“Decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen kind of feeling…”
Completely.
In a handful of words, a friend in Seattle sums up the whirlwind I’ve been caught in since Saturday, when I woke up to messages from a friend in Damascus asking me if I’m seeing the news.
“Tonight’s the night ya Jad.”
I took the first photo just after a gathering with a motley crew of democratic socialists where we argued about Syria among other things, and by the time I took the third photo sometime later, Damascus was surrounded.
Once again, my friend and comrade in Damascus let me know. “Are you seeing this,” she asked, as I stood in the snack aisle in Safeway not seeing a damn thing, before narrating the fall of the Ba’ath regime to me in real time.
It was exhilarating, worrying, and so very surreal to put my phone to my ear to hear the clips of gun fire over there while standing looking dumb and useless over here.
But getting the chance to bear witness and in my small way help process every emotion that decades of fear and disappointment kept bottled up at that precipice of uncertainty and change is something I’ll never forget.
“I think I just simply don’t believe anything is impossible anymore
I know the act of toppling no matter how hard is easier than building and negotiating
I still have low expectations for the state to come
But
There’s this feeling that nothing can be worse than what we already went through.”
(Saturday, December 8, 8:40 pm Pacific Time)
I have other friends processing other feelings now as well. This is nothing new. Syria has divided every movement I’ve ever been involved in; but more than this, Syria has broken my friendships again and again for two decades. I’m not letting that happen anymore.
There is enough love in my heart to care for more than one cause and absorb more than one fear and take more than one stand at the same time. I am not a military commander who has to make forced choices; I’m a human being who processes the world as it is, not as it must become when flattened into a theatre of operations.
My world is an open field, not a battlespace, and if you’re reading this, I will bet that so is yours, despite what your precepts and professionalization have told you.
My values are ethical, not logistical; my analysis is relational, not instrumental. The world will tempt me to cosplay as what I’m not — a pundit, a planner, a president-elect; my only task is to remember and return to the actual person I am.