Today I’m making food for tomorrow’s family gathering. Cooking for people I cherish is a deep pleasure. I hope love transfers into the dough I knead, the sauces I stir, the spices I grind. Outside the rain is relentless, rain I wish came to us instead as the soft snow we might expect in February. But then, these are not normal times.
I am in a warm house on a quiet day aware of the suffering in Yemen, Syria, Darfur, the Congo, and what clutches me most of late, Gaza. How is it possible the children I adore are safe when children just as beautiful and just as precious are exiled, starved, shot, bombed, buried under rubble? Many survivors are left with the world’s newest horrific acronym WCNSF: wounded child no surviving family. I know a moment’s trauma can take a lifetime to heal. I cannot imagine the relentless ongoing trauma for people in Gaza.
I am fortunate to host family Sundays here. Each week I plan out the day’s breakfast and lunch, making as many dishes as possible in advance so I can play with children and follow conversations on the day itself. This week I’m using beans I canned in September and the remaining potatoes harvested in October. I’m using pear sugar I made last summer and hot sauce I made last fall. I use eggs from our chickens, jam from our elderberries, tomatoes canned from our garden. There’s deep satisfaction in nourishing others with the food we’ve grown. Food, in nearly every spiritual tradition, is sacred and meant to be shared. Yet legacy olive groves are relentlessly bulldozed in Gaza. (Since 1967, more than eight hundred thousand Palestinian olive trees have been illegally uprooted by Israeli authorities and settlers.) Gaza’s orchards, greenhouses, crops, and fishing fleets are intentionally destroyed. And the nourishment lost, too, when libraries, universities, and museums are bombed into dust.
One child suffering is too much. The news that over 12,660 Palestinian children have been killed and more than one million displaced from their homes is impossible to imagine. The suffering too, of the 36 Israeli children killed by Hamas and the child hostages Hamas still imprisons. Each number represents a whole person, as unique and amazing as a child you love, as the child you yourself once were.
This month I’m beginning to pull together the mess from a file marked “taxes.” I work for myself as a writer, book editor, and educator in what’s lightly called the “gig economy’ –a term that encompasses all of us who work without an employer paying our healthcare, social security, or any benefits at all. This means I fully fund my taxes. My taxes pay for the bombs dropping on Gaza. (As of last month a reported 65,000 tons of munitions) My taxes finance weapons used to shoot civilians fleeing an endangered hospital, wandering sheep, ambulance drivers, journalists, fathers seeking safe passage for their families.
Armed conflict and war massively increase profits for a whole slew of companies. In my country, courts have ruled that money is free speech and that corporations deserve some of the same rights as people.
My country has repeatedly been the lone vote against a ceasefire in this ongoing colonizer vs colonized struggle — a struggle that resounds down through the centuries into today as if we must replay our ancestors’ traumas until we finally wake up to our oneness on this beautiful endangered planet.
Not one of my sputtering letters to legislators, no vigil I’ve attended, no boycott I follow or money I donate makes a molecule’s worth of difference for the people who are right now being bombed in the places where they were told to seek refuge.
Tomorrow my children and their children will come to eat the food I’m making, to talk and laugh and relax together. This is a joy every family deserves, everywhere. More than a joy. It’s a right that none of us have the right to take away.