Tag: politics

by jad

Trip Like I Do—Silica Road, June 28

Somewhere along #SilicaRoad, June 28—We caught a glimpse of this bus on our way to #Sunland and I just had to stop on our drive back. There were several NO TRESPASSING signs around it, but no physical barriers to stop me. On one corner, there was a tiny cardboard sign stuck to it that said RADIOACTIVE in a much-too-casual scrawl. We were actually on our way to the general vicinity of a former nuclear reactor, so I thought about that word for two seconds before promptly ignoring it. We laughed the whole thing off as we drove away; and yet, … Continue reading “Trip Like I Do—Silica Road, June 28” →

by jad

Trip Like I Do—Seattle, July 4

“Processing” takes a much more visceral meaning when you’re literally waiting for a roll of film to develop. I’ve never really known a time when photography wasn’t instantaneous; I mean, I do remember those days, but they didn’t effect me personally. The gap between holiday and photo album was like the cash my father drove to retrieve from a robot in the wall—someone else’s magic trick. We’ve all been processing something very heavy and very large in the past few months. It rolled in like a summer storm and it just sat there, covering everything with the acid rain of … Continue reading “Trip Like I Do—Seattle, July 4” →

by jad

Consolations

A Pentecost sermon is many things, but you don’t often expect to hear about the fear of heights, let alone the kind of morbid ideation that sometimes accompanies that phobic vertigo: “what if I just flung myself over the edge,” the preacher intimated, illustrating his larger point about the fragility of trust in the self in contrast with the solidity of trusting in God. I suspect that his moment of vulnerability was encouraged by an editor who left a comment in the margin urging him to “tell us something of what you’re afraid of here.” I wonder if he worried … Continue reading “Consolations” →

by jad

A Facebook Post About Love

In two days, I’ll be taking a bus to Redmond to cast my diasporic vote in the Lebanese elections. I won’t be doing this because I believe that there will be a direct correlation between casting my vote and seeing any change in my lifetime; I’ll be taking that bus to cast that vote because I love my friends and family and when you love, you do things like that. You show up, you participate, you chip in. I’m grateful to be able to ride that bus to Redmond; I’m grateful that I can ride a bus to pretty much … Continue reading “A Facebook Post About Love” →

by jad

Saret Pizza

Lebanese people of a certain age can often be found expressing their frustration at the sheer audacity of the accumulation of circumstance with two half-moon gestures encircling an invisible drain, indicating the metaphorical girth of just how badly or how far the matter’s gone. “Tekhnet.” It has become quite thick. Lebanese people of a slightly younger age will widen the gyre, indicating that matters are so out of hand that the axes have collapsed and the pipe has transmorphed into “pizza.” Two fingers on two hands in the shape of an L around a very large O, wlo, “saret pizza.” … Continue reading “Saret Pizza” →

by jad

So That Nothing May Be Lost

There’s something that happens whenever I read scripture; I find myself looking for God in the gaps—not “the God of the Gaps,” that theological sleight of hand that calls “God” any explanatory rabbit pulled out of every mysterious hat, but rather, the spirit of God’s lessons for us, today, at the margins, in the silences, on the thresholds—in any place we overlook. That these gaps exist is undeniable; so what, if anything, is the Spirit saying to God’s people there? We can ask this question in different ways when reading this Sunday’s gospel text. This event—often called the Feeding of … Continue reading “So That Nothing May Be Lost” →

by jad

A Different Song

This is the preamble to the introductory remarks before the end of hesitation. This is where the ground from which to begin is mapped. Here is where the “I” is marked from the “Not-I,” where references are made to permit the “I” to speak. This is where I tell you that I have been reading about C. G. Jung without telling you that I have been reading about C. G. Jung. Here is where that vernacular and these references allow me to keep speaking. This sentence is where I anchor the text in my personal experience. That is how I … Continue reading “A Different Song” →

by jad

A Note on Climate

It’s been three birthdays since my last in Beirut. I’ve been away before—to and fro, on and off—but never for this long of a stretch. This dislocation was heightened this week as rising heat mimicked foreign climates and a dearth of AC units recalled a life of daily power cuts back home. What’s new over there, since I left, is the bottom seemingly falling out from under our national resilience, with crisis after crisis accumulating on the backs of my friends and family. The latest indignity is the now regular scene of lines of cars waiting to fill up on … Continue reading “A Note on Climate” →

by jad

Keffiyeh Day, 2021

“To insist on the universal dimension of a Palestinian grammar of suffering is to resist the containment of the Palestinian question to a regional dispute…” (Zahi Zalloua) Today is #KeffiyehDay, and I’ve been thinking about that quote since I saw it on Twitter last week: “The Palestinian question touches all of us…to the extent that we are all compelled to imagine & invent the conditions for justice and equality in our contemporary global world.” Matt Flisfeder, who shared the quote, closed out his thread with this: “And, I would add that it is the same for the persistence of antisemitism and … Continue reading “Keffiyeh Day, 2021” →

by jad

May Day, 2021

It’s fascinating how the Gates Foundation has positioned itself at the intersection of very different vectors of rage over the years—anti-maskers today, copy-leftists last night, anti-vaxxers at one point, counter-Modiites before that. Though not all protests are created equal, this breadth of contention does share one feature: unmasking the feudalistic trials of strength that the neoliberal fairytale tells us it keeps at bay, just outside the city limits. This is what the gatekeepers were supposed to protect us from, but, alas, more of us are beginning to recognize that their rule of experts was founded on myth—this rule is not … Continue reading “May Day, 2021” →