january notes
more half-thoughts
Freedom of the Press
More journalists were killed in the first 10 weeks of Israel’s assault on Gaza than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Of the 120 journalists killed in 2023, according to the International Federation of Journalists, more than two-thirds were in Gaza.
[...]
We join the NUJ and IFJ in calling for an end of the targeted killing of journalists, in Palestine and globally. We hope that 2024 sees a reversal of the devastating trends that 2023 held for journalists, but what we have seen in the first two weeks of the year does not inspire optimism. -- Hani Barghouthi in Public Interest News Foundation
Please read Hani’s essay here. What he doesn’t say is that the (more than) 120 journalists killed in 2023 is nearly twice the number of journalists (67) who were murdered in 2022. And that, after announcing those numbers in 2022, the Committee to Protect Journalists expressed their dismay that that had been a 50% increase from 2021, in which 35 journalists were killed.
In a functioning democracy, which operates according to the ideas of rational discourse, journalism is not a dangerous profession. Of the 67 killings in 2022, more than half occurred in the same three countries: Ukraine, Mexico, and Haiti—three countries that made headlines for the conflict and violence that roiled within them that year (and continues to).
Israel is joining that list. It’s unconscionable that an army funded by the United States is intentionally targeting journalists. A press jacket is supposed to be protection, not a bullseye.
While the pacifists among us enjoy a greater degree of intellectual and moral integrity, many more of us believe (pace our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ) that there is such a thing as a just war and the use of violence to defend oneself.
And the international community has agreed upon norms for state violence, and—as troubling and suspect as the idea of endorsing state violence is for a Christian—killing journalists is an egregious flouting of those norms.
I suppose it’s not surprising that journalists are being slaughtered when civilians are being indiscriminately murdered. As of this writing, 25,000 men women and children killed in Gaza. I find it demoralizing that Western journalists feel more solidarity with the Israeli army than with their fellow journalists. And even more deeply that the United States has such need for a foothold in the Middle East that it will allow its dependent (Israel) to do anything it pleases—bomb hospitals, deploy chemical weapons—without any fear of repercussions from the global community. Their blood is on us and on our children.
Bulldozed
Trying to retrace my steps and recover memories in Charlotte, North Carolina, I find the faux French coffee shop I’m looking for closed in 2020. It moved into a shinier, soulless location right behind new housing being built up, still wrapped with Tyvek. I think of the dust in the sunbeams at that old warehouse café, so vivid and indescribable and now evaporated, like a dream. A group of homeless men have been kicked out of their encampment by yet another luxury apartment development going up nearby.
For a moment, I feel like we are living in the same city: Dispossession.
Snow one compares 2 u
New York City finally got snow for the first time since I left her loving arms. It’s hard to get over me, but I’m glad to see she’s finally moved on.
Exploited States of America
“Ending segregation, at last, would require affluent families to give up some things, but what we’d gain would be more valuable. We’d have to give up some comforts and familiarities of life behind the wall and give up the stories we’ve told ourselves about that place and our role in it, but we’d also be giving up the loneliness and empty materialism that have come to characterize much of upper-class life”
Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America is a symphony of statistics. Who knew numbers so mournful could produce such stirring music?
One number that got me was the 3.3 million who applied for unemployment the week of March 16, 2020. I wasn’t one of them, but I was about to become one of them two weeks later. And, he points out, during the following year, poverty decreased. The staggering number of men and women out of work led to government support—a government that protected the poor rather than punished them. And now, those supports have vanished, back to the business of usual of squeezing out pennies in the name of profit. So 38 million Americans live in poverty and 108 million live, as Desmond writes, in the “space between poverty and security.”
The word Desmond invokes over and over again is “exploitation.” Exploitation is the most prevalent strand of American DNA. We live in a society built on exploitation. It seems to be something we forget until we’re reminded of it in a daily paper or a woman with a cardboard sign on the street corner, asking for money. Another piece of our history we seem to have forgotten is that we are living in a country that was founded on kidnapping large numbers of people—from Europe and Africa at first and then strictly Africa—to work for free in order to turn the Eastern Seaboard of America into Little Europe. Exploitation and dehumanizing labor practices aren’t sad accidents of the American project, but design features. We have yet to decide on a different design. This is an impossible situation for a Christian, who is part of the same Body of Christ as her exploited neighbors. What are we to do?
The only wrong answer is nothing.
Tuna Check
When the TSA agent opened my backpack, I wondered if he had ever been to a food pantry. If he had, then he would have definitely recognized the food in my rucksack as Food Pantry Food. If you’ve been to a food pantry, you know what food pantry food looks like. It all looks the same. Once you know, you know, as the kids say.
I don’t think he had, because he didn’t say anything, but also if he had he wouldn’t have said anything. What would there be to say: “Why are you bringing food pantry food with you on the airplane?” The question answers itself. I assiduously texted nobody to avoid eye contact while he ran his ETD wand over the five-ounce cans of tuna, which liquid-wise, were probably a stretch. I was certain he would confiscate them, but they squeaked by.
He handed the bag back to me and said: “The just straight-up red potatoes are probably the craziest thing I’ve seen today.” I laughed. Brother, you ain’t seen a thing.