I have not been able to muster up the necessary energy, inspiration or even concentration over the last couple of months to work on this blog. And although I have continued to keep up with the horrific news of Gaza, the world’s complicity and indifference have been soul -wrenching. The trite banality of doubling down on ideology and militarism as the corporate and mainstream media has done, has left me aghast.

And the personal limitations of mobility and fatigue that prevent me from peacefully protesting with countless others — protesting FOR humanism and diplomacy— rather than for killing and torturing with impunity, have also impacted my creativity, making everyday life a daily encounter with chronic illness/es.

But it’s an important time to acknowledge that Eartotheground started five years ago, in a pre-COVID 19 world in which multiple struggles for justice were taking place in numerous countries.

The aftermath of the pandemic’s active management has been an impoverishment of not only people’s actual lives, but also our parameters of hope; as the manipulation of the internet and the fantastic use of social media is one of the most ingenious strategies for a Gramscian generation of “consensus”, artificially produced in the ethos of coercion.

All the armaments and murders on this planet cannot grow the economy and feed the world . All this wounded and poisoned earth will not be able to sustain the life that is needed for human survival. Floods, heatwaves, and damaging winds and fires have become a bitter new reality of climate change in our daily lives.

More and more of the world’s population are considered collateral damage to feeding the military-IT/industrial complex. And the less the poor are able to consume, the less need the elites have for them. So the loss of poor lives in refugee camps in Gaza, Sudan, DRC, Haiti are the costs of business as usual by any means necessary— collateral damage for profit. The costs of climate change disproportionately impacting populations and countries of the global South also elicit zero compassion.

And an information/surveillance gathering organization like the UN which rushes to protect imperialist and colonial interests and narratives is exposed for the pork-bellying scam that it is. Just like the academic networks that hire a few DIE types while actually materially collaborating with various elite and corporate interests and genocides, as the student encampments have so bravely exposed.

And so we are left with more war-mongering and the threat of nuclear annihilation which has not been experienced since the Bay of Pigs incident in Cuba 1961 and during the Reagan years of the early 1980s. Today, the facade of the European enlightenment and it’s descendant, bourgeois liberalism— is blood-stained and cracked, littered with the limbs and bodies of not only Palestinians, but indeed the war-bruised and torn bodies of Koreans, Vietnamese, Chileans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Argentinians, Algerians, Belgian Congo, Haitians and Native Americans from the South to North America. To name only a few.

Through Eartotheground I have tried to bring the voices of those directly affected by injustice and exclusion to inhabit a tiny speck of cyberspace. I hope to celebrate joys and victories of the marginalized as they occur, but sadly, they barely take place. Though the victory of Claudia Sheinbaum/MORENA in Mexico and decrease in Hindu nationalist majority in BJP India may provide little sparks of hope. And of course, the compassion of the world’s people as they have taken to the streets and universities across the globe is something we have to try to believe in. As the Palestinian poet, Marwan Makhoul says,

In order for me to write poetry

that isn’t political


I must listen to the birds 
and in order to hear the birds


the warplanes must be silent.

Living with genocide as a visible, audible, tactical presence, has impacted my thinking, my body, and my creative practice. It is impossible to not feel the helplessness of so many peoples, condemned to a violence without mercy. Or react to the criminalization of critiques of zionism and settler and extractive colonialisms.

So it is in the spirit of gratitude, that I thank those of you who have your “ear to the ground” with me. I hope to continue to share the voices of those suffering real-time erasure as well as those around the world whose resilience and victory in the every day gives us so much creativity, wonder, and understanding. May we be able to hear and sing new songs of future hope and continued solidarity !