The main point I want to make today is that everyone’s liberation is bound up with the liberation of Palestine; not only Palestinians, not only Israelis, but all of us who live in and with the ongoing and genocidal illness of White Supremacy & Settler Colonialism. An illness that has ravaged much of the world and from which we must heal if we have any chance of surviving as a species because this liberation is inextricably linked to Climate change as well.

We need to grow our muscles and capacity for love. Love, as hooks stresses, is not simply a feeling. It is a practice, a verb. It must be put into action concretely and locally, and then it can change the whole world. Love’s power is that it is both universal and specific. One cannot love abstractly, but through specific experiences of love—perhaps especially “down there in the thick of things” among those things we would rather reject— one can grow one’s capacity for loving it all.

If we can cultivate our capacity to be in the dark and formless for a while, if we can remember the importance of the beginner’s mind, we might be able to start to build the world we truly want rather than settling for trying to salvage and plug up holes on this completely dysfunctional and leaky boat we are currently sinking in.

In the process of healing trauma, one of the most important things to do is to build on our neuroplasticity. Even though trauma freezes us in a painful past, we have the power to create new neural-pathways —which essentially means we can create new stories, new options, new possibilities.

Abolition asks us to create a world in which we don’t need prisons. This is not naïve it means that abolitionists recognize that EVERYTHING has to change:  

White supremacy is a phenomenon that we cannot simply attribute to ignorance, bigotry and evil. All of these might be involved. But it goes much deeper, and yet that depth is also its ubiquity, the water we swim in, the air we breathe.

The reality of the matter is that we are at a true crossroads, and while this is an opportunity for a better world, a more humane economy in which we recognize our interdependence with the earth and so many people’s love and labor, there is also a real possibility that this is the beginning (or really the continuation) of a dystopic future that so many films and books have been written about.

Part of the opportunity and power of this moment, the initiation that we are being asked to go through, involves learning how to NOT do—at least not in the same ways we have for so long. Not doing is not simply passive, it is not a nihilistic throwing up of our hands in despair or cynicism.

For me, just as scary as the things mentioned above, is the notion that we have so internalized and naturalized a dog-eats-dog system that we don’t have the faith or imagination to consider that on the other side of this crisis (hopefully one in which we act sooner to lessen the overwhelm on our quite pathetically prepared health system due to decades of privatization, and deregulation), there might not be something different, even better.

As so many studies have shown us, and as the Chinese character for crisis even translates, crises are not necessarily scary and bad, they are also opportunities. Opportunity to do things differently, to choose a different course. They have the potential remind us of who and what we truly are: kind, loving, social, generous, care-taking, responsible creatures (not the greedy, selfish, violent, hoarding visions of ourselves we have been told we are by media, politics, and even some social sciences!)