It was hard to leave Palestine.
It was hard to walk away from everything that gripped me there for five weeks.
It is uncomfortable to be able to turn and walk from death and sadness and fear, as if it is not also your own.
"Stay safe", I heard constantly from friends and family. "Come home."
I'm thankful to be loved and blessed by you all. But sometimes these well wishes were an uncomfortable reminder that, in the world we created, someone else's suffering does not have to be my suffering. What they cannot escape I can easily side step.
Even though my tax dollars go to making the bombs, they do not land on my house. Even though my state makes the tear gas, it won't influence my fertility or health.
It is not that my presence did anything to stop or ease the suffering. But it seemed a small justice that I would have to fall asleep each night to the sound of my tax dollars at work; of my inaction in action; of my ignorance burning away in this explosive light of truth.
But now I don't know what to do with this truth.
It was hard to walk away from everything that gripped me there for five weeks.
It is uncomfortable to be able to turn and walk from death and sadness and fear, as if it is not also your own.
"Stay safe", I heard constantly from friends and family. "Come home."
I'm thankful to be loved and blessed by you all. But sometimes these well wishes were an uncomfortable reminder that, in the world we created, someone else's suffering does not have to be my suffering. What they cannot escape I can easily side step.
Even though my tax dollars go to making the bombs, they do not land on my house. Even though my state makes the tear gas, it won't influence my fertility or health.
It is not that my presence did anything to stop or ease the suffering. But it seemed a small justice that I would have to fall asleep each night to the sound of my tax dollars at work; of my inaction in action; of my ignorance burning away in this explosive light of truth.
But now I don't know what to do with this truth.
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