chapter 11 - the unbearable lightness of being

Salaam, y'all. I have created this list due to some concerns that mass emails with everyone's email addresses posted creates some privacy issues. If you wish to unsubscribe, let me know, cuz I haven't quite figured that out yet.

I've been thinking a lot lately about a particular passage in the writings of Rachel Corrie. She talks about how she knew what "the unbearable lightness of being was, before I read the book. The lightness - between life and death, there are no dimensions at all, the difference between Hitler and my mother,the difference between Whitney Houston and a Russian
mother watching her son fall through the sidewalk and boil to
death...it's just a shrug...the difference between ecstasy and misery is just a shrug."

I sit and drink tea with my friends in Palestine, people that have become so close to me, but I feel this gulf between us that will never be bridged. We were born on opposite sides of the coin: the oppressor and the oppressed. And just like it's impossible for the heads and tails of a penny to see each other, to see what the other sees, I feel like it's impossible for me - blessed with freedom, opportunity,
lightheartedness, security - to see the world from the eyes of someone whom the world decided didn't deserved those things, too. I try; I try very hard to understand, but when you try to fit this suffering and this horrible mess into the parameters of your American-born brain, it can't deal with it, it has no way to make sense of it, and everything becomes surreal and like a dream.

And that is when the lightness of life is unbearable: there is no rhyme or reason why I am not Palestinian, why I was born into the 20% of people who have food and shelter every day. I think all the time what my life would've been like if I wasn't lucky enough to be born into that 20%.

The only way to truly face the reality of it - the only way to see the other side of the coin - is to willfully destroy your previous reality. You must die a little death, and let go of everything you've been told since you were small: how America believes in Justice for all, how we are a haven for the poor and tired, how anyone who is an enemy of the United
States is an enemy of Freedom, how our country was founded with the belief that All Humans Have the Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. It's a lie. It's a big fat lie, and everyone knows it, and it hurts real bad to own up to it, it hurts to realize that this freedom we have, our collective American dream of anyone being able to come up out
of the gutter and become a millionare, what we're all busting our asses to achieve, is an illusion. Cuz everyone can't have it, and people are suffering all over the world so we can have it.

I'm seeing it with my own eyes, and my heart hurts, but seeing it with my own eyes is helping me to wake up from the dream I've been walking around in for 24 years. I know I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist ("everything's a lie!!"), but I don't care. Come to Palestine and see what's being done in your name. Go to Iraq and see what they're doing with your money. Go to Nike sweatshops in South America and see what your shoes truly cost.

Last night the Israelis dropped from airplanes a delightful treat for the children of Balata Camp: chemical bombs disguised as brightly wrapped candies. 2 boys are very badly burned. Bet yer not gonna hear that on the news, so I thought I'd let you know. I bet $20 the planes they dropped 'em from are made in the good ole' USA.

peace in the middle east,
magan