Four months ago I attended the People’s Conference for Palestine. Organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement, Answer Coalition, The People’s Forum, National SJP, and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network to name only a few, this conference stood toe to toe with eight months of renewed Israeli aggression visited upon the Palestinian people and several lifetimes of suppression and misrepresentation of the Palestinian cause in the west.
In July of 2016, a grad student at York University submitted a paper (possibly his Master's Thesis) with the title Cacophonous Settler Grounded Normativity: Interrelationality with the More-Than-Human World as a Path for Decolonial Transformation. Benjamin Kapron is a settler student of the Indigenous theorists that developed Grounded Normativity (which we will expand on later), and in a little over a hundred pages he laid out his thoughts for more appropriate and more effective settler engagement in decolonization.
When proclamations are made that “voting is harm reduction,” it’s never clear how less harm is actually calculated. Do we compare how many millions of undocumented Indigenous Peoples have been deported? Do we add up what political party conducted more drone strikes? Or who, had the highest military budget? Do we factor in pipelines, mines, dams, sacred sites desecration? Do we balance incarceration rates? Do we compare sexual violence statistics? Is it in the massive budgets of politicians who spend hundreds of millions of dollars competing for votes?
Forty-seven years ago, in 1976, I was a National Maritime Union, AFL-CIO, merchant mariner and an unlicensed crewmember of United States Lines M/V Pioneer Crusader that carried U.S. military cargo to Santiago, Chile. I wanted to honor those who had been imprisoned, tortured, and executed inside the National Stadium in 1973. Today I think again of Victor Jara’s last poem—and what instead could have been accomplished by Unidad Popular, UP, opposed to the fascist military dictatorship supported by the U.S. and headed by General Agusto Pinochet— Estadio Chile...
1925 image of streetcars crossing Portage Lake Bridge, image credit Northern Michigan University, overlayed on image of modern day Bridge, St., Houghton, Michigan, 2024.
As historically defining experiences, emergencies are an element of perception. Far from a private and personal affair, perception is social, structured by what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky call a process of “inculcation”. Settler perception has a material-political infrastructure in the sense that it is underlain by economic and normative conditions that refract the colonial, White supremacist, and heteropatriarchal strategies of dominant society into the quotidian understanding of events.