To live in our small communities along the Delaware River and throughout the area, we have to rely on each other. At the heart of that reliance is a common understanding of what is right and wrong, what is good and what is bad. We’re polite in the grocery store, we look out for each other’s children to keep them safe. If it were learned that there were animals being held in a pen without food or water for days on end, people in our towns would move Heaven and Earth to rescue those creatures and free them from that hell, because we know it is wrong.

 

But we find ourselves now as part of a nation-state that is officially engaged in allowing, facilitating, and actively participating in an enterprise to starve to death two million people. How can something which would appear to our eyes so wrong if we saw it done to an animal, but when done to actual human beings on such a consequential scale, we as a society remain silent? 

 

Why wouldn’t such a gross violation of our moral foundation be denounced weekly from every place of worship, where our personal conduct and our obligations to other human beings are supposedly the primary concern? Why are our newspapers and media, which purport to be a forum to discuss the events of the day, so silent about an historic crime being committed in our name?

 

Even as our tax dollars pay for this genocide, even as we wear the mantle of democracy where the people supposedly are the final authority over the actions of the government, why isn’t every politician stepping forward to demonstrate their grasp of the moral structure of society and calling for the end of the genocide? Even among the protest movements that have emerged in the wake of Donald Trump’s dismantling of constitutional government, where is the full-throated denunciation of two million people being starved to death? A movement whose appeal is narrow self interest, rather than radical solidarity with all who are suffering, seems destined to fall short.

 

For well over a year we have seen the complete collapse of institutional morality. By collaborating with atrocity and working to illegally suppress all dissent, the rulers of our social order, the political class both Democrat and Republican, the heads of almost every industry and institution, the national media, have demonstrated their psychopathic alienation from common human empathy. We are ruled by monsters.

 

The short explanation for this silence in the face of evil is power, which in our system means money. The focus of those in the upper tiers of our institutions, from corporate news organizations to university heads, is on obedience to whoever signs their checks, the ones who placed them in these positions of power. They simply have too much to lose to take a principled stand against the horror of this new holocaust. 

 

Since major donors of both political parties were committed Zionists, this last election wasn’t a competition so much as a collusion to secure the most favorable outcome for the foreign state of Israel and it’s strongman Benjamin Netanyahu. That preferred outcome was Trump. The Democrats may have been sincere in not wanting Trump to win, but when it came to asserting their power to stop the genocide, which would have secured their victory, they thought it better to obey the money and fall on their swords for the cause of Israel. The rest of us will pay the price with the loss of our democracy.

 

Even though common morality has disappeared from the halls of money and power I believe it still exists among average working people. People know that killing children is wrong, that the starvation of a population of two million people is an abomination. That bombing hospitals and killing journalists and torturing doctors and nurses are intolerable crimes. What is missing are the mechanisms for average people to assert agency over our government and institutions.

 

We must use every tool at hand to fight this evil, including a better understanding of electoral politics. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats will lead us out of this mess. But an organized voting bloc, willing to step outside of the control of these two pro-genocide parties, would have the power to shift the political landscape away from this cul-de-sac of history we currently find ourselves in.