Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
US airman Aaron Bushnell said the words “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal” before self-immolating in protest of the genocide in Gaza. That simple line has been reverberating throughout our collective consciousness ever since.
It seems like every day now we’re learning some horrible new fact about the US-centralized power alliance and the empire managers who carry out its malignant will for our world, because that’s just what our rulers have decided will be the norm for our species going forward.
Reports that Israel tortured UN workers to extract false testimony against Gaza’s primary humanitarian aid agency.
Images surfacing of airstrikes on Gaza occurring at the same time and location as airdrops of aid.
Gazan children beginning to drop dead from hunger in a deliberately-engineered famine that is causing sweeping starvation at breakneck speed.
The IDF kettling the population of Gaza further and further south with a horrifically destructive onslaught and then setting up an attack on the enclave’s densely-packed southernmost point.
Israeli “demonstrators” bringing cotton candy machines and bouncy castles to create a fun, family-friendly atmosphere for their blockades to stop aid trucks from getting into Gaza.
The US president waxing poetically about how “heartbreaking” all the death and destruction in Gaza is when he himself is directly responsible for that death and destruction.
People in the world’s most powerful nation being told they have to choose between two candidates who both support this genocide.
A journalist locked away in a maximum-security prison for factual reporting on the same empire which claims to support free speech and a free press.
The biosphere we depend on for survival being fed into a soulless profit-generating death machine because everything on our planet has been turned into a commodity.
The leaders of nuclear-armed states brandishing armageddon weapons at each other because a few manipulators in Washington DC and Virginia have decided that the US must maintain global hegemony at all cost.
A mind-controlled dystopia in which ordinary people are propagandized into accepting all this as perfectly fine.
This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
This madness will continue until we come together and resolutely decide the opposite.
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Today, one image said all your words to me, like one crossbow arrow fired deep into my brain. It was of a 10-year-old Gazan boy almost dead of malnutrition, his face a mask of death, there being barely any fat or muscle left under the skin to disguise that it was reduced to a skull seeking eternity. It was horrific, and it made me want to spit in the ugly faces of Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen, and all the other effing sociopath money-shakers who inject these fake politician assholes with the funding that serves as their puppet strings and turns the sick imperialist engines of corporate crony Capitalism into pauperizing and murdering everything, everywhere. Omicidio di tutto, dappertutto.
Caitlin,
You have an uncanny ability to maintain a focus on the most important things, those that really matter.