The Free Art Campaign

I don’t know how to tell you that you should care about this.

Empathy, sympathy, any kind of -pathy but apathy, please!

How can we all bear witness to the most well-documented, recorded and publicized genocide in the history of the world and just say, “That’s not my problem.”

Have we not seen enough?

Have you not? Go to @motaz.azaiza ‘s page. Or @wizardbisan or @byplestia or @eye.on.palestine. It’s all on Instagram and Tiktok and X. Take a look for yourself at the firsthand eye witness testimonies from the people on the ground.

I have seen so many — too many — children being pulled from the rubble. Pieces of children being carried in grocery bags by their father, wailing as he brings them to the makeshift morgue. Babies drawn from their mother’s dead bodies. A man carrying the head, neck, and shoulders of a dust-covered little boy before the cameras, because that’s all he can do. Share with the world his most horrific moments and beg them to make change.

I have witnessed so many people missing limbs and eyes and receiving medical care on the dirty, bloody floor of the only hospital left in the region. With no anesthetics. No electricity. Right before the only democracy in the middle east storms and destroys that hospital, too. Tying up the doctors and nurses and staff and executing them before burying them in a mass grave and moving on to the next. Leaving the incubated babies to rot.

The people of Gaza are starving, dehydrated, and alone. Begging for help. For anyone to hear them. “Where are the Arabs?” one boy cried in a video, tears streaming down his face after his home was bombed behind him. A better question: Where is the world?

Oh, it’s made me sick. And I am changed.

I knew it was bad out there, but I didn’t realize how directly we were involved. Even as the average citizen: our hands are bloody from every ancestor that came before us.

I see people recording on the ground, showing bodies beneath the rubble and begging for money to evacuate, because they have to pay to cross the border. From the safe zone they were told to evacuate to! The place they were told would not be attacked, just go there and you’ll be safe. This tiny strip of land, now being bombed. And nobody can leave without thousands of dollars.

How can it have come to this?

I have a hard time looking at the world right now and not feeling rage. Feeling powerless against what those who came before me built. What they continue to stand on proudly. Destruction for the “greater good,” pretending that’s what their God demands. Or the economy needs. Or they say that’s just the way it is and turn a blind eye.

I can’t get behind that. How could we, human beings with all the creative power of the universe at our fingertips, decide to make things like war? Like pollution and credit scores? Bombs and colonization and cruelty?

When will the Baby Boomers wake up already? Gen X?

Do I need to talk about money? Will that bring them into the conversation before empathy?

Okay, let’s try money.

The tax dollars you earned and gave to the government are being used to fund a foreign country. Billions of dollars going to an independent nation every year since long before I was born. Not an American colony, no. They don’t have to listen to us. They don’t have to do anything we want them to as a condition for that money, they just… get to have it. And on our dime, they have what all of us have been screaming for, like universal healthcare and cheap or free education. They can have culture and joy and sure, maybe they have to push out the indigenous people for it, to literally, forcibly empty the houses their ancestors built and claim it as their own, but isn’t that how America was built anyway? How most of the “free” world was built?

It’s just the way it is, right? Don’t even get me started on Congo. Sudan. And all the American colonies we have today, like Hawaii and Puerto Rico and Guam.

I thought we said never again.

Even if it wasn’t just morally appalling, American money is leaving these shores that could go toward bettering something in America, like education. For transportation and infrastructure. For the National Endowment for the Arts! For libraries. Anything, anything, anything but the good most of us want and need in the world. We could reduce college education. We could reduce prisons! We could funnel this money into our communities as a safety net for people who need it.

Child care over bombing children. Love over all.

You maybe wondering, “What am I supposed to do about this?”

And the answer is simple, for now. First, bear witness, and continue to do so. It is so easy to be traumatized by this, and I understand it wholly. If you freeze up, get that energy out of you by MAKING ART ABOUT IT. Then, allow that creative passion to fuel your next actionable steps: Calling your representatives, going to protests, donating to those in need, and the biggest power play of all, voting with your dollar.

You are not separate from this, as much as you want to be. Your comfort is built on the backs of the dollar-standard currency as much as any other American. And it’s time to see the horrors that go along with it… and change.

That’s all I have to say about that.