03/10/2024
Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Hello. My name is Miguel A. Cruz Díaz, and I wanted to kill myself yesterday.
I am a doctoral candidate at a university that despises free speech and openly persecutes Palestinians at the behest of fascists donors.
I majored in a field that is populated, I have come to understand, by mutes. Silence is enforced by my guild, you understand. Silence and compliance.
We are too wedded to Zionism in the United States if you write or research history. It is everywhere. Our long relationship to the State Department during the Cold War saw to that. We are censored, blacklisted, or fired for expressing an opinion that runs counter to the status quo. Ask Steven Salaita about freedom of speech.
Hello. My name is Miguel A. Cruz Díaz, and I wanted to kill myself yesterday.
I was born in an American imperial colony. Empire, the dirty word. We can’t be an empire, we’re the good guys, right? I’ve even had American historians tell me that the United States was never an Empire. To my face. A COLONIAL citizen. The American Empire is and always has been a force for evil, for ethnic cleansing, for racial discrimination, for police brutality, for concentration camps in the border, and for endless killing. Our country excels at killing. We’ve even convinced ourselves that our nuclear war crimes in Japan were justified. We never do wrong.
Hello. My name is Miguel A. Cruz Díaz, and I wanted to kill myself yesterday.
Because it physically hurts to live in a world where it feels like we have abandoned all pretense of reason. Where the Global South finally attempts to rise up against the racist and genocidal North but is tripped up by a rigged system. Internationalism is a vile lie unless it refers to a select club of death-dealing ethno-nationalist rogue states still playing at empire, all the while engaged in ecocide and ruthless economic fascism.
Hello. My name is Miguel A. Cruz Díaz, and I wanted to kill myself yesterday. Because I saw a child blown in half, dismembered by Zionist bombs more than likely provided by our own fu***ng country. Yet another nameless victim of Israel’s madness. No, not nameless.
Her name was Sidra Hassouna. She was seven years old.
Her name was Sidra Hassouna. I paid for the bombs that killed her.
Her name was Sidra Hassouna. She was blown apart.
Her name was Sidra Hassouna. I saw her dead body on social media.
Her name was Sidra Hassouna. I wanted to kill myself.
I feel shame for being alive. I do not want to be alive while everyone else can go around pretending like nothing is happening. Reducing this to an academic exercise. Calling a genocide a “war”. At least the god damned N***s tried to hide what they did."
God help Migel and the rest of us who feel the same way., to endure to the end of this unfolding tragedy with our integrity intact, and a sense of the evaporating justice we used to believe in.
VJCB
