On Gaza And Feelings Of Powerlessness

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

It’s the sense of powerlessness that gets to you. Watching all these people being slaughtered and tormented in Gaza and in Lebanon with the full support of your own government and its allies, but being unable to stop it.

That’s basically been the main message of the 2024 US presidential election with regard to Israel’s US-backed atrocities: “You are powerless to stop this.” Over and over again in various ways Americans are being fed the message that the slaughter is going to continue regardless of who wins, so you may as well give up on saving Gaza and try to look out for your own interests.

That was what Kamala Harris was saying when she told Americans that they need to vote for her, even though she will continue the Gaza genocide, if they want things like affordable groceries and abortion rights. She was saying, “You are powerless. There is nothing you can do to stop this. What are you going to do, vote for Trump? He’ll continue the genocide too. Vote for a third party candidate? They can’t win. We’ve closed off all the options by which you might try to end this. We’ve shut and locked all the doors. There’s no way out. You might as well relax and submit to the inevitable.”

And, in a sense, the empire managers are not wrong when they tell us this. The system is stacked to prevent us from stopping their genocidal rampage in the middle east. You can’t vote your way out of it; they’ve rigged it so all possible results of the election lead to more genocide. You can’t fight a revolution to stop it; westerners are currently too propaganda-addled to rise up in sufficient numbers to join you, and you’d just get killed. You can’t even engage in direct action like blocking the weapons shipments and sabotaging the arms manufacturers unless you’re prepared to do some serious prison time. 

This reality weighs heavily on those who oppose this genocide. I sometimes see activists online snapping and lashing out at people on their side over the fact that they’re not doing more, not putting their bodies and lives on the line, not doing whatever it takes to stop this nightmare. 

Which is an entirely understandable response to the situation we now find ourselves in. We should all be doing everything we can to end this genocide and stop the empire’s bloodbath, and those who are going above and beyond on this front should be commended. 

But I think the real lesson behind this feeling of powerlessness and the message from our rulers that we are powerless to stop them is just that: that we are powerless. Or, more specifically, that we have been made powerless. That our power has been taken from us, and given to people who should not have power.

That’s the message we should be taking from all this: that we are living in a civilization that has been rigged by the powerful, for the benefit of the powerful, to siphon power away from the many to and give it to a few oligarchs and empire managers. 

We have been made powerless. Until we get real about this fact, we won’t be able to address it. As long as we’re still fooling ourselves into thinking there’s a swift and immediately available option for us to end these murderous atrocities, we won’t be able to begin addressing the problem that we live in a highly controlled tyrannical dystopia where the people do not have the kind of power we’re taught we have in school.

Of course we do have power in the most real sense: there are a whole lot more normal people than there are oligarchs and empire managers, and we could easily implement any changes we wanted to if we rose up in sufficient numbers. But we’re not rising up in sufficient numbers because far too many of us have been successfully indoctrinated into believing our genocidal, ecocidal, omnicidal status quo is acceptable, with the help of the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed.

As long as westerners are being successfully psychologically manipulated at mass scale into consenting to the insane behavior of the western empire, we are completely powerless. They may as well have steel chains around each of our necks and mind control chips in each of our brains. There is nothing we can do to stop them from ethnically cleansing Gaza, waging nonstop wars, engaging in increasingly dangerous nuclear brinkmanship, or destroying the biosphere we depend on for survival. 

If we can find some way to shake off the conditioning which manipulates us into thinking revolutionary change is unnecessary, then anything becomes possible. If enough people can awaken to the urgent need for change, collective measures like national strikes and mass-scale civil disobedience could bring the capitalist empire to its knees without firing a shot. We own all the labor and purchasing power upon which the empire is built; that’s why a historically unprecedented amount of propaganda has gone into making sure we never make use of that power.

But nothing like that can happen until we come to terms with the reality that we live in a civilization that is designed to make us powerless. Until then we’re stuck with ridiculous strategies which feed into the illusion that we have the power to do something meaningful within the current system, like “Vote for Kamala and then push her to the left” or “Vote for Trump and hope he does something unpredictable”. 

So lean into the powerlessness of this historical moment. Point it out to people. In as many ways as you can, help show people that their political systems are controlled by the powerful, that their news media are propaganda services of the western empire, and that a better world is possible if we can shake off the chains of imperial narrative control and start forcing the advancement of the interests of ordinary human beings.

You can do this using any means at your disposal. Talking to people. Distributing literature. Making videos. Making TikTok skits. Making tweets. Making art. Making memes. Writing on the wall. Writing blogs. Printing zines. Writing letters to the editor at your local paper. Anything you can do to help get unauthorized ideas into eyes and ears which may not otherwise have encountered them, using your own unique set of skills and personal conditioning.

The more eyes are opened to what’s going on, the more hands we will have working toward the task of waking up the others. This allows for the possibility of nonlinear growth, which means things could move very quickly from looking impossible to looking inevitable.

All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. In helping to spread awareness of the fact that we live in a civilization that is designed to make us powerless, we actually turn that powerlessness into power by waking people up to the reality of what’s happening. The powerlessness-manufacturing capabilities of the empire can in this way be weaponized against the empire to take it down.

And of course, nothing I am describing here does Palestinian and Lebanese people a damn bit of good in the here and now. Today we are powerless to stop what’s happening, and it sucks, and it hurts. 

Rather than letting this destroy us, we can just let those feelings wash over us, and feel them all the way through until they’ve had their say. Feelings are meant to be felt. If you just sit with a feeling and let it rip through you without trying to manage it or reframe it with thought stories, it always subsides after a while. Feelings are not dangerous. Just feel them.

We’re not supposed to feel okay about genocide. The fact that we’re feeling bad about what we are seeing just tells us that we are emotionally healthy people with a healthy sense of empathy, which is what we’re going to need if we are to build a healthy world someday. 

So if you’re feeling powerless, feel the powerlessness. If you’re feeling grief, let the grief carry you away. If you’re feeling rage, let the rage roar through you. Don’t act. Don’t speak. Don’t think. Just feel. Cry. Moan. Scream. If you sit courageously through the energy of an emotion and give it a voice within you, it will move along once its message has been delivered. 

Feel the feelings all the way through, and then get up and get back to work. We’ve got a world to save.

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