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Do you all remember Shireen? Journalist. US citizen. Killed in 2022 by the IDF. When I say killed by the IDF that isn't speculation or insinuation. She was shot by an IDF sniper while where a blue press vest. When news of her death first came out Israel said: It wasn't us. "We weren't even in the area. It must have been Palestinian militants". Then they said "Ok, so maybe we were in the area, but we don't think we shot her. The Palestinian militants were shooting at us, so it was probably them." And finally they fell back to "Maybe we shot her while returning fire or something but we didn't know who she was." However, separate investigations from CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all established that there had been no Palestinian gunfire prior, that Shireen was standing with a group of other journalists and wearing a clearly marked blue press vest, and her wounds were consistent with being shot by an IDF sniper (whose presence nearby has been admitted to by the IDF).

This is what I mean when you should trust the IDF as much as you trust the cops after they kill someone. Both come out, leaning on their authority, insisting you have to take their version of events at face value. Both delegitimize the other with: they were probably armed, a thug, not so innocent past, gang member, terrorist… None of these are offered as serious justifications, let alone with any evidence. Their real purpose is to dehumanize the other just enough so they are no longer a human whose story is worth listening to. It's about who gets the benefit of the doubt. When there are confusing conflicting stories cops in uniform get the benefit of the doubt. Black men don't. The IDF does. Palestinians don't. But we know that cops lie and that racism is baked into who they are. The IDF has shown over and over and over again that they lie and that disregard for Palestinian life is part of who they are.

Let me be explicit: it seems like a lot of US liberals understand this about the cops but don't want to accept it about the IDF. I don't know how many hospitals need to be bombed or how many villages need to be wiped out or how much evidence of a calculated campaign of mass starvation it will take for that change.

To finish Shireen's story: did the IDF ever do an internal investigation or subject the sniper who killed her to any consequences? No. They violently disrupted her funeral. We only know as much as we do because she was a journalist and US citizen, so the international media paid attention. At the end of the day the only thing we don't know is whether they targeted Shireen specifically or they just didn't give a fuck which Palestinian they were killing. It doesn't take much to imagine how this plays out day after day for regular Palestinians.

One of the things I love about bicycle touring is how it structures your relationship to geography. You notice every slight up and downhill. You care about slight variations in road surface.

But, it's thinking about how to cross stuff that has had the biggest impact on me.

For longer trips we generally follow vies verdes / rails to trails type routes and getting from A to B is straight forward. We don't always have time for those kind of trips though. So sometimes on the weekend we do an overnight camping trip, often in combination with a short train ride. For these we usually have to make our own route, for at least part of the journey.

With a car (or a cycle path in the Netherlands!) you get on the road, follow the signs, and don't worry about anything stopping you. Bridges and underpasses help you across rivers, freeways, and train tracks no problem.

Unfortunately on a bike—especially if you are trying to avoid sharing a busy road with cars—that isn't always the case. Plotting routes out of the city has made me acutely aware of the way landscape, rivers, freeways, and train tracks all interact with each other and the ways that they both connect and, often, divide, nearby communities. And even when you can cross by bicycle, where a car is usually allowed to take a straight flat connection you are often forced into detours and elevation changes that more closely hug the original geography of the land.

For example, going from La Llagosta to Mollet del Vallès. On the left bank of the Besòs river [a] there is either a path that is unsuitable for biking [b] or the BV-5001 [c], which is too busy for my taste (yes, I know lycra-bros do it all the time). On the right bank we have to figure out how to cross the Riera de Caldes [d], which shouldn't be too bad because it's pretty small and usually dry. Obviously we can't take the C-33, C-17, or any of the train tracks [e]. Carretera de Puigcerdà [f] looks promising. Except, it's actually the N-152z here (i.e. a freeway access road). It crosses the C-59 via an unpleasant looking overpass [g] with cars de/accelerating from/to freeway speeds. Doable but very far from ideal.

Except even a little bravery doesn't actually help! Going that way you'd be stuck on the wrong side of the C-17, and train tracks, because the only bikeable bridge [h] back across the Besòs isn't accessible from Mollet del Vallès except via either the freeway or a bunch of stairs. So if you want to keep going up the Besòs you would have to first take a detour into Parets de Valles and through Montmeló. Luckily there is an alternative. There is a weird little ford across the Caldes [i], with a path to it and everything, right by the train tracks. It works! I've taken the dotted path. (A whole other topic is my amazement at just how many random dirt access paths there are everywhere.) But, it's amazing how one mostly dry river bed and a whole bunch of infrastructure meant to connect stuff, divides these two towns.

How do we keep going in a world full of unbelievable suck? The philosopher Walter Benjamin described history as “one single catastrophe that unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before [our] feet.”¹ Sounds like 2017 2024.

The question of how to keep going isn’t new. I imagine my grandparents faced it while in the underground resistance during the Second World War back in Holland. Of course, as Jews—and I believe they would say, as people of conscience—there was no alternative. Today we once again find ourselves in a historical moment where naked fascism is stepping out into the foreground of our collective psyche.

I hope we all agree that it must be stopped.

I keep hearing “We’ve beaten them before,” as though the military defeat of the Nazis in the second World War was the only time fascists were a threat. It wasn’t. For example, just ask the Spanish who suffered under Franco’s rule until the mid-’70s. Or, as if that somehow ensures the invincibility of “Western” Democracy forever. It really doesn’t. The truth is, there is no sure path, no eleven point listicle, to stemming the rise of fascism.

But what actually scares me the most these days is that when I wake up every morning the sun is still shining. Fascism, while apocalyptic, does not arrive with a swarm of locusts or a blood red moon, and does not lead to an inevitable showdown at high noon between good and evil.

The struggle against fascism cannot be reduced to a struggle for normalcy. For many—let’s call them ‘white men’, for short—normal may never be disturbed. And for others, “normal” has been shitty for a while now. To stand with the oppressed is a choice, a choice to actively put oneself into confrontation with the forces of fascism.

This is true at the grand political level; when Antifa faces off against white supremacists they are seeking out conflict because you can’t wait for the neo-Nazis to show up at your door. And it is true in our personal lives, where we must constantly interrogate our own beliefs and behaviors. Or, as the French philosopher Michel Foucault put it, the deepest enemy we need to defeat is “The fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”²

Personally, I cannot think of that confrontation without thinking of my grandparents and what they faced. My close friend Katie once described protest as a ritual to appease our ancestors. That makes sense to me. Of course I carry the memory of Oma and Opa with me everywhere. But, I hope to do more than appease them. I hope to complete their work.

I want a revolution, but not one driven by the desire for utopia but as a gift to the past. Revolutions break the flow of history. They rupture that progression of “catastrophe that unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble”.

I guess you could say I’m not wondering “how do we keep going?” so much as “how do we make it all stop?”

Because through that rupture we can reach back into the past. I know that the past can’t be fixed. But, it could be reoriented towards a new future, made part of a new story, and in so doing redeem all the struggles of our ancestors.

In the meantime, I wake up everyday and greet the still shining sun with a prayer:

Good morning. Today…
  I train my heart to desire revolution
  I teach my mind to think of love
  I shape my mouth to speak resistance, and
  I discipline my legs to stand in solidarity.

Because we must practice the world we wish to see.

A slightly different version of this was first published in 2017 as the backmatter to issue #4 of Steve Stormoen’s The Pros. This version, that I put here in 2024, has been lightly edited—mostly so that it makes sense without needing to have read Steve’s excellent comic.