I Tried To Write This, But Couldn't…
This Substack project of mine was supposed to push me to do more long-form writing. As in more than IG captions. In May, it seemed like a solid idea. But I’ve struggled. I actually started to write my next ONWARD essay a couple months ago and couldn’t finish.
I started to write about Jerry Seinfeld. It was reported that he stood on a stage at Duke University and compared the movement for Palestinian freedom to the Ku Klux Klan. He reportedly suggested that “Free Palestine” is a coded way of saying “I don’t like Jews” and claimed that the Klan was “a little better” because their hatred was “honest.” I began writing an open letter to educate folks who may believe him on what the Ku Klux Klan actually was, and still is.
The KKK is a terrorist organization born in the ashes of the Civil War. The evil men of the Klu Klux Klan dragged Black families from their beds at night, shot Black fathers in front of their children, raped Black mothers while crosses burned outside. Hooded Klan members lynched Black men and women and children, mutilated their bodies and burned them alive before white cheering crowds. The Klan bombed Black churches, assassinated Black leaders and spread terror so deep that entire towns lived in silence, afraid to speak, let alone dream.
To invoke the Klan as some kind of yardstick for “honesty” is to desecrate the memory of those murdered in its blood-soaked reign. Equally vile is the attempt to smear “Free Palestine” as nothing more than antisemitic camouflage. It is the cry of a people suffocating under blockade, occupation and apartheid conditions with entire neighborhoods of civilians reduced to rubble by bombs as they are being starved. To recast this cry for help as hatred is a deliberate distortion that puts people in harm’s way.
Here’s the paradox: I was writing this with the belief that Jerry Seinfeld has the right to say all that he said. Free speech protects his misuse of history. As I was working on the draft, a man I’d barely heard of named Charles Kirk was shot and killed by another white man who was raised in a MAGA household in a conservative state using his grandfather’s rifle. I couldn’t finish the Seinfeld piece…
I started to write about Charlie Kirk. The rush by the right to blame the left, their dangerous hysteria to venerate a man who preached racist, misogynistic and violent views. Ta-Nehisi Coates in Vanity Fair laid it bare: Kirk wasn’t an aberration, he was the product of a system that teaches cruelty as strength. Mourning him has seemed to become a requirement by some, but outrage for him never carried the same weight as for other victims of political violence or gun violence. They don’t matter at all, it appears. I wanted to share all my thoughts on this, but the new stories were coming so fast that I couldn’t focus.
I started to write about Sudan. The RSF broke through the last defense of Sudan’s armed forces after an eighteen-month siege. The videos are unbearable. RSF soldiers storming the main hospital and shooting patients in their beds. It’s reported that fifteen hundred people were murdered in three days. 1500 people. In 3 days. Not by a bomb or a catastrophic device. But, hand to hand. At close range. Black people are the targets, specifically the Masalit and other non-Arab people. They are being slaughtered while the world scrolls on. 150,000 humans gone since April 2023. Mothers, fathers, aunts, cousins, shopkeepers, nurses, barbers, cooks, students. And currently, half a million children are there starving to death right now. All of this is motivated by even darker forces. To do with fortunes and minerals and gold and manipulation to profit and plunder by other countries, including the United States. What can I do with writing? I try to track the stats and learn about it and post about it and will continue, but it feels like a raindrop on the ocean. Not enough. I don’t know.
I tried to write about the 42 million Americans who woke up one morning to find their EBT cards from SNAP empty on purpose. What cruelty from a regime that treats suffering like sport. Congress had already set aside six billion dollars for emergencies like this, but the Trump machine shrugged and withheld it anyway. And then a handful of Democrats caved. A gut punch felt across the country. After the longest government shutdown in our history, the people received no real relief on the vital issue of healthcare, only another lesson on how pain has become a political tactic. The message was clear… if you’re willing to hurt enough people, you can win any fight. Heartbreaking.
Every time I sat down to write, the chaos and the cruelty of this time crowded the page. I kept stopping. I kept starting. Nothing felt finished. Until the people finished it for me. When New York City handed the Mayor’s seat to Zohran Mamdani in a landslide no one thought possible. A win shaped by organizers, teenagers, night-shift nurses, mosque elders, subway poets, delivery bikers… the people who refused despair and decided to bend history with their own hands. The story written by those who refuse to be erased.
When the people put Black women in mayor’s chairs in Detroit, Albany, Charlotte, Syracuse and Conyers, Georgia.
And in California, my home state, when the people passed Proposition 50 as a middle finger to the GOP gerrymandering hustle. California said, “You wanna play games with Congressional seats? Let’s play.”
These aren’t flukes. This is people choosing solidarity over cruelty. It is a reminder that organized people can outrun the arrogance of the powerful. I wanted to write this as celebration of every single win on the road to a more just world. Thankfully, I was able to finish this time… just as Trump grinned and shook hands with Mamdani in the Oval Office mere hours after calling for the hanging of Democrat political opponents. Folks… ya can’t make this stuff up.
Overall, I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of months. Especially about finishing. In a world this chaotic and wounded, an attempt itself carries its own integrity. Beginning becomes its own vow and its own defiance. Sometimes the incomplete essay is the truest one because it reflects the world as it actually is: in progress. There will always be another spectacle waiting to break the day open. There will always be another crisis screaming for ink. So, what do we do? I’ve resolved to just keep starting again. And again. Even when I can’t finish. Especially then.