We are so fucking awful

In the past day or so, a Jewish man in Miami saw two Palestinians on the street and opened fire. Seventeen shots. No words exchanged. No threat. Just stops his truck in the middle of the road, gets out, and starts shooting. In fucking Miami.

At the police station, he calmly and proudly admits to seeing two Palestinians on the street and murdering them.

It gets better. Or maybe it gets worse. I don’t even know any more.

Because the victims (who thankfully weren’t killed) were not actually Palestinian. They were, in fact, (because the universe has a wickedly sharp and ironic sense of humor) Israeli tourists. 

But the universe’s black comedy isn’t quite over yet. There’s a zinger yet to come.

Lying in a hospital bed, bleeding from his gunshot wound, one of the Israeli victims posts online that a Palestinian shot him and his father, labels it an antisemitic attack, and ends his post with that most humane and unracist of sentiments, “Death to Arabs.”

This is what hatred does. 

This is how it rots humans from the inside out.

It makes us stupid. 

It makes us cruel. 

It turns victims into the very thing they claim to hate. 

A Jewish man tried to murder two strangers because he thought they were Arab. 

And, one of the Israeli victims of this hate crime responds by calling for the deaths of Arabs (who, not immaterially, had nothing to do with him being shot.)

All of which makes me ask, what the actual fuck is happening?

Because it’s not just this one incident. 

It’s not just Jews. 

It’s not just Arabs. 

It’s everyone.

A Jewish man in Miami shoots at people because he thinks they’re Palestinian. 

A Jewish man in Australia is stabbed in the street while his attacker screams “Allahu Akbar.” 

A couple of Palestinian kids in Vermont are shot for speaking Arabic. 

A Jewish man in France is beaten nearly to death by a group of attackers shouting antisemitic slurs. 

A Palestinian family in Texas is executed in their home. 

A Palestinian boy in the West Bank is shot dead by Israeli settlers while picking olives with his family.

It never ends. 

Every attack fuels the next one. Every bullet, every stabbing, every beating is someone else’s excuse to keep this shit going. Look what they did to us. Look what they did to me.

But at some point, I have to ask: Who the fuck is ‘they’?

Because ‘they’ isn’t Jews.

‘They’ isn’t Arabs.

‘They’ isn’t Muslims or Christians or Jews or Israelis or Palestinians. 

‘They’ is Us.

'They' is everyone trapped in this sick cycle of hatred, paranoia, and revenge.

The lines may blur. The faces may change. The weapons may be different, but the story is painfully, awfully, predictably always the fucking same.

Fear breeds violence. Violence breeds vengeance. Vengeance breeds more violence. 

And in the end, all that’s left is ruin.

It’s not that we’ve been here before. 

It’s that it feels like we have been here forever. Not just Arabs and Jews... all of us. Every continent has its own version of this misery. 

Every part of our planet has its own share of this endless tribalism, this war with the other, this hatred on blood-soaked fields, it’s all existed longer than the flags we fight for, longer than the names we kill in. It will exist long after we are gone. We have buried generations in this dirt, and still, we stand over their graves and sharpen our knives.

We cry for our dead and plot the deaths of others in the same breath. 

We carry the weight of massacres and still find room in our hands for the next stone, the next match, the next bullet. 

We justify the slaughter of children because our children were slaughtered first. 

We scream for justice and bathe in revenge. 

And while we keen like Harpies for the other to stop, we ourselves refuse to stop.

Every time someone picks up a gun or a knife or a rock and tells themselves this one is justified, the world gets dumber, crueler, and less human. 

And that’s what makes me so fucking angry. Every attack like this proves that we are failing. That we are letting hatred win. That people would rather die fighting ghosts than live trying to fix these messes.

This isn’t about sides. 

There are no sides when everyone is bleeding.

But, ah... fuck it.

Let’s keep going. 

Let’s keep pulling the trigger. 

Let’s keep sharpening the knives. 

Let’s keep convincing ourselves that this attack is different, that this revenge is righteous, that this time, the hate is justified. 

Let’s keep feeding the fire. 

Let’s keep watching the bodies pile up. 

Let’s keep believing, against all evidence, that if we just kill one more of ‘them’, it will all finally make sense.

Maybe, if we’re really committed—if we really keep at it—we’ll manage to hate ourselves into extinction. 

Maybe one day, there won’t be anyone left to fight over the many lands between all the rivers and all the seas. 

No flags, no walls, no martyrs, no graves—just silence. 

Just the wind through the olive trees, their roots deep in soil finally free of blood. 

Just the deserts and the jungles and the forest creeping forward, patient and indifferent, swallowing up the ruins we left behind.

And when the last echoes of war fade, when the last names are forgotten, when there is nothing left of us but dust and shattered stone, that land will still be here. 

It will always be here. 

It does not need us. 

It never did. 

It never cared who was right, who was wrong, who claimed it, who bled for it, who burned for it, who wept for it. 

It will endure long after we are gone.

And if, in some distant future, when the sand has buried our monuments and the wind has erased our borders, some being with consciousness stumbles upon the ruins of what we built and then destroyed.

Maybe they will stop. 

And maybe they will wonder who we were. 

And maybe they will see the remnants of our rage, our endless war, our wasted lives, and shake their head at the absurdity of the hairless apes who had it all and destroyed it as the lone sands stretch away.

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

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