In my new neighborhood, there is scaffolding on nearly every block. It took me a few days of shuttling under these metal structures to notice the trees beside me. The radically resilient trees. The ones which called these streets home long before I arrived, and before the scaffolding was nailed into the earth beside them. They work hard, day and night, to stay alive. Some branches have been cut, others now twist around the scaffolding to drink in precious rain and sunlight. These trees speak to a concept I’ve been grappling with throughout the summer: Hope.

Hope is a word that I once thought of as cliché or naive. On the one hand, it reminds me of corny quotes plastered on bare AirBnB walls. On the other, it forces me to confront my sense of faith. Hope is the word that has reinvented itself for me this summer.

In late July, my mom and I landed in Montgomery, Alabama to begin our Civil Rights Trail road trip. A five-day journey through the South to learn more about the movements that shook and reshaped this nation and world. After disembarking from our delayed flight, we approached the Hertz rental car counter, only to find that it had closed early. Our hopes for grace and convenience – dashed. The sun was setting as I clicked open the Uber app.

“Do you all need a ride to your hotel?” A woman politely asked, in her thick Southern accent.

With exhaustion growing, my mom and I agreed and followed this kind couple to their car. They were driving 40-minutes away to visit family, but eagerly went out of their way to drive us to downtown Montgomery first. During our ride, we learned that the driver, Haley, had a PhD and was from rural Alabama. Her husband Cody is a special education teacher from Mississippi. Their hospitality in the dark of night left me in awe.

The next day, when my mom and I walked through the Equal Justice Initiative Legacy Museum in Montgomery, the significance of Haley and Cody’s normal and beautiful relationship dawned on me. Less than sixty years ago, their marriage, an interracial marriage, was illegal in Alabama and 16 other states. In fact, it was not until the year 2000 that Alabama symbolically removed the unenforceable ban from its state constitution–the last U.S. state to do so.

As I stepped from plaque to plaque and scuttled from room to room, the weight of the cruelty and injustice of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration became heavier and heavier. What also became clearer with each step through the museum was the courage and faith of those who partook in and led the Civil Rights movement.

When Montgomery’s Black community walked and carpooled to work and school for 382 straight days during the Montgomery Bus Boycott they did so despite the inconvenience and hardship. They did so because their faith was so deep that they knew their lived realities of segregation could not persist in perpetuity. Their sense of hope was so powerful that they were confident that the fruits of their labor would bloom. Their steadfastness and strategy moved the systems around them. They did not wait for the arc of the moral universe to bend for them. With each step they took, they bent it.

On the night following Rosa Parks’ arrest, a university employee, Jo Ann Robinson, used a mimeograph machine at her school. With the help of two students, she worked until 4 am to print 35,000 mimeographs, encouraging Black people not to ride Montgomery’s buses. The small but mighty group then distributed these flyers across the city. Her daring hope and ambitious strategy changed the course of a movement.

From museum to memorial, city to town, it became abundantly clear along our road trip that countless courageous individuals who participated in the Civil Rights movement took the steps they did not just for their own dignity and ease, but with the clear vision of a future far beyond their own. They marched in heels and suits from Selma to Montgomery. They sacrificed their lives shuttling demonstrators. They tested school integration, potentially sacrificing the safety of their own children. They put their bodies, their relationships, their families on the line in the fight for everyone’s rights to dignity, justice, political participation, education, and economic opportunity.

It is no coincidence that so many of the Civil Rights movement’s most significant events originated in churches across the South, and that so many of its leaders had faith backgrounds. Spirituality is inextricably tied to hope.

You must have hope to be able to imagine structures and realities that you cannot see; that you have never seen or known to be possible. It is no coincidence that some of the most inspiring political figures on the left today, including Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and James Talarico, have strong foundations in their faith backgrounds. Their faith drives their reimagination of our political and economic realities.

Martin Luther King Jr. was only 26 years old when, as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he helped lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott. His unshakeable belief in the “Beloved Community” was grounded in his faith. His faith guided him to a practice of hope, which allowed him to reimagine and to articulate a future that had never existed. Movement leaders did not cower to the “realists.”

They did not call off their peaceful demonstrations when they were met with violence. They did not turn to apathy when those with power imprisoned or assassinated their leaders. They put their hope and their faith into action. Again. And again. And again.

Our confidence that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice is not a call to rest with the expectation that this change occurs on its own.

After meditating on the names of lynching victims at the National Lynching Memorial, gazing up at the 120,000 last names of formerly enslaved Americans at the National Monument to Freedom, tracing the steps of John Lewis over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and praying beside the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, my mom and I found our way to our final museum for the trip: The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. The museum is housed within the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

In this museum, the curators made clear that the Civil Rights Movement is inextricably bound to all movements and cries for justice. In one exhibit, I read a poem by Claude McCay called “If We Must Die.” His words reminded me of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die,” which he wrote before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. These poets, writing a century apart, knew that their pens were mightier than the swords. They knew that cruelty is the weapon of the weak.

In another exhibit Martin Luther King Jr.’s words felt as though they were written for today: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death… We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”

Though Martin Luther King Jr. was vocally opposed to the Vietnam War, it was in fact his wife, Coretta Scott King, who boldly opposed the war first, much to the dismay of other movement leaders. There was fear that her conviction to speak out against the war would threaten the Civil Rights Movement’s progress. She, on the other hand, understood that their struggles for racial justice were bound into the fight against militarism as well. That to pull out the weeds of war and imperialism would inevitably make tilling the soil for racial and economic justice possible.

In the final room of the museum, after reading about the more than one trillion dollars spent on the “War on Drugs” and the shameful system of mass incarceration in America, I found myself in front of a quote by Mariame Kaba that changed my perception of hope:

“Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know. Hope is not optimism.

Hope is a discipline…we have to practice it every single day.”

Hope is a way of life, under the weight of this tiresome world. It is the courage and conviction to become active, to become creators of the world we wish to see.

The first morning back home, once returning from our trip, I sat outside and looked down at the garden in my backyard. We had neglected it during our travels this summer. There were no bright tomatoes like last year. A partially moldy squash hid under the wide green leaves. And weeds ran amok. At first glance I was disappointed, but when I got over my disappointment I held myself accountable and reflected. We had planted the garden in the spring, with hope, and then neglected it all summer.

I was reminded of the words of King in 1956, which he delivered in New York City: “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”

Movements for justice can be likened to a garden. They require hard work. You must clear the existing weeds, nurture healthy soil, seed and plant new visions, water the saplings… and so on. You also need flowers to welcome pollinators from afar. If not, your garden will not blossom. Pests will inevitably seek to make holes in your leaves. And even if there is fruit, if you do not pick it in time, it may spoil.

The work of movements for justice is a constant struggle. It is not okay to bask in the fruits of the Civil Rights Movement or any other movement for that matter without continuing to water, weed, and plant for the future. Many have become complacent – or worse, apathetic – with the doom and gloom of the world. It might be easier for some to imagine no garden at all. To expect no fruits. But there is no joy, no life, and no love with such levels of apathy.

A few weeks after returning from our trip, I was sitting down with an elderly relative who, amidst all the current backtracking, asked me and my mom “Do you all have any hope left?”

We affirmed our hope, and my mom promptly responded, “If you give up hope, you give up action. That is exactly what the opposition wants. Hope is a discipline that requires action.”

We do not need to accept this level of economic inequality, state violence, and injustice as if it is as inevitable as gravity. It is not. With hope, we are called to act with the kind of courage we want our descendants to inherit from us. Those who fought to legalize interracial marriage may not have reaped the fruits of such change. Yet, our nation now, including our neighbors, family members, friends, and even the strangers who gave us a ride in Alabama, are enjoying the fruits of such labor.

It is incumbent upon us that we do not give up hope. That we instead turn our hope into a discipline.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates said in a recent podcast, “The best of us have always been concerned beyond ourselves.” This does not just mean concerning ourselves for those around us, but those beyond the scope of our fleeting existence on this earth.

Hope is a responsibility we carry. It is fortified through our faith in that which we cannot see. It is shaped by the love we have for our communities. It is not naive. It is vital for our survival.

The seeds that became trees and were planted in a land surrounded by cement are our teachers. They do not stop growing when their limbs are cut. They do not stop flowering when their leaves need to reach far for fleeting sunlight. They transform the toxicity around them into the vital air we breathe. They continue to root deeper, and rise higher, despite the challenges.

Let us look around for our teachers of all kinds, and let them move us to action and hope.

Subscribe now

Today, my aunt passed away after a long and brave battle with cancer.

Today, I felt the beloved community move with the spirit.

When I woke up this morning, I decided to meditate on the balcony outside my window. I slid across the windowsill, scraping my silky pajamas across the divide, and set a timer for five minutes. I never do this. But, last night, as I was preparing for sleep, I closed my eyes and vividly pictured my grandmother Eloisa communing with my Grandmother Maryann. Eloisa was telling Maryann about what it was like for her son to be taken from this earth too soon and how she welcomed him into the great beyond. I felt as though my grandmothers, who both passed away eight years ago, were holding each other tight as Maryann prepared to welcome her only daughter, Liz, into the great beyond.

As I attempted to meditate on the balcony, fuchsia flowers stole my focus, dancing on the tree beside me. The same wind that stirred the petals glided through the wheels of a bike carrying a laughing father-son duo below.

When my five minutes were up, I slid back through the window and grabbed my phone just as a message popped up. My friend Sarah, who is studying in Jerusalem to become a Rabbi, texted me that she was on her way to an area close to the border with Gaza. She was on a trip commemorating the sorrowful Jewish holiday of Tisha B’Av. “I’m thinking about and praying/mourning present day destruction,” she wrote. “As we get closer and closer to the Gaza border I’m thinking about Abdallah and his family. Is there any prayer that I can offer while being here? I know words can mean little in the face of so much destruction but I just have them at the front of my mind.”

I quickly replied with names and photos of each of my friend Abdallah’s siblings, who all remain in Gaza, and asked for her prayers.

Just an hour later, I learned that my aunt Liz departed this earth and joined the great beyond.

My aunt was tender, all love, and all light. She was a curious and brave soul—and, despite spending nearly all of her life in Rochester, New York, her blanket of care extended around the globe. Liz had cared deeply for my friend Abdallah and his family in Gaza. Each time we called, she would ask about him as if she was asking about my brother. When Abdallah was evacuated to Ireland last August, I called her to let her know. She let out soul-filled tears over the phone. Cries of relief. Cries filled with love. A few months ago, she got to meet Abdallah over FaceTime for the first time.

Shortly after hearing of my aunt’s passing, I FaceTimed Abdallah to let him know. “When I’m having challenging moments in Ireland, I remember that she cried for me when I got out of Gaza. It means so much,” Abdallah told me. For the past few years, I have stood with Abdallah through his grief. Today, he stood with me in mine.

While I was reminiscing on my aunt’s life over the phone with Abdallah, Sarah was sending prayers for Abdallah’s siblings into the thick and heavy air right outside of Gaza. Care and compassion know no borders.

As the day passed, I listened to recordings of my aunt singing and sent them to a few close friends. I wanted them to know the sweetness of her song. Her sweet songs accompanied me as I packed my bags for Alabama.

The day of her death coincides with the day my mom and I fly to Montgomery to learn of the visions of our nation’s civil rights leaders–and all the thousands of unsung heroes who sacrificed so much–from the land where these movements shook and transformed us all. That transformation was clear today.

In the airport this evening, I picked up a call from Sarah in Jerusalem. She recounted her experiences listening to and learning from Palestinians who are facing attacks by settlers and occupation forces. During our call, text messages trickled in from Abdallah. He was in an Irish grocery store looking for a candle to light for my Aunt. It was his first time buying a candle for this purpose, but he’d heard it was something that Christians do. Thousands of miles away, he was burning a deep red candle for my aunt Liz. Thousands of miles from him, Sarah was near the rubble of his home, praying for his family on a Jewish holiday of lamentation.

My mom and I are now on our way to Alabama and Tennessee to honor the lives and visions of civil rights leaders who fought with love for the Beloved Community. They had a clear vision for a world that embodied an all-inclusive spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood. A world where radical hospitality is the norm. A world where peace is not merely the absence of tension, but the presence of justice. A world of kinship and action.

Before boarding the plane, my eyes heavy from a long day, I reflected on how I had been witness to the beloved community in action all day. It was not simply a bidirectional kinship, but one that moved like the rustling morning wind. Flowing with love. Dancing between wheels and petals. Weaving strands together. Gliding over walls and WhatsApp messages. Bridging life and death.

As I shared my reflection with my mom, feeling the richness of love I feel in this lifetime, she reminded me that “the harvest is plenty, but the laborers are few.” There is so much love to be had in this world as long as we are willing to work with an ethic of care for it. The beloved community means to grieve with one another. To pray for one another. To love one another as our own kin.

Subscribe

*This reflection was written and the evening of July 23rd

Could you imagine a Mother’s Day card that read: ‘Your actions make you one of the good ladies’ or stating that generations to come will be ‘respecting your name’? Our traditional expectations as a society for fathers, even on Father’s Day, often set men up for unhealthy parenting.

I know for many people, Father’s Day brings up pain, loss, longing, or other complex emotions. I also know that for many others, it’s an opportunity to celebrate the fathers and father-figures in our lives that show up, break traditional molds, approach fatherhood with humility, and practice expansive models of care.

Today, I celebrate the fathers who have been bold and tender enough to reveal their hearts in ways society does not traditionally encourage. I celebrate the fathers who are constantly learning and teaching us how to be brave and compassionate. I celebrate the way that my father fuels me to keep imagining what else is possible for men around the world.

A Different Card

When I was ten, I remember gifting my dad a handmade Father’s Day card with “You’re the best dad ever!” scribbled on the front. “You can say I’m a great dad, but I’m definitely not the best dad,” my father told me after receiving it. His humility on a day that was meant to celebrate him shocked my small brain. “What does he mean that he’s not the best dad ever?!” I wondered.

And so, in that spirit, I approach this Substack not with the mindset that my father is the “Best Dad” (I am definitely not the best daughter either), but with profound gratitude for his model of fatherhood.

Throughout my childhood, my dad held many of the traditional roles of a modern dad – he grilled delicious chicken, coached my soccer and basketball teams, taught me to mow the lawn in the spring, and raked leaf piles for me to jump into in the fall. My dad’s dedication to play and adventure was invaluable. Yet, it was not his ‘fun dad’ characteristics that inspired me to start a podcast on healthy masculinity and filled me with hope for what men can become. Instead, it was the expectations he set, the support he provided, and his humility to never stop learning how to parent.

A Coach and Cheerleader

As the youngest child in my family, I cannot remember a moment when I felt that my father held different standards for us kids based on our genders. Although my brother was two years older than I, my dad expected both of us to be just as scrappy at basketball, as curious about the world, as ambitious in our careers, and as kind to our communities as one another. His equal expectations are a tremendous part of how I became the young woman I am today.

My dad has been both a lifelong coach and one of my biggest cheerleaders (especially when it comes to my podcast and Substack). In fact, he gave me the courage to start a podcast on masculinity.

In November 2024, I began imagining starting a podcast about manhood. Within a few hours of telling my dad, he helped me build out a strategy, logo, and list of potential interviewees. To have your 60-year-old father drawing up a list of his friends that you should interview about masculinity is a truly unique phenomenon. It is he whom I interviewed first for this podcast, and it is he who continues to be one of my first listeners for each episode. Today. I celebrate all the dads who are learning to support their children’s unique passions and treat them with respect and care, no matter their gender.

Providing Care

Caregiving is an essential part of ‘providing’ as a father. More and more, dads are learning to take on caregiving roles, whether it’s learning to braid their daughter’s hair or scheduling their child’s doctors’ appointments. Fathers should have the support to learn how to give care in ways that feel authentic to them and their families.

A few years ago, my dad and I got into a debate about whether I considered him my “caregiver.” What I explained to him was that growing up, whether I had a medical need or a relationship challenge, I was far more likely to turn to my mom for caregiving support. I can only imagine how tough it was for him to hear his 23-year-old daughter tell him that, but my father took my feedback with humility.

In the years since our “caregiver” conversation, I’ve had the honor of living with my parents several times. On this Father’s Day, I celebrate my dad’s commitment to learning to become a more care-driven father. Even though all of us children are adults, I feel as though he has stepped deeper into his caregiving role with time.

I saw this growth most poignantly a few months back. It was the second day of Trump’s catastrophic war with Iran, and I was doomscrolling on social media at my parents’ dining room table. Anxiety and heartache bubbled up inside of me and twisted together in my chest and throat. In my head, the only two paths forward were to keep scrolling or see if my dad wanted to watch something with me. Instead of pursuing either option, my dad read my cues and offered a third option.

“Carolina, I have an idea. Put out two yoga mats on the floor,” he told me.

Soon after, meditative folk music began playing over the TV. As I laid still on the yoga mat, my chest rose and fell. A few minutes in, tears began streaming sideways down my cheeks, and my throat began to release the tension it had been holding. My father was actively caregiving, helping me release my sadness just by creating space for it. He taught me that it is never too late to expand in your role as a parent. His openness to feedback turned into him stepping into a more expansive role as a father.

Fathers feel a greater sense of purpose in life compared to men without children, yet they are struggling with how to practice healthy fatherhood. Our society does not set fathers up with the models, tools, or preparation to thrive in their roles. And, rigid or traditional expectations for fathers to suppress their emotions and focus on providing financially, hurt men and their families.

The 2026 Equimundo State of America’s Fathers report found that fathers with more rigid ideas of fatherhood are 5.2 times as likely to report suicidality. This staggering statistic is reflected in a quote from one of the survey’s respondents: “Our culture really expects men to be providers [...] But men don’t really support each other in those challenges. We don’t have each other the way our wives do with their friends. As men, we’re alone a lot trying to navigate being a father [and] being a husband.”

Fathers need more support from one another, better policies for paid parental leave from their workplaces, and better models of caregiving from our media and educational institutions.

Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers, father-figures, and fathers who have passed away whose care continues to fuel us to imagine new worlds!

Subscribe now

In the six months since the DNC announced it would not release its autopsy of the 2024 Election, there was speculation that the report was scathing or contained groundbreaking information inside. Instead, it turns out that the post-mortem is quite the opposite. It has huge holes and overlooks many key reasons why Democrats lost.

I worked as a Field Organizer on the Harris-Walz campaign in North Carolina for four months. When we lost, I assumed that one day the Democratic Party would reach out to me and my fellow organizers to find out what we had learned on the ground. No such attempts have been made. And thus, in the absence of a real post-mortem and leading up to the 2026 midterms, I will write a mini-series reflecting on several reasons why I believe Democrats lost the 2024 presidential elections, based on my on-the-ground experiences.

And first in this series: Gaza.

If you want to turn out young people, don’t fund a genocide.

In the spring of 2024, students across the country led the largest and most sustained U.S. university protest movement sparked by a foreign event. Encampments took place at over 130 U.S. university campuses. Young people across the country were (and continue to be) rightfully outraged by the U.S.’s role in funding the genocide in Gaza. (For a reminder of the student movement, I recommend you watch The Encampments movie.)

Pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protests on college campuses did not only focus on Israel’s actions – they directly linked the actions of the Biden-Harris administration to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

In April of 2024, I visited George Washington University’s encampments several times. Crowds of students and community members, from all faiths and backgrounds, joined together in solidarity. One of the most common chants was “Biden Biden you can’t hide, you’re committing genocide.”

With the momentum of encampments and increased student activism across the United States, when Kamala Harris became the nominee, she and her campaign should have been better prepared to separate Harris from Biden’s decisions to support the genocide in Gaza.

The DNC and VP Harris’s campaign rejected requests from “uncommitted” delegates to have a Palestinian-American speaker address the main stage during the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The request was to include a Palestinian speaker, such as a doctor who had worked in Gaza or an elected official. The DNC’s refusal to allow a Palestinian American on the main stage hurt its chances to pave a new path forward with Kamala Harris and rebuild trust with hundreds of thousands of “uncommitted” voters. Including Palestinian American voices would have signaled a more anti-war direction for the party.

In continuing to support the ongoing genocide and sideline Palestinian voices, the Democratic Party hurt the campaign’s chances of mobilizing youth as volunteers and organizers. Many of the most active and progressive young people were dedicating themselves to protesting for Palestinian lives. This meant fewer youth were showing up as organizers or volunteers, inhibiting the campaign’s ability to be authentic, diverse, and energized.

Becoming a Field Organizer

I had no intention of becoming a Field Organizer when it was Biden’s campaign, and was hesitant to join once Harris became the nominee. Yet, I had some hope after Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate that the two would pave a different path forward for the Democratic Party – an anti-war, or at least anti-genocide path.

In August, when I arrived in North Carolina as a Field Organizer, I started wearing a bracelet that I had purchased at a fundraiser for Gaza. It was red, white, green, and black – the colors of the Palestinian flag – and it had a small watermelon charm. I wore it every day on the campaign to remind myself of the ongoing genocide – that I could campaign for a candidate and seek to hold them accountable. I met other people like me on the campaign, mostly younger staff, who opposed the genocide and sought change from within. Still, there was a significant divide within campaign staff when it came to Palestine.

The night of VP Harris’ first rally in Raleigh, NC, I went to a bar with other campaign staff. A fellow organizer, who was an elder-millennial from California, and I entered into a debate. She told me the civilian death toll and destruction of Gaza was “just how war happens.” The rest of the table went quiet as we debated at length. At the end of the conversation, she claimed that by wearing a bracelet with a watermelon charm, I was indicating support for Hamas. Someone pulled me aside after the conversation ended and let me know that they supported what I was saying, “but we aren’t supposed to bring up Gaza.” Such a significant divergence in values and the taboo nature of conversations around Gaza impacted campaign staff morale.

There was no plan

As the election neared, it was clear that many of the organizers, campaign staff, and volunteers were not prepared to talk about Gaza with voters.

In late September, my most committed volunteers, a sweet Jewish couple from Chapel Hill, confided in me that their daughter was not planning to vote for Harris because of the genocide in Gaza. Since they knew I had spent time in Palestine, they asked me to meet with their daughter and her boyfriend and try to convince them that Harris would be better than Trump. I understood their daughter’s reasoning. Harris and her campaign were not doing much to distinguish themselves from Biden’s legacy of supporting the genocide. I met with them at a coffee shop, but I do not think our conversation convinced them to vote.

This family’s experience was not isolated. Again and again, volunteers would come back from knocking on doors to let me know that previously strong Democrats and young people were letting them know that, because of the genocide in Gaza, they would not be voting for Harris. Volunteers were often shocked by this perspective and, at times, unempathetically dismissed these potential voters. These volunteer experiences were so common that another organizer asked me to hold a training dedicated to teaching volunteers how to empathetically talk about Gaza with undecided voters.

As the Election Day neared, I held out hope that Harris would differentiate herself from Biden on Gaza. This hope did not come to fruition. While being interviewed on The View in early October, Harris was asked whether she would have done anything differently than Biden. Her response: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” Her unwillingness to diverge from Biden’s policy on Gaza and the Biden Administration’s continued support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza hurt the campaign.

In late October, at a rally with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff in Chapel Hill, student protesters interrupted his speech, yelling that a vote for Harris was a vote for genocide. Instead of a thoughtful or empathetic response, Emhoff yelled, “Bye!” and the protesters were quickly thrown out of the building. His tone-deaf response to protestors mirrored that of the campaign overall. Again and again, protesters were thrown out of events. Activist youth were seen as a threat, not stakeholders to listen to.

A campaign organizer in Arizona told me that her team limited the size of their events out of fear of student protesters. Instead of using foreign policy tools to reach a ceasefire, the administration and campaign remained fearful and dismissive of young people’s activism.

Not Just Young People

But it wasn’t just young people who were appalled by the ongoing genocide.

While knocking on doors in a trailer park in Carrboro, North Carolina, I encountered a middle-aged Mexican-American voter named Maria. She was undecided, and when I asked her what issues were most impacting her decision, the first one she named was Gaza. “I look at the pictures of mothers in Gaza starving, and I imagine, what if that were me and my kids?” she told me. She had plenty of reasons to worry about the economy or immigration, but the fact that Gaza was the first issue she named was telling.

In the scripts we gave volunteers for phone calls and door knocks, Gaza was not one of the issues that warranted any talking points. It’s because there is no good way to justify or explain the immoral actions of the Biden-Harris Administration when it came to Gaza. And, ignoring or silencing the cries of young people and opponents to Israel’s genocide in Gaza did not mitigate the impact of Gaza on the election’s outcome.

An Empty Analysis

Given the impact that the genocide in Gaza had on campaigning in North Carolina (in a region without any significant Arab population), you would think that the DNC’s post-mortem, would have mentioned Gaza as a factor in stifling youth involvement in the campaign or overall support. Instead, in the 200-page autopsy, there were exactly zero mentions of ‘Gaza’, ‘genocide’, or ‘Israel’.

The most recent New York Times/Siena poll, released this week, found that 74% of Democratic voters oppose “providing additional economic and military support to Israel.” 65% of Democrats say their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, while 17% say they sympathize more with the Israelis. Independents have also now joined Democrats in supporting Palestinians. 41% of independents say they sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, compared to 30% who sympathize with Israelis more.

With numbers like those, you would think the party would be reading the tea leaves. Instead, it’s burying its head in the sand.

Just last month, the DNC voted to kill a measure that would limit the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and dark-money corporate groups in Democratic primaries. AIPAC has spent more than $221 million in Democratic primaries since the 2022 midterms in support of pro-Israel candidates. In the Illinois primaries this March, AIPAC spent over $22 million, funneled partially through shell groups. This kind of influence and money is undemocratic and is crippling the potential for the Democratic Party to provide a moral and strong opposition to Trump.

The Anti-War Party

If the Democratic Party wants to win in the future, it must become the anti-war party and limit the influence of AIPAC and other dark-money groups.

Despite what the DNC’s 2024 Election autopsy indicates, we lost in part because of the pro-war stance of the party and the Biden-Harris Administration’s role in funding and supporting genocide and war crimes in Gaza.

To become the anti-war party is not just the strategic thing to do. It is the right thing to do. Until the party and progressives come to terms with the tremendous harm and destruction caused by supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, illegal occupation, and war with Lebanon, we will continue to lose both morally and politically.

A continued blank check for Israel only destroys credibility for Democratic candidates or the party. Just this week, Gaza flotilla activists have shared experiences of sexual assault and rape in Israeli detention, and last week, the New York Times published a gut-wrenching piece about systematic sexual violence by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians.

To continue to allow pro-Israel groups to buy out Democratic candidates sets the party and the nation up for failure, politically and morally.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.” I believe these words ring true today.

The bombs in Gaza explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America. The bombs in Lebanon, Iran, and beyond continue to explode as well.

Subscribe now

Half awake, I quietly walked down the dark gravel road, soaking in the sounds of gurgling toads and singing cicadas.

“Allí está!”

Looking up at the tangled wires, a huge ball came into view. The sloth’s hair looked as though it had been freshly blown out at the salon down the road. She clung to the wire with two toes and gracefully slid her way across the electrical wire. As she shifted, the baby clinging to her chest came into view, and its face peered down at us. I stood completely in awe.

Immediately, I thought to myself: “Wow – mothers of all kinds are expected to do a graceful dance on an electrical wire, while carrying their babies.”

Earlier this week, my sister gave birth to her second daughter. Her water broke after a full day of working on her feet as a palliative care social worker in a hospital. She was 34 weeks pregnant, creating new life inside of her while also caring for patients as they approached the end of their lives.

With the serenity of a saint and the preparation of a social worker, she brought my new niece, Gabriela, into this world at 3:30 am on May 7th. In this world of electrical wires, her husband, our family, and a team of incredible doctors serve as branches of support while Gabriela grows stronger each day in the NICU and my sister continues to heal down the hall.

My sister, a mother of two daughters under the age of two, leaves me in awe and inspires me to act. It is not enough to just praise mothers for their strength, we must continue stepping in and stepping up to build webs of support.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for HuffPost about Gen Z’s reluctance to enter motherhood. There are many great reasons in this world to not have children – including the regressive values across Gen Z men, unequal domestic labor divide, or the wholly inadequate systems of childcare or maternity leave in the US.

Each day, there are more and more sparks on the electrical wire of motherhood. And yet, despite these daunting and oppressive challenges, on this Mother’s Day, I could not be more amazed and in awe of the models of motherhood and care around me and around this world.

I reflect on the joy, passion, and selflessness of my own mother. From sharing sweet oats in the early morning to doing homework by her side as she worked late, she embodied a care and strength that I have never doubted.

I revere the resilience, steadfastness, and immeasurable strength of mothers in conflict zones around the world–especially in Gaza, Iran, Sudan, and the DRC. Every single war is antithetical to motherhood. And yet, mothers continue to bring new life into this world. Since October 2023, mothers in Gaza have given birth to 130 babies each day, amounting to over 120,000 babies since the start of the genocide.

But, just because moms are incredible beings who can both literally and figuratively carry their children upside down as they cling to an electrical wire in the dark of night with two toes, does not mean it should or must be this way.

• We need guaranteed paid maternity leave in the U.S. The United States is one of six countries worldwide without a national paid maternity leave policy. This is embarrassing and immoral.

• We need innovative models of community care, like Bogota, Colombia’s expanding ‘care block’ model.

• We need to end all wars and reallocate the funding poured into senseless wars into a just care system. Our $25 Billion+ war with Iran could have paid for an 8-week national paid maternity leave program in the U.S. for over 2 years.

• We need healthy parenthood education, trainings, and support for both mothers and fathers.

• We need an economy that truly values the tremendous unpaid care labor that mothers do. Unpaid family caregiving reduces a mother’s lifetime earnings by 15 percent and, globally, mothers spend on average two and a half times more time doing this work than men.

As my sister begins her two weeks of paid maternity leave, accompanied by two months of unpaid leave, I reflect on the strength of mothers and the failures of our systems to adequately support them.

I recently heard the phrase: “We’ve destroyed the village model, and now we are forced to buy it back,” with respect to paying for caregiving. We have torn down the few trees that supported motherhood and replaced them with fragile poles.

In a world of electrical wires, where is the reforestation to support mothers? How are you planting the seeds or bridging trees for the mothers in your life? How are you stepping into the village of care?

May my nieces grow up in a world that is safe, supportive, and just for all mothers. May all mothers be safe, happy, and healthy.

Happy Mother’s Day,

Carolina

Subscribe now

Hunger

Last month, on the evening before the season of Lent and the month of Ramadan began, I rode home on the Metro in contemplation, trying to find the divine around me. My eyes wandered, my ears perked up, free from the pressure of AirPods.

The teenager sitting in front of me asked for help navigating the Metro, and a mother-daughter daughter duo swiftly helped her map out her route. I let out a slight grin and thought their kind gesture was my lesson for the ride. I was wrong.

Shortly after, the teenager turned back to her phone and began typing quickly. My eyes wandered to her brightly lit screen. The message she typed was far different from what I expected. She was messaging Chat GPT-5 a lengthy paragraph. “I’m so hungry,” she wrote. “We are out of food at home, have no money, and I’m afraid we’re going to be evicted soon. What should I do?” she asked that AI chat bot. Her thumb quickly jumped to the send button. Almost immediately, the response from Chat GPT trickled down her screen.

“Doors opening, step back to allow customers to exit…” the automated announcement blared over the speaker. The teenager jumped up and hurried through the closing Metro doors. It was the last I saw of her.

Throughout the season of Lent and the month of Ramadan, her message has continued to pull at my heart.

I have never known the kind of hunger that this teen and millions around the world feel. For the several days I fasted during Ramadan this year, in solidarity with my Muslim friends, I did so while knowing that a large feast awaited after sunset. That I would share a meal with friends who warmed my soul just as much as the meal did. That my hunger was a choice.

The hunger this teen is facing is also a choice, but a different kind of choice made by those who prefer to invest in war. The same Metro train that carries us to our homes and places of work also carries the darkness of our nation. The artificial intelligence that provided comfort and validation to this teenager is also tearing at our social fabric, facilitating war, and destroying the environment.

Addiction to War

For months, I have been noticing an uptick in the amount of artificial intelligence weapons system advertisements surrounding the D.C. Metro system. Nearly every morning as I walk to the Metro, I encounter a bus that is wrapped in AI-weapons system advertising. It is not just one company or one advertisement. Many different artificial intelligence-driven defense technologies have chosen the D.C. Metro as their battleground for the attention of policymakers and Pentagon officials.

“Meet Your New Prime” states an advertisement from Raft, a ‘modern warfare software’ that in January won a U.S. military AI Mission System contract.

“Airspace is the new frontline: Al-driven, battlefield-proven RF technology to locate, classify, and neutralize aerial intrusions,” reads an advertisement for Dedrone.

“The Trusted Disruptor” reads another from the defense contractor L3Harris, which has massive contracts with ICE and whose stock has surged by 23% in the last 3 months.

“For the warfighter,” reads an advertisement for Applied Intelligence, an AI defense company that just expanded its partnership with the U.S. Navy. This particular poster hangs at Metro Center station, accompanied by the looming presence of National Guardsmen.

These advertisements are quite literally wrapped around us as we shuttle through the city. The flashy graphics and synthetic language strip away the terror of war and famine. They seek to normalize our nation’s addiction to war.

My government attempts to separate me from the harm that my tax dollars inflict. Acts of war are confined to flashy Tom Cruise movies, addicting video games, or worse, prediction market bets. When visuals of war get through the shadow-banning and censorship of social media, images of atrocities hold the potential to tear at our hearts. Nevertheless, war remains far away, perhaps unimaginable for many.

What the bus advertisements remind us is that we live in a society that is profoundly addicted to war and an economy that is built on war. We do not know how to maintain our economy without the destruction of our wars abroad.

It should not be so hard to be anti-war, especially in this moment. War is an antiquated strategy. It is incredibly expensive. It destroys the environment. It is wildly immoral. And, for the Christians in the room, Jesus’ teachings are inherently anti-war.

When the war with Iran began, I searched for this excerpt from Representative John Lewis’ 1998 book, Walking With the Wind, which I had read years ago. In it, he describes his opposition to the Gulf war in 1991:

“Death and destruction,” I said at the time, “diminishes us all.” I quoted the old spiritual: “I’m going to lay my burden down…Down by the riverside… I ain’t gonna study war no more.” War is obsolete as an instrument of foreign policy, I explained. Negotiation, sanctions, the way of nonviolence these options must be exhaustively pursued before we even consider the use of weaponry…as an individual I believe that nothing, but nothing, justifies the use of violence between people or nations. There is no excuse for the waste of the resources our nation spends on a military force.

In the U.S., many do not know the cost of our wars. The U.S.’s post-9/11 war violence alone led to the deaths of 4.5 - 4.7 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan. While nearly a million of those people died directly in war, millions more died in the years that followed. Beyond direct casualties, our wars caused economic disaster, malnutrition, health system collapse, environmental destruction, and further violence, all of which led to more death. (To read more about the human cost of war, please read this brilliant Substack post).

The levels of long-term destruction to people and our planet, caused by the U.S and Israel’s war with Iran and Israel’s attacks and occupation of Lebanon, will only continue to rise with each passing day. Powerful forces that stand to profit from armed conflict will continue to push for the prolonging of this immoral destruction.

The defense-tech industry depends on our addiction to war to sustain itself. We continue to enter wars to line the pockets of the wealthy and starve the minds and bodies of the poor. In Heidi Peltier’s research for Brown University’s Costs of War project, she notes that “Investments in infrastructure, healthcare, education, and emergency preparedness, for instance, have all suffered as military spending and industry have crowded them out. Increased resources channeled to the military further increase the political power of military industries, ensuring that the cycle of economic dependence continues — militarized sectors of the economy see perpetual increases in funding and manpower while other human needs go unmet.”

My disturbance about these advertisements for defense technologies on the Metro does not stem from nostalgia for when the ads used to be about art exhibits or shows (which I do miss). My point is that the reason we cannot feed our neighbors is because we choose not to. This war with Iran, and those before, has been a war of choice. One where corporations, politicians, and the wealthy have decided that their personal benefit from the destruction of other human’s lives and land is worth the cost of thousands, if not millions of lives.

While reading another Substack, I recently learned that 13th Century theologian Thomas Aquinas “believed that political authority is legitimate only when it serves shared flourishing.” Our political authority today is antithetical to shared flourishing and, therefore, is illegitimate.

We must be firmly and wholeheartedly anti-war. To hunger for peace. To stand with our brothers and sisters around the world who stay awake at night as bombs rain down on their neighborhoods.

Last week, as I walked around my quaint D.C. neighborhood, I noticed the freshly sprouted daffodils lining my street. Heavy raindrops fell to the ground, splattering against the sidewalk. As I experienced the fresh spring rain, I imagined the oil raining down on the people of Iran. In the yellow flowers blossoming, I recalled an image I’d seen earlier in the day of flowers blossoming around cemeteries in Gaza. Though existing in wildly different realities, I know deep in my bones how intertwined my flourishing is to those suffering in my city and around the world.

How do we hold both the rebirth that accompanies springtime with our nation’s growing violence and destruction abroad? It can be tempting to either fall into a dark pit of cynicism or numb ourselves into indifference. Neither of these options are productive.

Now, more than ever, we must center the voices and wellbeing of our brothers and sisters around us who are hungry. We must decenter the forces that tell us “war is inevitable” or “necessary.”

In the spirit of the final weeks of Lent, I call on the wisdom of Melissa Florer-Bixler, a faith leader in the Mennonite tradition. She says of the Lord’s Prayer:

“When we pray “deliver us from evil,” we are not asking to be spared abstract wickedness. We are asking to be delivered from the violence that crushes children beneath concrete and starves their bodies long after the bombs have fallen. We pray because the temptation to call such violence necessary — to accept it as the price of peace — is powerful enough to deceive even those who believe themselves righteous.”

My aunt and hundreds of community members had held these flowers as they marched outside of Miami’s immigration court five days before. Miami’s unusually cold air had kept these flowers intact. They were a physical reminder to me of her brave acts of solidarity. After carefully laying my suitcase next to the roses, I shut the trunk with pride.

I often like to place my hand on a structure and imagine all that it has witnessed since its inception. Whether an ancient column, a wise olive tree, or a modern vehicle, the structures that hold us bear witness. With my hand on the cold car exterior, I felt pride for what this car, which has passed through various members of our family, has witnessed.

Before the car belonged to my Aunt Ellie, it belonged to her brother, my Uncle Patrick. He used to fill the trunk with all sorts of signs, boxes, and mischief. My Uncle Patrick was often up to ‘good trouble.’ Restless in this maddening world. He acted courageously and with an infectious smile.

There is a picture of my uncle’s joyful courage in my bedroom. In it, he’s yelling into a megaphone, with a glimmer of hope in his eyes. He was protesting the first Trump administration and standing in solidarity with migrants. I meditate on photographs of my ancestors nearly every night. Their courage, and their ability to see that our freedoms are intimately wound into everyone else’s, continues to drive me forward.

On the first Sunday in February, I honored what would have been my Uncle’s 47th birthday. Ever since he passed away, nearly six years ago, his birthdays have served as a gut check for me. I ask myself each year, on his birthday, two questions: Am I being brave enough? Am I weaving communities with joy and love?

In 2019, when my Uncle Patrick co-founded the Miami Freedom Project, an organization to transform Miami’s political culture, I am told he wrote on a whiteboard ‘Be Not Afraid.” Bravery was to be the foundation of his organizing.

In the past few years, we have witnessed the rapid unraveling of our social fabric and an acceptance for the unacceptable. Large corporations and violent state-run forces seek to tear us apart. But, for many, the comforts of our lives make courage appear too inconvenient. Too uncomfortable. Too messy. And, I sense that some of our movements for social justice have been stripped of spirit and mercy. Acting mercifully takes bravery too.

How can we thread courage, love, and mercy together in this maddening world?

I spent my uncle’s birthday with the next generation of our family, my 16-month-old niece, Bella. She’s all parts precocious, curious, and comedic. Bella joined me on the couch to watch old videos of my uncle. Tears streamed down my cheeks and Bella stared in amazement, as if she was taking mental notes.

I hope she was.

I show her these videos not only because I want her to know his infectious laugh, but because I want her to inherit his courage.

The brilliant civil rights activist Valarie Kaur speaks to this. As the ancestors of the future, she asks us: Will your descendants inherit a legacy of your courage and joy, or your fear?

Our courage, to me, is the inheritance we should spend more time building and investing in.

Acting with courage was never supposed to be comfortable. It’s friction-filled, gritty, challenging, and confusing. But, we are here because of our ancestors’ bravery. It’s our responsibility to continue weaving that thread of courage forward.

On my flight home from Miami, I cross-stitched fuchsia threads through white cloth. Hole by hole, my needle jumped and punctured the fabric. I thought of the torn social fabric of our world. Our collective and individual exhaustion. And weary hope.

I then thought of the courage that I feel threaded into me. From my ancestors, from my aunt, from strangers standing beside their immigrant brothers and sisters. This bravery passes through us, into our communities, and towards our descendants.

What is the courage and the care, the bravery and the light that you choose to thread? What kind of stories will your descendants share with their children? Will these stories fill them with bravery?

Subscribe now

Recently, my friend Anam has been offering writing prompts in her incredible Substack. Inspired by her, I invite you all to an action prompt:

I like to think of Valentine’s Day as the New Years Eve of love. This month, I invite you to gather some friends or neighbors, and share dishes that feel like love. Discuss or reflect: What are your resolutions for how you will show up with courage both for your loved ones and strangers alike? How will our acts of love ripple across generations and weave us closer together.

“God does not wait for history to get better before He enters it. He enters while history is what it is. Thus, He teaches us that no time is definitively lost and no situation is too dark for God to dwell in.

That is why the Gospel begins not with a clamorous miracle, but with an administrative act, not with angels’ song, but with a census,” said Cardinal Pizzaballa. His voice rang out across the Church of the Nativity, late on Christmas Eve.

Nuns, priest, politicians, and every day people gathered in Bethlehem, Jesus’s birth place, to celebrate. Incense danced between the crowd. With my back leaning against a pew that held several Italian priests, I sat on the cold marble floor of the sanctuary , savoring the wisdom in the Cardinal’s homily. His words connected the lessons of 2000 years ago to the chaos and violence of this very moment.

We cannot wait until the stifling of free speech ceases for our cries for justice to grow louder. We cannot wait for the bombs to stop falling to stand in solidarity with those under fire. We cannot wait for the world around us to become less cruel to open our hearts. We cannot wait for our neighbors to become loved ones to let them into our homes. This is what the Christmas story teaches us. This is what Palestine has taught me.

On my first morning in Palestine, my boyfriend’s landlord, Raed, invited us into his home on the Mount of Olives for coffee and sweets. Before feeding his girls, Raed made sure we were nourished. While I sipped on Nescafe and gazed out at the olive trees in his backyard, Raed told us about how he met his wife while driving a taxi. His storytelling mingled with the voice of an Al Jazeera reporter, emerging from the TV. Videos from the genocide in Gaza played continuously in the background. The reality that we were less than 50 miles away from Gaza was not lost on anyone. History is cruel and gut wrenching. And yet, Raed immediately opened his door to me, a stranger visiting from the U.S., because he knew that there is no situation too dark for kinship not to exist in.

Later that morning, I found myself driving to Haifa with an Israeli young man who identifies as an anti-Zionist. “This state stole nearly three years of my life forcing me into the military,” he told me. He had served in a non-combat role nearly a decade ago, but continues to hold pain and resentment for being forced into the military, especially one that commits ethnic cleansing and genocide. I gazed out of the car window to see the cruel face of Ofer Prison, a prison in the West Bank notorious for torture. I closed my eyes and said a prayer.

After a series of questions about being anti-zionist in academia and around his family, this young man told me that he has challenging conversations with his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It was in reading his grandfather’s research on the Holocaust, he explained, that he learned to identify the ongoing atrocities in Gaza as a genocide.

Hours later, on this never-ending first day in Palestine, we went to our final visit of the night, with my boyfriend’s aunt. We arrived at her beautifully decorated apartment at 10:30pm, after a nearly three hour bus ride from Haifa. All we had eaten for dinner up until that point were stale strawberry-flavored crackers.

When we arrived to her home in East Jerusalem, her countertop was filled with dips, homemade pizza, kebab, and fresh squeezed lemonade from her garden. With work in the morning, I assumed this visit was simply a pit stop on the way home. Instead, his aunt continued to add more food onto our plates, insisted on pouring more lemonade in our glasses, and with time, began telling us stories of her activism during the first intifada, when she was our age. Mid-sentence, she scurried off to her bedroom, and returned with old letters she had pulled from her dresser.

Thin and wrinkled, the yellow-tinted paper carried messages between her and her late husband during their various stints in Israeli prisons. While in prison, detainees being released would swallow letters from other prisoners to their loved ones, and once out, would excrete these plastic coated letters and share them. She brushed pizza crumbs off part of the counter, laid out her letters, and read them aloud. She had not waited for history to get better before leaning into love and action.

While on my travels, I kept a book in my bag, Ordinary Mysticism by Mirabai Starr. I’d break open the coffee-stained book mid-bus ride or beside a bowl of hummus. It was a constant reminder that the everyday acts around me, especially the abundant generosity, were expressions of ordinary mysticism.

In the Cardinal’s homily on Christmas Eve, he said, “Christmas does not distance us from history but profoundly engages so that we are not neutral, but partakers…To celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem is to recognize that God has chosen a real land marked by wounds and expectations. The holiness of the places coexists with wounds that are still open.”

On Christmas Eve, hesitant joy and agony mingled on the holiest of grounds. By 9:00 am scouts from across Palestine proudly played their trumpets and drums, marching through the streets of Bethlehem. It was the first time they had celebrated like this since 2022. But, these celebrations were inseparable from the open wounds and occupation around us.

Later in the afternoon, just down the road from the Church of the Nativity, I gazed up at apartheid walls, looming large over the Aida refugee camp. The Lajee Community Center in the Aida camp, despite repeated attacks and incursions by the Israeli forces, has continued to expand their kindergarten and health clinic over the past two years, since I was last there. A 5-year old’s drawing of the Palestinian flag hung over the freshly painted, bright yellow classroom wall. The soccer field buzzed with the energy of competitive kids. The staff at Lajee could not wait for history to get better to build for their future.

Check out the work of the Lajee Center

After our visit to the center, we wandered into the camp and found a barber who gave my boyfriend a 2-hour long haircut. The barber’s scissors moved with care and purpose. Just outside the shop, the 50-foot-tall occupation wall surrounded the camp and the Israeli-manned remote-controlled guns remained trained on the main street. An Israeli military raid on the camp, the morning of our visit, did not inhibit the kindness and generosity of those that live there. The people of Palestine do not wait for history to become less painful to practice radical hospitality.

“God chooses to be present in the world and, consequently, the way in which we too are called to remain in history…Christmas is a school of responsibility. It teaches us that the fullness of time is not an ideal condition to wait for, but a reality to welcome.”

Later in the week, as I smushed my long legs into the back seat of a shared taxi, from the West Bank city of Ramallah to Nablus, I stared out the window at the roadside. Thousands of Israeli flags lined the roadside. Settlers had planted them there just months before. Throughout the hour-long ride, I followed our location on my phone’s Google Maps, studying the names of the Palestinian villages we crossed and bearing witness to the illegal Israeli settlements that seek to tear at the fabric of the West Bank. With nearly 210 illegal outposts and settlements across the West Bank, the global community is not remaining in history, but instead turning a blind eye to this cruelty. Nothing about the 2,000+ Israeli flags strewn across Palestinian land between Ramallah and Nablus made me think of this land as any less Palestinian. Flags do not demarcate the soul of a land.

The people of Palestine do not need to put massive flags or remote-controlled weapons to claim their land. They are not waiting for history to ‘get better’ to tend to the earth beneath their feet nor nurture their communities and those around them. It is the hospitality of the host who reminds us of whose home we are in.

“The worlds’ night may be deep, but it is not definitive. The light of Bethlehem does not blind us; rather it lights the way. It spreads from heart to heart, through humble gestures, reconciled words, daily choices of peace made by men and women who allow the Gospel to take flesh in their lives,” exclaimed Cardinal Pizzaballa during the Midinight Mass.

On our final day in Palestine, we pushed our luggage through drizzling rain to meet Sameh, our taxi driver for the morning. He would be driving us to the bridge with Jordan. Along the way, I savored the view of Palestine’s honey-drizzled mountains and luscious date palm farms as rain clouds billowed in the distance. Halfway through the drive, Sameh turned to us and asked, “Bidkum mo3ajanat?” Do you want pastries? Despite insisting on our fullness from breakfast an hour before, he stopped at a bakery and proceeded to treat us to a second breakfast. Even as we were leaving Palestine, Sameh’s hospitality reminded us that the cruelty of this world is no excuse to hold back on our generosity.

Each humble gesture in Palestine, following years of incalculable pain, lights the way for all of us. Each moment of generosity in a political climate that rewards greed, serves as our teacher. This past week in Palestine, and the Christmas story itself, is a powerful reminder that we cannot simply wait for history to become right for us to actively take part in it.

“The difficult situations of this time are not the result of destiny, but of political choices, of human responsibilities, and of decisions that often put the interests of a few before the good of all,” stated the Cardinal at the end of his homily.

The history we are living through is terrifying. These first few days of 2026 have made that abundantly clear. But, each of us has a choice, each and every day, to approach this darkness around us with light, courage, and community…or not. We cannot wait for history to get better to practice radical hospitality, to raise our voices, and to open our hearts.

May this new year bring your courage, solidarity, strength, and revolutionary love.

Subscribe now

Donate to the Lajee Center in Bethlehem

My eyes gravitated to the first paragraph. “The loving people I have met all across the world seem to know that if it is love at all, it has to be love for everybody,” the page read. “As soon as you even begin to parcel it out, you are not in the great field of love.” The book was The Tears of Things by Richard Rohr and these words sank deep. I shut the book and sprang back over the tracks to meet my friends who had withstood the chill of a late November Irish afternoon. I interrupted their Thanksgiving dinner planning to share the wisdom of the blue book.

Later in the evening, while tossing sweet potatoes in paprika and nestling sliced lemons into chicken, I reflected on fate – Every little and big decision that brought me together with these friends, new and old. The words of the blue book resurfaced: ‘if it is love at all, it has to be love for everybody.’ This Thanksgiving was unlike any other. I was hosting the meal for friends who were evacuated from Gaza a few months ago to begin their Master’s Degrees in Ireland.

A few days before, while explaining the work of Gaza Champions to an Irish man, he asked my friend Anam what kept our organizing work going and whether we had any hope. 

“I’m an optimist,” Anam responded, referring to the successes she witnessed doing mutual aid work and connecting her friends in Gaza with allies around the world. “I believe in the power of love.” Her capacity to bear witness to the horrors of this world and remain steadfast in a practice of love and solidarity never ceases to amaze me. 

“Well, I believe in fascism,” the man responded.

Reflecting on his attempt to be realistic (or at least temper his expectations of the world), I cannot help but feel sorry for those who would rather bet on fascism than love. Facism may be louder, but love, I’m convinced, is more powerful. To practice love does not mean ignoring reality. It means choosing to respond to it in a way that is deep, expansive, and courageous. This kind of love shows up in lightness, but becomes especially apparent amidst darkness. It’s a kind of revolutionary love that demands we look at a stranger, see them as part of us, and put that love into action. Each courageous act of love fulfills Rohr’s vision of a “great field of love.”

The purpose of my trip to Ireland was to meet my friend Abdallah in person. Just a few months before, Abdallah was evacuated from Gaza to begin his Master’s at Maynooth University in Ireland. Soon after he arrived, I booked my ticket to Dublin. Throughout the genocide, we committed to one day sharing meals together in person. Our time in Ireland together did not disappoint. 

I felt the field of love my second day in Ireland. Abdallah invited me to meet three other students, all in their mid-twenties, who had been evacuated from Gaza. In the colorful-tiled nook of a falafel shop, the five of us discussed international law, workshopped dissertation ideas, planned future baby names, laughed at YouTube videos, and debated dialects across Gaza. The conversation vacillated between lightness and darkness, joy and heartache. Love was the container for all of these emotions. As I learned more about each of these students, all I could think was: every human being is a universe. The more we view each person as a universe, the less capable we become of dehumanizing or separating ourselves from each other.

After asking the other students about their families in Gaza, I learned about the dozens of times they were forced to relocate in the past two years. For Nisreen, a young woman studying communications whose sense of humor reminded me of my cousin, her family had been displaced 17 times since October 7. Her family is not the exception, they are the norm in Gaza. I cannot fathom the cruelty that drives such displacement.

“Where did your family originally come from?” I asked. “Were they from Gaza?”

One by one, my new friends told me about the villages that their grandparents were driven out of during the Nakba in 1948 and their eventual displacement into Gaza. I wondered how many times Nisreen’s grandparents started over again back in 1948.

“This time is different,” Nisreen said, sipping her sage tea. “Gen Z, we know our humanity is interconnected and social media allows us to see that.” We discussed recent appalling remarks, made by former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz, who suggested that Holocaust education had unintended consequences in educating our generation about genocide. Our education drives our awareness and social media creates new avenues for solidarity. Our spontaneous friendship in this Irish falafel shop was exactly what those in power fear: love in action.

After several hours, the shisha smoke cleared the air and our hunger set in. I thought the night was coming to a close. I was wrong. Abdallah and Nisreen led us down Temple Bar street to a mini mart. It was 10:30pm, and before I could make sense of what was happening, pans sizzled in Nisreen’s dorm kitchen. 

“I’m looking at how AI weapons systems are being used in the genocide,” said Mohammed, one of the recently evacuated students. He was describing his Master’s dissertation, while he dropped falafel into a pot of hot oil.

“I would have been a millionaire if I had these in Gaza during the war,” Nisreen said, referring to the cans of ful medames she was using to make fava bean dip. Like magic, the table was covered in dishes: grape leaves, halloumi, hummus, and more. Our hands wove across the table, scooping the food with folded pita breads. It seemed as though no matter how much we ate, the bowls never became any less full. Once again, I was in the great field of love. I was being nourished by friends who had just months before witnessed and endured starvation in Gaza.

That dorm room table is why I agree with Anam. Why I have hope. Why I believe in the power of love. Because it is simply never a unidirectional force. The love you give to this world will ripple through and shake the world and it will find its way back to you.

On Thanksgiving evening, I cooked for my new friends from Gaza for the first time. The carefully plotted oven schedule we developed on our tram rides made sure the cornbread stuffing, sweet potatoes, and lemony roasted chicken would all be ready in time. With mismatched chairs collected around the dining room table and gratitude abundant, a stranger's Airbnb became our home. 

Before turning to our pumpkin pie, we lounged on the living room’s deep red carpet. “Let’s teach Lina Tarneeb,” Anam suggested. This card game, popular in Gaza, reminded me of my family’s fierce games of Spades. Each round was met with strategy, accusations of cheating, secret hand signals, and abundant laughter. 

“We played this for hours at Al Baqa cafe by the sea in Gaza,” said Anam. 

“I haven’t played since before the genocide began,” Nisreen replied.

“We didn’t have time for it. We were just trying to survive,” Abdallah added.

On an island of dreary weather and radiant solidarity, we savored pumpkin pie, launched whipped cream in the air the way I did with my cousins growing up, and played tarneeb until our eyes grew weary. The joy and levity of the evening did not bypass the heaviness and horrors of the genocide that half our group had experienced. Abdallah and Nisreen continued to ache and long for their families and communities–yet, over these two meals, I witnessed how, in spite of the horrors, life demands our joy, solidarity, and kinship. It demands that we continuously build and bask in the great field of love. 

The names of Nisreen and Mohammed are pseudonyms to protect their privacy.

In apartment doorways, on sidewalks, and at bus stops, the energy for Mamdani was electric. Mamdani speaks boldly, communicates creatively, meets communities where they are at, and is clear with his policies, making it easy on us volunteers to share his vision.

From the Syrian barista who handed me free coffee for canvassing, to the lunch go-ers cheering for Mamdani from their chairs, Mamdani’s campaign is one that so many people, overlooked by traditional politicians, can truly see themselves in. And, he has created a movement that goes well beyond the bounds of New York City. The woman I had been paired with to canvass had flown in from Sacramento just to spend a few days knocking doors for his campaign.

But, it wasn’t always this way.

In fact, many strategists advise candidates and organizers to do the opposite of Mamdani. In an effort to make political messaging more “palatable” we have been forced to believe that bold approaches have no place in campaigns. That instead we need to cater to the dollars of donors. They could not have been more wrong.

To those that say not condemning a genocide, bowing to billionaires, and caving to the president is strategic, let this night show that strategic cowardice is not a winning message.

Be Not Afraid.

Part of what inspired me to knock doors on Saturday (beyond my enthusiasm for Mamdani’s policies) was the vision of my late Uncle Patrick. When Patrick began mapping out plans with his co-founder for the Miami Freedom Project, he boldly wrote “Be Not Afraid” at the top of the white board. His vision, to meaningfully engage with those whose fears may prevent them from pursuing just policies and work across differences to build people-power, lives on.

We have much to learn from Mamdani too on how not to be afraid.

Despite the rampant Islamophobia he and 1 million+ New Yorkers face, Mamdani proudly embraces his heritage and Muslim faith. Despite ICE raids across the country, Mamdani spoke to his Latino constituency in Spanish in the lead up to the Election and stands up to Trump. Despite the millions of dollars poured in to suppress his momentum, Mamdani continued to build a movement with a growing community.

Zohran Mamdani won tonight precisely because he was not afraid to stand boldly on the side of justice, community, and affordability. With an agenda that centered the care economy, he even got 64% of the young male vote; reversing the trend toward Trump amongst young men in NYC.

At the end of my volunteer shift, one constituent walked straight from our conversation to the polls to vote. I was heading to the Subway, feeling unstoppable, when I encountered an elderly woman on the street.

“Good afternoon, have you voted yet?” I asked.

“No, not yet,” she said.

“Do you know who you’ll be voting for?” I responded.

The woman proceeded to tell me she was planning to vote for Andrew Cuomo. Her reasoning? Cuomo seemed more realistic and Mamdani’s policies seemed unattainable.

My response to her was as follows: If we did not already have public libraries today, I believe we would have had serious trouble getting enough votes for a politician who committed to bringing free books to every community. This politician would have been lambasted for being a “socialist” and criticized for outlandish policies. But, in reality, with public libraries across our communities, we recognize how essential these institutions are for community life and education. Why should universal child care be any different?

We must elect candidates who dare to dream rather than those who settle for the status quo; who feel a deep responsibility to solve our challenges, rather than distract us from them; and, who push us forward rather than pull us back.

At the end of our conversation, the old woman told me I had not fully changed her mind, but had inspired her to rethink her decision. The conversations we have with our neighbors matter because, as Mamdani has modeled, our movements depend on knowing one another–each other’s challenges, languages, faiths, hopes, and even fears.

In Mamdani’s victory speech tonight, he said “we have bowed to the altar of caution and we have paid a mighty price.” A mighty price it has been, but it is now time to lift up our heads, with courage, community, and conviction.

As I boarded the subway at the end of my volunteer shift, legs weary from canvassing, a passenger across from me on the train looked at the Mamdani door-hangers in my purse and gave me a thumbs up. Soon enough the entire Subway car started talking about voting for Mamdani and the hope they felt. People reached their hands out just to get a Mamdani door-hanger from me. His campaign’s hope is infectious.

As we head into another contentious election year, and what will certainly be an uneasy road ahead, we must draw on this energy to reimagine what is possible.

Let us not be afraid to stand with our brothers and sisters across communities. To stand up to the billionaires with small ideas. To learn from each other’s pains and to turn our fears into action.

Subscribe now

Thank you for your tremendous support for Abdallah as he settles into life in Ireland and his family as they continue to survive the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

After spending two weeks living with a host family, Abdallah started classes in late September at Maynooth University. He’s settling into the life of a student, studying in common rooms, spraining his ankle while dancing, learning to cook new dishes and play chess, and savoring the sweet flavors of fruit that remind him of home in Gaza.

Amidst his studies, he’s also found the time to continue to write a memoir about his life in Gaza, publish a piece in the Irish Times and +972 Magazine (I will paste the text of his article at the end of this post), and start working with me to plan my upcoming trip to visit him in Ireland for Thanksgiving. In between checking in on each other’s families, we’re getting to do what friends in their 20s should be doing: booking rental cars, planning itineraries, and anticipating nourishing meals and long conversations.

When my niece, Bella, was born last year, Abdallah swooned over the photos and anticipated the day he’d finally meet her. This month, on her first birthday, he sent her an Irish gift in the mail: a warm lamb backpack. I have no words to describe the thoughtfulness and care.

These past few weeks have been quite tough. Abdallah’s thoughtful gift came during a scary health emergency in my family. It is one of the beautiful reminders we received that kinship is never a one-way street. Kinship is circular, beautiful, complex, and grounded in love. Kinship came in the form of our loved ones nearby, joining us in the hospital waiting room with Cuban coffee and food, or from friends from afar, like Abdallah, checking in and sending warm wishes. It was a reminder that to be generous with our time, energy, or wallet in these trying times is the bravery that this world requires.

While my family was able to access essential healthcare, Abdallah’s family remains in their tent in Khan Yunis. With the news of a ceasefire, Abdallah’s family hoped that Nour, Abdallah’s brother, who went missing in May 2024, might be released in the detainee swap. After the ceasefire and swap, his family carried images of Nour around Gaza to Palestinians released from Israeli prisons, asking if they had seen Nour in any of the prisons. On the first day, his family heard from three released men that they had seen Nour in prison. Nevertheless, the cruelty of the genocide and occupation remain and right now, they have no way of knowing for sure where Nour may be. Today, they spent the day looking at Palestinian corpses in a hospital just in case.

I am sharing below Abdallah’s Article in the Irish Times. It was republished in +972 Magazine without a paywall and Maynooth University published a press release about it today and held a dinner with him and his professors to celebrate it this evening. You’ll notice that much of it is drawn from Abdallah’s previous Substack here. Your support and encouragement led him to pitch the piece for the Irish Times.

Many things can be true at once. This ceasefire is not ending the senseless killing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. There is so much deep pain. Adjustment to life outside of Gaza is lonely in many ways and nourishing in others. Abdallah is supported as a student, and his family continues to need support in these trying times.

If you can donate, please do so via venmo to @carolina-mccabe or via his GoFundMe.

Subscribe now

Source: +972 Magazine & The Irish Times

My last words to Gaza

I didn’t turn back to see my family again after saying goodbye. I felt too ashamed. I was leaving for peace, and all they had was famine and war.

By Abdallah Aljazzar October 21, 2025

“I need a haircut,” I told my barber, Mohammed. “Okay. The usual?” he asked. “No, I am proposing to my love tomorrow.” The lie came easily: I’m single, and have been for a long time. But I needed the barber’s hand to move with extra purpose and care, because this was no normal haircut.

A little while earlier, the Irish government had called me. It was a Tuesday in August. “Prepare to leave Gaza for Ireland. Maynooth University is ready.” For more than a year, I had rehearsed my departure from my home in Gaza, like my little brother Ali practices flying kites. Now, the rehearsal was over.

I had big plans, but how do you leave your life? How do you give up your home? I wanted to depart with my spine straight, my dignity intact. I didn’t want to feel like I was running away. But to leave home with “dignity”? The word has lost all meaning.

For a start, I finally decided, it means how I look. In the barber’s mirror, I saw a mirage of my brother, Nour — a police officer who has been missing since he vanished during Israel’s bombing of Khan Younis. “How do I look?” I asked him silently. “Do I look human enough for Ireland?”

For my entire life, I had been the one left behind, watching others disappear into the possibility of elsewhere: cousins, friends, acquaintances. But this time, I was the ghost preparing to vanish. My joy was shrouded in fear, like a second skin. What if one Israeli soldier at the Kerem Shalom crossing into Israel decided not to let me leave — or worse? This is the reality of life in Gaza: I knew then that excitement only means getting ready to be disappointed.

That evening, I carried two gallons of water to my makeshift bathroom, and poured it over my body. My skin slowly remembered the feel of being clean. No one would see me cry there, bathed in water and sand, salt and soap, and my own grief.

I dressed in my only clean clothes and moved through the hugs, saving my mum for last. My mother is pure love, incapable of hatred even though hatred has claimed so many of her own. I breathed in the scent of home one final time. Then, stepping outside my tent, my family followed me into the street like a funeral procession.

I found a taxi instead of a donkey cart to carry me from Al-Mawasi to Deir Al-Balah in the center of the Strip, where the evacuation bus would pick me up. At the last moment, it struck me that this might be the final goodbye. What should I say? Before climbing into the taxi, I looked at my little brother Ali and said, “Deer balak ʻala ammak.” I wasn’t sure if he got me. “Ali, you take care, and take care of mum, okay?”

These were my last words to Gaza.

I didn’t turn back to see my family again. I felt too ashamed. I was leaving for peace, and all they had was famine and war. I tried to tell myself that I was leaving so that one day I could bring them out, too. Except I didn’t believe that either.

That night, as I waited for the bus to arrive, I lay on asphalt, using my backpack as a pillow. But I stayed awake, following the Irish instructions with the devotion of a monk. At 3 a.m., I stepped onto the bus and into the unknown, with a group of more than 40 other scholars.

As the bus lurched forward, all I could see was a landscape of ruin, Gaza in fragments, Ali’s eyes with heavy responsibilities, and Nour’s absence. By 7 a.m., we had reached Rafah, the place where I was born. The war had turned it into a graveyard, occupied by forces that made it a no-go zone.

Still, I scanned across broken concrete. Maybe Nour was trapped somewhere, waiting. Nour’s name means light in Arabic, and without him, my life is shrouded in darkness.

At the Karem Abu Salem/Kerem Shalom crossing, one of the officials on the Palestinian side offered me a cigarette. Inside the Strip, a single cigarette cost a day’s wage. I had quit smoking, but took one anyway, for the ritual of this fellowship. Soon I found myself in a circle of fellow exiles, puffing smoke into the morning air, and watching it drift over the border.

Finally, we crossed to the Israeli side. The Irish embassy staff were waiting like angels. They gave us edible food and water that was not rationed. I also witnessed the magic of my visa emerging from a printer. When I looked at it, my eyes lost focus. This one little piece of paper was all it took?

The rest of that journey — to Jordan, then to Turkey, before arriving in Dublin — is still a blur. Yet, in and out of sleep, Nour’s voice kept coming to me: “Carry me with you, not as your weight, but as your wings.”

During the 2014 war, we lost the marble factory that was our family business. A few years later, we rebuilt it, but in 2021 it was partially destroyed. Now, it’s completely gone, along with my house and farm and maybe Nour too.

The announcement of a ceasefire last week felt surreal. All I can think about is getting my family out, to ease their burden, help them find comfort, process the trauma, and start over. But I don’t know how.

At night, I dream Nour is looking for me. “I’m in Ireland, habibi,” I call out to him. “Everything is green and lovely. I have moved into my accommodation in Maynooth. Just one room, but big enough for two. I saved a place for you by the window. Just tell me where you are, habibi. I will come get you.”

I wonder whether he is alive somewhere in the Israeli prisons, unable to reach us. Will he be released as part of the agreement? Will he call me from our family tent in Gaza, saying, “I miss you too, big brother”?

And then, last Tuesday, I woke up to my family calling me. They had met three Palestinians who had just been released from Israeli detention, and they said they had seen Nour. He is alive. He is okay.

I found myself on the ground crying. Just tell me where you are, habibi. I will come get you.

Subscribe to my Substack with Abdallah

I could go on, but the world’s horrors are not the point of why I write this Substack late on a Tuesday night.

If I’ve learned anything over the past few years, it’s that the true antidote we have to the cruelty and nonsensicalness of this world, is to to build stronger, deeper, and wider communities.

Tonight, I write because I’m inspired by a trivia night.

Not the bar trivia nights where you’re screaming into someone else’s ear so that they can nod along like they hear you. I’m talking about sitting on the floor of my living room tonight, clicking through a crafty presentation of trivia questions with 15 friends, new and old (while also trying to calm down my anxious dog). Bits of chaos, chatter, spilled drinks, and point disputes carried us through the night. Friction.

You see, I’ve been thinking about friction a lot lately. The joys of messiness in a world that is trying to make your life as bare and smooth as possible.

Tech and AI are trying to strip away the friction from our lives.

As the crises in loneliness only seems to be getting worse, tech companies are trying to make relationships absolutely frictionless. It started with making friendship and relationship decisions through the swipe of a finger. Dating and friendship apps appealed to young people by taking away the fears of in-person rejection.

However, this week, I spoke on a panel that inspired me to learn more about AI “companionship.” Over 72% of American teens report using AI “companions.” Tech companies are commodifying intimacy and offering 24/7 care from a robot (that then sells your data and preferences.) For just $13.99 a month, you can have an AI girlfriend that is constructed exactly to your liking, absolutely subservient, and keeps you isolated.

The fear that AI companionship will break down community on a societal level is very real. But, it’s up to us to let that happen or not. And how do we stop that from happening? We turn to real, in-person, friction-abundant community.

Back to Trivia Nights

I hosted a trivia night for the first time in the fall of 2023. I had just moved into a studio apartment in Jordan, after leaving Palestine. The air around me was thick with grief and absolutely nothing made sense. In a time where it could have been easier to go back to the U.S. or stay isolated in my room, I instead began gathering friends for a weekly trivia night.

Every Wednesday night, in my small apartment, friends came over with homemade cookies, a rug, ingredients to make creamy Bengali tea, and fresh berries. One of us would write a game of trivia, and we’d spend the night laughing and channeling our worries into point counting and obscure facts. It was the best of times and the worst of times.

When I think back to that fall in Jordan, I am drawn to those nights, cramped together across the floor of my apartment, and how they were some of the brightest moments of my life. When shit was hitting the fan, we leaned on one another.

Which brings me back to tonight. In the invite for trivia/dinner night, I named the theme of the pre-trivia dinner “upside down” (to reflect the state of the world) and asked everyone to bring a dish that had to be flipped, tossed, or shaken. People showed up with dumplings, upside-down cakes, scallion pancakes, and focaccia, and more.

After having been sucked into depressing research on AI companions the past few days, the sensation of being in a room full of energy, friction, new topics of conversation, awkward pauses, and delicious dishes felt so whole. In an era where companies profit off of keeping us apart (or in a dark room talking to a robot) choosing and building community is a pretty radical act.

Once the trivia night ended and everyone left, I wheeled the full recycling bins out for the night. Unsurprising to anyone that knows me, I then proceeded to knock over the bin and spill all the cans. As I picked up each can, all I could think to myself was “the only thing that makes sense right now is community.”

Tonight was a reminder that when societies face oppression, upheaval, and disaster, those that forge tighter bonds increase their resilience and survival. In fact, Darwin’s research actually shows that “survival of the kindest” is more accurate than “survival of the fittest” for explaining which species survive.

The way you build community doesn’t have to be grand nor perfect. In fact, the friction in it is what keeps us human. It is on each of us to not let the muscles of community-building and in-person connection atrophy.

Your community time doesn’t have to look like hosting a monthly trivia night in your home. But, creativity and connection are our superpowers right now. Here are some recent moments of community that brought me joy.

• Last month, a friend and I hosted a cookbook club. We each made a recipe out of the same cookbook and brought it all together to share a delicious meal.

• A friend is hosting a free weekly cross-stitching workshop that grows each week. Some nights, we’re 5 people around the table, and other nights, we’re 15.

• I joined a running group a few months ago. Staying active with other people gave me the confidence and support to train and run a half marathon along 10,000 other people in D.C. last weekend.

• My uncle launched a Cuban-Ethiopian pop-up with salsa, food, and dominoes for the community. 150 people showed up last Saturday night.

• Gaza Champions created a literary magazine and this weekend we launched it at a local brewery with vendors, food, and readings. We built community and raised over $3,000 for families in Gaza.

With love,

Lina

These words hung in my grandmother’s kitchen growing up. When I looked closely at the frame this weekend, I was amazed by how each stitch, threaded decades ago, wound together to form words that feel so relevant today.

My grandmother’s cross-stitch sat in a frame to my left as my phone rang. The familiar WhatsApp tone. Beep…Beeeep… My brother and his wife stood by me. We were video calling Abdallah so that they could meet him for the first time. ‘Marhaba’ Abdallah picked up the phone, wearing a red beanie with the words “Maynooth University” embroidered in bold white font.

The last time I had called Abdallah from this very home, it had been a hot June day, and we were recording our episode for my podcast. In the background, I could hear the sounds of drones hovering above him. The fear, the genocide, and the helplessness seemed to have no end in sight.

Since the day we recorded our episode, conditions in Gaza, driven by man-made famine and genocide, have continued to rapidly deteriorate. Against all odds, Abdallah continued to hold out hope that he would be leaving Gaza to begin his Master’s abroad by this fall. He dreamt of joining us in D.C., at Georgetown where he has had a full-ride since 2024, but with each step away from humanity that this administration has taken, the prospects dimmed.

Despite the compounding crises unfolding globally and domestically, people who have never spoken to Abdallah, but have heard his story, continued to contribute funds. With these funds, Abdallah was able to keep him and his family alive. He recently described a bag of macaroni, bought with money fundraised, as “a treasure.” While keeping his family safe, he continued to apply to schools and scholarships.

Abdallah and I met in March of 2024 after being matched through our mutual friend at Gaza Champions. Abdallah was a friend I had not met yet. What started as simple conversations to get to know each other for the fundraising campaign reached a gentle familiarity and in turn, a genuine friendship. A friendship that had been waiting for us to meet. Neither Abdallah, nor his family, were ever strangers. Not to me, not to you.

A week or so ago, I received a text from Abdallah. He had hope that he might be leaving Gaza soon. We’d been in this place before–hopeful for a pending evacuation. This time, his plan was to go to Ireland.

“You travel a lot so how does one gets ready?” He asked me.

I read this message over and over again. How does one prepare to evacuate from genocide? Leaving your homeland for the first time in your life? Leaving every member of your family?

With patience, Abdallah waited for clearance. And when that clearance came, he began his journey, along with dozens of other dream-filled Palestinians, to the border.

In the days after he told me he was leaving, it was radio silence. My mind ached with anxiety. I didn’t know how, if, or when I would receive notice that Abdallah had evacuated Gaza. Each time, for the next few days, that I checked my phone, I’d look through my DMs, emails, and WhatsApp messages, eager for any kind of news.

At 6:00 am, on Friday, I woke up with a fuzziness and eagerness that accompanies the morning of a road trip. I would be driving up to the home that was once my grandmother’s. The one with the cross-stitch hanging in the kitchen that reads “There are no strangers, only friends I have not met yet.” And that, is when I saw a message pop up on my phone from an unknown number.

“You must be sleeping.”

“It’s Abdallah hahahahaahha”

My eyes watered. Could it really be? Immediately, with my retainer still in my mouth, I called his number. A familiar WhatsApp beep..beep…beep… “Marhaba.” It was Abdallah. The video quality was crystal clear, the sound was sharp, no drones hovered above. Abdallah had made it to Ireland after a multi-country journey. Immediately after he hung up, I woke my mother up from her sleep to share the news through my tears

As the hours passed, I began to share the news with loved ones in our family group chats. They had cared for Abdallah these past 19 months as if he were part of the family. I received a call from an aunt; she was sobbing with joy. The relief that Abdallah had been evacuated flowed out. An hour after, a friend sent a voice note, her gratitude for Abdallah’s safety, conveyed through tears as well. Though they’ve never met or spoken to Abdallah, they are friends he does not know yet.

Over the 19 months that I’ve known and been fundraising for Abdallah, people from every walk of my life have contributed their thoughts, prayers, and funds to Abdallah and his family. From people I haven’t spoken to in over a decade, to coworkers, close friends, and family, I have been in awe of the generosity. But more than just the financial generosity, I am inspired by the care. The care that this world requires of us. The care that will sustain us. The care that will be the foundation of new futures. It’s the kind of care where the stranger is no stranger at all.

This time last week, Abdallah was in Gaza, unsure whether he’d ever be able to make it out. The genocide and scholasticide in Gaza made it impossible for Abdallah to continue his studies near his home. In fact, Israel destroyed Al-Azhar University, where Abdallah received his BA in English literature, along with every other university in Gaza and 85 percent of schools.

Yesterday, Maynooth University shared an image of Abdallah in a Maynooth University hoodie on their Instagram. I scrolled through the comments to find dozens of messages from students, eager to welcome Abdallah. Maynooth is filled with friends he has yet to meet.

The humanity demonstrated by the Irish government and Maynooth University, to evacuate him for his studies, is emblematic of the kinship and solidarity this moment demands of us.

After scrolling through the comments, I put down my phone and picked up the cloth in front of me. I sat on my Grandma’s porch to start my tatreez (Palestinian embroidery), in a similar way she must have when she made her now framed cross-stitch.

When my needle made the final puncture to close out a rose design, I took a picture of the tatreez and texted it to Abdallah. It’s the beginning of the bookmark I’ll give to him when I meet him in person…soon.

Abdallah and his family will continue to need your support. All of Abdallah’s family remains in Gaza facing famine and genocide. Since Abdallah is the oldest of 11 siblings and the main provider in his family, your donations are critical to supporting their nutrition and safety. You can donate to Abdallah’s family by venmoing @carolina-mccabe or via bit.ly/abdallah24

Subscribe to Abdallah's Substack

Abdallah and I started a Substack to share his writings and updates with the world.

Subscribe to Abdallah’s Updates

Dear Lina — I Hate My Life

It has been more than 600 days since my life has split in two.

Not like a fork in the road where you choose your direction — but like a glass dropped on concrete, one half showing the life I was meant to live, and the other, a pile of shards I now have to walk barefoot through every morning.

In the life I should have had, I’m in Washington, D.C. The air smells of rain on brick. I’m crossing the Key Bridge with a coffee in my hand, feeling the breeze push gently against my scarf. My day is beginning with books, new conversations, and a kind of future you can taste in your lungs — clean, cold, full of possibility, and maybe with a cigarette.

In the life I actually have, I wake up on sand in Khan Yunis, in Al-Mawasi. The fabric walls of the tent breathe in and out with the wind, the way a dying person breathes. The air smells of ash and salt, and instead of birds and normality, drones buzz overhead, the sound drilling straight into your skull until you forget what silence was. My brother Nour has been missing since May 2024. Silence now owns his voice.

I used to wake up in Rafah, with walls around me, doors that closed, a bed that remembered my shape. Morning came with the smell of tea, with my mother’s voice calling us to eat, with my brother already off to work or still half-asleep. Now my mornings begin with the same thought as yesterday:

Why am I alive again?

I didn’t stay up late talking under warm light. I stayed up because the sand cut into my back and hunger kept my ribs awake. The generators growled until my head ached, and somewhere in the distance, the night was punched through by gunfire.

Back in November 2023, I told a friend in London: “Our existence is resistance.” I believed it then. Now it feels like a cruel slogan — like being told to smile while drowning.

Do I exist just to sprint barefoot to a water truck before it leaves? This morning I ran with two empty gallons swinging in my hands. The crowd was already thick, bodies pressed tight, voices sharp with desperation. I got my share in the end — water warm from the sun, tasting faintly of rust.

Do I exist to walk to the market under a sun so heavy it strips the skin from my patience? The market smells of sweat, smoke, and resignation. Flour is cheaper here than in other areas, but still too expensive for a family to eat every day. I hand over the money. The vendor and I exchange almost no words; survival has its own silent grammar.

Some mornings, I don’t even try to wash the dust from my skin. A gallon of water is too precious to waste. No one says “good morning” anymore — it belongs to another life.

When Ruaa, my youngest sister, asked for money to print her schoolbooks, I said “okay,” though I only had enough for an internet card. She is in her final year of high school but looks like she hasn’t been inside a classroom for a century. Sometimes a lie is the last kindness you can give.

I remembered sitting with my friend O outside his father’s shop in Rafah, before all this. Two plastic chairs. Two cigarettes. Two unemployed young men passing the day. I asked him, “How do you imagine our lives at fifty?”

He laughed. “We’ll only see each other at funerals. ‘Hey Abdallah, you in for so-and-so’s burial?’”

This morning, I got a call: “Are you coming to Mohammed’s burial?” I called O. “We’re fifty now,” I said. He understood. I added, “And we already have back and lung pain” — from hauling water, sleeping on sand, breathing dust.

By 12 p.m., I was back in the tent, staring at the fabric ceiling, wondering how to stretch the rest of the day into something that didn’t feel like dying in slow motion.

Then a drone strike landed meters away. My uncle was gone instantly, along with strangers whose names I’ll never know.

What do I tell his sons?

Later, I rolled tobacco I’d grown beside the tent, thinking how absurd it was to be alive enough to smoke. This life feels borrowed, like I’m inhabiting someone else’s tragedy. I should be in Lau Library, rushing to finish an essay before class, maybe meeting you, Lina, for coffee afterward. Instead, I’m counting coins, trying to figure out what the children will eat tomorrow.

Today I spent $160. Half went to cash brokers who take 50% just to turn a digital transfer into bills. Sometimes they have guns. You stay polite. You stay small.

And still — even here, even like this — my mind drifts to the life I was supposed to have: walking under Georgetown’s trees, meeting my professors, feeling the bite of autumn air, smiling without guilt.

When we evacuated Rafah, Nour stayed behind to collect more belongings. Before I left, he stood staring at the sand, like he already knew we might never see each other again.

He said one thing:

“My older brother… fix what I broke.”

Lina...

If you meet Nour in an Israeli prison, tell him he has a rock here — held up by friends he’s never met. Tell him Abdallah will meet them soon in Washington.

If you meet him in your dreams, tell him that I really, really miss him more than words will hold.

If you meet him somewhere else, maybe with no memory, please tell him, You are Nour.

And if you meet me one day, don’t call me a hero — just say, Hi, dear human being.

Subscribe to Abdallah‘s substack

You can support Abdallah and his family by donating to his gofundme or directly via venmo to @carolina-mccabe with the description “abdallah”

“You starve the most generous people who would have fed you with their last breath.”

- Daliah Lina

If this moment does not rattle your soul, shake you to your core, well up in your eyes, and tighten your chest, then I am sorry for you. I am sorry that you have chosen to leave your humanity at the doorstop. Lost it in the money. Left it at the pew. Or worse, muzzled it for the sake of not “disturbing the peace.”

If the manmade mass famine in Gaza does not make you want to scream out, weep with your shoulders, and hold your loved ones tight, then your apathy is not just a lack of anger, but a lack of love.

You do not need to be a genius, an expert, or a polyglot to be able to see that men, women, and children, who border a land that is filled with abundance, are starving.

This famine is different. It is not like famines caused by drought or natural disaster, it is the product of greed and genocide. Just a few miles from Gaza, lies a society with a surplus of food. Outside of the gates of Gaza, hundreds of trucks filled with food and aid are prevented by the Israeli forces from entering into Gaza, robbed of their lifesaving capacity. Sit with that.

What makes this moment even more cruel is that the people of Palestine are some of the most generous humans I have ever met. From my Palestinian-American friends who fill me to the brim when I eat dinner at their houses and insist I take the leftovers home, to my neighbors in Bethlehem who, after the war began, nourished me with glee, even when grocery store aisles emptied – I have never met a more generous people.

On my last day in Palestine, I was staying at my friend’s Aunt Fatima’s house. As I left her house to head to Jordan, she packed me not one, not two, but three sandwiches. The bridge to Jordan was just 45 minutes away, but she wanted to make sure that I would be full throughout my entire journey.

When I remarked to her brother, who was driving me, how much I appreciated Palestinian hospitality, he said something I’ll never forget. “Palestinians are indeed very hospitable, but I dream that one day the world will return that hospitality to us – welcome us in the way we welcome in others.”

Since that day, the cruelty of this world, especially on the part of our elected officials and business leaders, has known no bounds. The famine has reached the point of literally encoding itself genetically for generations at the same time that our government has chosen to incinerate 500 Tons of emergency food aid rather than let the people of Palestine eat.

And, you may be thinking, what can I do? I have no power? I’m not qualified?

We don’t need complex solutions, we need empathy, attention, and courage. Inspired by the prayer of theologian Brian McLaren, we need your anger to lead you to sadness, and your sadness to lead you to love, and that love to insist on bottomless compassion.

We need to get food into Gaza. We need to talk to the nonprofits, places of worship, businesses, and politicians around us and work with them to publicly call for food aid to get into Gaza.

We need to arm ourselves with wisdom to fight for justice. I just finished reading Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza and it equipped me with many powerful reference points for talking with those who have not stepped into their influence or power regarding Palestine.

Next, we must continue to develop kinship. Join Gaza Champions and match with a pen pal in Gaza to support them through friendship and financial contributions. Solidarity is a form of nourishment that can traverse any border. Reach out to five people and make sure they are using their power and connections to support the lives of people in Gaza.

My sister could not physically feed the people of Gaza yesterday, but instead, she messaged words of love and encouragement for my friend Abdallah in Gaza. Abdallah is despondent and hungry, but her words were a source of nourishment.

When I forwarded my sister’s message to him, he replied “Thank you for always reminding me that my life is worth living through sharing with me the family’s thoughts.”

There is no quick “solution” to this madness. In fact, paying attention to this genocide may break us, but acting with intention will build us back to be stronger and more loving than we ever thought we were capable of.

When I asked Abdallah today what verses of the Quran are giving him comfort, he responded with this verse:

وَمَن يَتَوَكَّلْ عَلَى اللَّهِ فَهُوَ حَسْبُهُ

“And whoever relies upon Allah – then He is sufficient for him.”

Surah At-Talaq (65:3)

If you have a faith tradition, pray. If you have a voice, speak. If you have influence, act. If you have a brain, learn. If you have a soul, let it guide you.

May all have abundant life,

Lina

Subscribe now

Abdallah's Podcast Episode

A few weeks ago, I sat in the comfort of my grandmother’s old yellow house by a lake, and I spoke with Abdallah, calling in from his tent in Khan Yunis. We spoke about being a man in Gaza today and recorded this conversation for you all to hear.

There are so many reasons to resent the rapidly evolving technologies of this world. So often, we are fed endless distractions from the things and people that matter most. But, at the same time, these technologies have also afforded us the opportunity to listen to those directly enduring the gravest crises and disasters of this world, no matter where they may be.

Since the end of May, the UN reports over 875 people were killed by the IDF in Gaza while trying to get food. How does one provide when the act of simply approaching an aid distribution site is life and death? How does one protect when drones and quadcopters hover above their tents?

I urge you to take the time to listen to our episode this weekend and share it out. Abdallah's courage to use his voice and his strength to share his vulnerability with the world, from under the drones, is unparalleled.

With love,

Lina

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcast

Abdallah's Article on Manhood

Last week, Abdallah, my friend in Gaza, sent me a picture of this golden flower outside his tent. I was amazed by the strength of this bold Gazania, willing to burst through the soil and sand, against all odds. To my surprise, he then sent pictures of the garden he’s been nurturing.

“How in the hell has he figured out how to grow vegetables in the sand while I’m here struggling to keep my cucumber plant alive?” I thought to myself.

Nearly 6,000 miles apart, and here we are, Abdallah and I, exchanging pictures of our gardens. I wonder how his plants have fought through the trembling sands and beating sun; how his messages have escaped the whirring of drones that hover above him. I wonder how this world, as cruel as it is, has made it possible that I can ask someone who is enduring genocide, how to better nourish my garden.

I planted my garden in DC a month or so ago with my mom and my friend Anam, who first connected me with Abdallah through Gaza Champions. We dug our fingers into rich soil, disturbing a worm or two in the process, and nestled squash, tomatoes, bay leaves, and more, into the earth.

I have not planted a garden since I was a little girl. But this year, it felt like a radical and necessary act. Since planting the garden, I feel the heat of DC differently. As the harsh sun batters the plants, I seek to nourish them. On the days I show up to work with my socks soaked through with rain, I can’t help but feel glad for the growing eggplant stalks. I am increasingly aware of the weather patterns; keeping a pulse on the life around me, amidst the crumbling of it all.

But it’s not just my garden. Each morning, as I walk to the metro, I greet the sunflowers, growing tall above me. I debate whether I can take just one of the neighbor’s blueberries, leaning over the sidewalk. I take in the rich smells of the basil, flourishing in hanging buckets. I am nurtured by the gardens popping up all around me, cared for by neighbors I do not yet know.

In such darkness, these gardens provide me and my mother an alternative from talking politics all the time. ‘Did you see the cactus rising from its long winter slumber?’ ‘Have you seen the roses in Brother Jose’s yard?’ ‘Have you tasted the sweetness of those blueberries yet?’ we ask each other.

When we first planted the garden, in May, my mom and I would read how-to articles online, or hesitantly trust Google’s AI answers. I did not think to ask Abdallah, as he survives genocide, what tips he has for gardening. Not until he sent me pictures of his eggplants, sprouting outside his family’s tent.

“How did you start this garden?” I asked – amazed by his hope to even plant seeds in sand, while under daily bombardment.

“I got the seeds and decided to plant them in my desk drawer. Which I pulled from the rubble back in January. I poked a few small holes at the bottom for drainage, I filled it with soil, mixed in some crushed compost bits we saved,” he replied.

His original seedlings were sprouted in a wooden drawer he salvaged from the rubble of his own home. His hope, so radical, that it fed these seeds with the strength to emerge from the soil. His care, so generous and persistent, that they have emerged into full plants.

As these days grow darker and more uncertain, I am continuously learning from the courage and persistence of ancestors, organizers, and friends alike.

I am turning to the rising cacti in my neighbor’s yard, who tricked us with their shriveled and sunken bodies all winter.

I am learning from the persistent organizing of Zohran Mamdani, who put community and fairness first and showed that money cannot buy the power of working-class people. Zohran is a Gazania flower in the sands of U.S. politics.

I am learning from the patience and humility it takes to nurture one’s own garden, especially in the sweltering heat. Learning when to weed and when to water, both literally and figuratively.

But most of all, I am drawing on the radical sumud –steadfastness– that it takes for one to see their home reduced to rubble, and still plant seeds.

Subscribe now

“Alright man, well good night. That’s really sweet of you, I hope you have a great night!” replies a male voice on the other end of the line.

The TikTok video, which has since gained nearly 3 million views, is not an anomaly, it’s part of a trend taking over the internet of men calling their friends to wish them a good night.

Some of the men on the receiving end of the line immediately hang up, others find it charming, and some ask “are you okay?”

When a male friend started sending me these TikToks last week, I was initially shocked that videos encouraging men to lean into their friendships were trending. I thought they were only on ‘one-side’ of the internet, but when I saw that manosphere influencer Jake Paul had hopped on the trend, I knew there was something deeper.

In one video, Jake Paul wishes the rapper Lil Yachty a goodnight, the two spend the rest of the call determining the limits of their straightness:

"Is that gay?”

“I'm not sure my bad bro.”

“That's borderline gay, I'm pretty sure…I gotta ask another straight person.”

“My bad”

“No, I think it's cool, I guess it's cool. Goodnight.”

Paul hangs up and turns to the camera laughing. “I feel so sick dude," he says.

Yachty and Paul’s conversation make clear how the constraints men place on themselves, driven by homophobic beliefs that discourage male intimacy, hurt themsleves. Homophobia is stripping men of the joys of deep relationships.

The TikTok continues and Paul calls Faza Banks, Chief Operating Officer of the Call of Duty gaming group, FaZe Clan. “I appreciate it. That’s nice, very thoughtful, I like the random phone call, let’s do it more often,” Banks responds. The singer Machine Gun Kelly tells him that his call “made my night.”

The fact that men, even on the manosphere, are finding joy in a trend that brings them together shouldn’t be surprising. In the years of asking young men, “What’s the hardest thing about being a man?” one of the most common responses I’ve received is, “It’s so lonely.”

By reaching out to one another, even in the mundane moments, checking in on each others families and wellbeing, and maintaining regular communication, men are actively saving each others lives. With suicide rates in the U.S. over 4 times higher for men than women, it’s about time men take on the responsibility of addressing the loneliness epidemic.

Mankeeping

But, it would be too simple to look at this trend and not unpack who is on the other ends of these cameras. For many of the videos, the tagline is something along the lines of “told hubby to call and tell his homies goodnight.” Female partners are largely on the other end of the camera, often introducing their male partners to the trend.

Watching these videos, and reading interviews where men say they were set up by their partners to do it, I couldn’t help but think about the emotional labor that comes with being a partner. More specifically, mankeeping.

Mankeeping is a term coined by Angelica Ferrara to describe the emotional and social labor that women perform to support men, especially related to men's social networks and friendships. It can involve organizing social events or reminding men to reach out to other male friends.

Many women reading this can likely feel a pit in their stomach thinking about the amount of energy they’ve devoted to mankeeping in their relationships. Whether it’s telling your dad to go play tennis with his friends, reminding your partner of one of his friend’s birthdays, or encouraging men to reach out to each other to hang out, this phenomenon is widespread.

Research suggests that some women may spend several hours a week managing the emotional and social well-being of the men in their lives. The ‘goodnight’ trend is a near perfect model of the unspoken emotional and worry labor that so many of us women know all too well.

If anything, this trend, can leave us with much to reflect on, whether in realizing that even manosphere influencers crave close friendships or the continued under-recognized emotional labor women are pouring into their relationships. For too long, online movements have placed the blame for male loneliness on women. What the ‘goodnight’ trend gets right is that men are each others greatest solutions to their loneliness crisis.

Subscribe now

By the time I reached my teens, and after learning more about abuses within the Catholic church, I told my family that I had wandered out for good. But, leaving the church didn’t answer the question that has followed me for years: what do you do when your faith system is abused by others to inflict or justify harm?

A few weeks ago, I heard Peter Beinart speak at an event about this very tension. In reflecting on his new book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, he shared something that reframed faith for me. He said (paraphrased): “As friends turn their backs on me for speaking out about Gaza, I’ve deepened my practice of Jewish tradition in order to separate my faith from a nation-state, and I’ve in turn built a moral community across faiths.”

The phrase ‘moral community’ captured what I had been searching. A desire to be in community with others whose tradition and culture don’t have to match perfectly, but whose core callings do: to love our neighbors, see no stranger, and fight for a more just world.

A community where no one is outside our circle of care. A community where the divine is not just an abstract concept, but also reflected in the essence of every being. A community where our faith traditions can weave together to strengthen our resilience in these dark times.

Al-Baba’s Example

With the passing of Pope Francis, I’ve been reflecting on the path of the Catholic church under his leadership. Among his many groundbreaking actions, one stands out - his model of interfaith solidarity.

In March of 2019, I had been living in Morocco for six months with my Muslim host family when I heard that “Al-Baba” was paying us a visit. Pope Francis would be making his first trip to a Muslim country on a journey titled “Servant of Hope.”

On a rainy March morning, Pope Francis rode through the streets of Rabat, greeted by thousands. His popemobile protected him from the heavy rain, which the crowd considered a blessing.

The following morning, Pope Francis held mass for ten thousand Christians and Muslims alike. In his homily, he urged us all to remember that "we are brothers and sisters." I felt no inkling to wander, just to wonder about the lives of all around me.

"Experience tells us that hatred, division and revenge succeed only in killing our peoples' soul, poisoning our children's hopes, and destroying and sweeping away everything we cherish," he said boldly.

Pope Francis understood that the cures to our world’s epidemics of violence and oppression would not be found in our silos. Our commitment to justice requires us to cry out for those on the margins, together.

In fact, one of Pope Francis’ parting gifts to this world was donating his popemobile so that it be turned into a health clinic for the children of Gaza. He named the popemobile turned mobile health clinic “Vehicle of Hope.” Talk about building a moral community.

‘Both/And’

For far too long, I understood religions to be dividing lines between us, and in my angstiest teenage years I couldn’t see what it was good for, other than sparking wars. This week, I stood in awe of the intertwined nature of religion during my travels across Southeast Asia.

In Indonesia, every airplane seat back pocket held a laminated card of travel prayers—from different religions. Diversity of belief was offered not as a threat, but as a strength (and believe me, on our propeller plane flight I recited each of the prayers, no matter the religion).

In Bangkok, temples drew on symbols and practices of both Buddhism and Hinduism.

On the island of Sumba, I learned that the Marapu people weave their ancestral indigenous religion into Christianity to create practices that work for them. Not an ‘either/or’ but a ‘both/and.’

And, in Jakarta, when I crashed a Catholic wedding, the priest’s blessing of the newlyweds coincided with the Muslim call to prayer ringing out across the street. The voices of priest and mu'azzin tangled together, rooted in similar foundations of justice and divine love.

In a world where children cry out in hunger, where the disastrous impacts of the climate crisis accelerate, where governments slash healthcare while sending bombs abroad—we are desperately in need of the courage, compassion and solidarity that comes from forming moral communities.

Now is the time to wander out of our silos and recommit to kinship with those who don’t look like us, pray like us, or believe like us, but who hold a similar vision of a more loving and just world. Then, we must allow this kinship to spur and strengthen our actions to protect those on the margins.

Subscribe now

After a week surrounded by tumbleweed and mountain ranges, I returned home to D.C.’s budding trees, swarms of scooters, ruthless speed cameras, and political upheaval. Contrasting the ‘panic’ presented in that Montana mural, my family and I made our way to the cherry blossoms early one Sunday morning, half-awake, but filled with the energy and beauty of ‘peak bloom.’

I watched 15 year-olds pose in bedazzled gowns for quinceañera photos. I listened to people of all backgrounds bickering over how to pose for family photos and laughing together under the blossoms. I savored the rhythms of a saxophonist, serenading us as we walked past monuments honoring Washington, MLK, and FDR—each offering visions of America radically different from that ominous mural I’d seen just days before.

Etched into the stone at the FDR Memorial was this reminder: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” My eyes jumped from quote to quote, from stone to petals, caught between the gravity of this moment and the joy unfolding around me.

Another quote of Roosevelt loomed large: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

The contrast between the ‘panic’ sketched onto the wall in Montana and the sense of purpose carved into stone in DC was stark. We can choose panic, or we can choose courage. We can choose to line the pockets of the wealthy and send celebrities into space, or we can choose to build a world that sees all people as worthy of freedom, dignity, and prosperity.

And yet, too many leaders, citizens, and institutions have allowed fear to paralyze them into cowardice. We’ve seen political figures, universities, and corporate giants meet this moment with silence or complicity, despite their claims of moral conviction. We've heard ‘resistance’ leaders speak for 25 hours-straight—yet remain silent when it comes to genocide. We've watched neighbors look away from deportations, only to pay attention once again when the markets tumbled. I continue to return to the question: What is ours to do in this moment?

Last night, I had the privilege of attending a virtual event with civil rights leader and wisdom-keeper Valarie Kaur, who offered a vision for how to endure these times without leaving anyone outside our circle of care. She demanded that we look at strangers as parts of ourselves that we do not know yet, and in order to face this moment, our dreams must be more powerful than the nightmare they seek to create.

In order to make our dreams of a more just future more powerful, we cannot carry the weight of them alone. We are carrying the dreams of our ancestors and our descendants. We carry the dreams of a neighbor and a stranger. In order to build power, our dreams demand our bravery, our resilience, our steadfastness, and, most of all, our connection.

But, it’s scary to dream in a world filled with nightmares.

Tonight, as I flew to Miami, I read the book We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled, about the cruelty of the Assad regime in Syria, the torture and murder of citizens who did no wrong, and the courage of everyday people who looked out for each other. After taking in several of the book’s vignettes, I felt grief bubbling up inside of me. I had many thoughts, but no journal at 30,000 feet. So, I took the white waste bag out of the seat pocket and began to scribble.

Once the waste bag held no more white space, and my thoughts downloaded, I was reminded of the wisdom of Kaur and Roosevelt, their calls to see no stranger. I surprised myself and struck up a conversation with the 8 year-old next to me who had just finished watching High School Musical. We ended up talking for twenty minutes about nicknames, aisle seats, and dreams for the future. This simple, but joyful conversation was nourishing, not because it was a distraction, but because it grounded me in the power of human connection. Our ability to hold grief, live with uncertainty, and build solidarity depends on our ability to connect with others, strangers and neighbors alike.

One day, I know my descendants will walk past quotes, etched into rock, from people who chose solidarity over supremacy, purpose over panic. People who wove webs of connection with those most marginalized. People who saw no stranger.

Subscribe now

April Roundup

What I’m Reading:

• We Crossed a Bridge And It Trembled: Voices from Syria, by Wendy Pearlman

• Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, by Jonathan Blitzer

• Sage Warrior, by Valarie Kaur

What I’m Cooking:

Musakhan: Sumac Chicken and Caramelized Onion Flatbread

Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookies - I add in all spice, cinnamon, and cardamom.

What I’m Listening To: