. I write to say that this must be stopped. In my lifetime, in yours. We must stop this. We must.
GlitchOut 