I have a routine each morning. I prefer coffee, not tea. Once I have my first cup in hand, I scroll through the daily news, at first there’s almost a fevered need to find out.

Is he dead yet?

Somehow Trump has managed to stay alive. It always seems like the best people pass too young, before they have the chance to live their lives. Yet this vile waste of precious air, who lives off of diet coke and McDonald’s, has lived as long as he has and refuses to just die.

So, every morning, I check the news. Instead of reading a death notice for him, often times it’s for many others. Often times it’s human rights violations, or state kidnappings, poverty, war. Half of the time I can just check Israel’s news to find out what will be in our news waves later on. After all, we are fighting Israel’s war. Nothing like being able to read children’s pleas for freedom from both my home country as well as abroad.

Today the news articles that wormed their way into my brain the most were Ms. Rachel & the Children at Dilley and Trump’s Reaction to Mueller’s Death. Of course that’s just the top of the shit pile that is our world right now.

The past decade, especially the past five or so years, has been really difficult to exist in. Unless you go out of your way to avoid the atrocities that surround us and other “1st world” powers, they assault us at every turn. They permeate our lives, our work, our sleep. Almost to the point that it’s normal. You start to become desensitized. Starvation, war, the erosion of rights.. becomes part of the every day.

Speaking as an elder millennial or whatever-the-fuck, the main difference in living in the USA now compared to the late 90’s or early 00’s, is the media. Back in highschool, it wasn’t constant. You didn’t get bombarded with information about “the war” (choose your poison here), all you saw on the news is what our country wanted to show us. Sure, you’d see a few broadcasts of protests against the war in the middle east, but it was really mild. If you wanted REAL current events, you had to go online, and SEARCH for them. The news on the front page of Yahoo dot come, wasn’t going to give it to you. The vast majority of us had dial up, if anything at all, and had no idea where to get news. Atrocities were passed along by word of mouth.. which didn’t get very far.

Now? I watched a live stream of a residential building being hit by an airstrike in Lebanon courtesy of Israel. I’ve watched Israeli soldiers sniping Palestinian peoples queuing up for the food pantry. I’ve watched ICE agents dragging disabled women through the snow and arresting them for existing in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve watched women and men be shot in our streets for protesting. I’ve watched children and adult prisoners alike cry for help from inside government camps.

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I often can’t sleep at night. I end up reading my books, or scrolling through current events. When I close my eyes, I see a bloodied backpack from our bombing of an elementary school. I see blood smears on our schools’ hallways. I see horrendous things.

I’ve been told that I should step away, take a break from *everything*. White folks are privileged enough to ignore what our country does, we can turn away and pretend everything is peachy keen. The problem with that is that’s what white people have been doing for generations. We’ve ignored the plight of everyone around us, we’ve benefitted from others’ suffering, for generations. For hundreds of years. We’ve erased history and replaced it with something more palatable, and fed it to our children and grandchildren. We are still actively erasing history.

So I won’t look away, and I’m not the only one. It’s the least that white America can do, we face our past, our present, our actions. It’s the first step. We have technology now, there’s no excuses to be ignorant anymore. It’s time to pay attention, it’s time to learn. Listen to stories, read books, talk.

Because the next step? It’s building community or participating with the others working around you already. It’s mutual aid and direct action.