It has become a commonplace among disillusioned radicals and independents that today’s choice of Harris/Trump fails to pose any of the most pressing issues facing the human race: climate change, potential world war, resource poisoning/depletion, and so on. But the most critical issue of all is indeed on the ballot: the genocide in Gaza, which has become nothing short of a watershed in defining human consciousness in our time. Conservative estimates place the death toll in that calamity at some 43,000 (perhaps as high as 186,000, according to one study), more than half of them women and children.
We are all by now inured to liberals’ adaptability to the most alarming evils of the US polity: wars of aggression abroad, mushrooming homelessness, tens of millions with little or no healthcare coverage, failing schools, social/cultural dysfunction and despair—all just part of a day’s work in the standard, narrow lane of establishment conservative/liberal discourse, but shocking and disorienting to anyone outside that Beltway of complacency and business as usual. As ghastly as those injustices are, none of them comes close to the staggering evil of this genocide recorded in real time, in the gruesome literality of daily and ever more sickening social media videos.
Yet … the liberal class of this country has now surpassed itself in depravity and callousness by fielding a candidate for president who has funded and presided over this horror: Kamala Harris, mass murderer of children. Seemingly sane if smug urban hipsters and academics urge us, with their customarily curled lips of condescension, to vote to ratify this monstrosity by casting a ballot for this unspeakable genocidaire. People who could not imagine campaigning for school shooter for mayor are unruffled in their flacking for a child murderer to the hundredth power of that—and for the presidency of the United States.
Even the habitual liberal tolerance for everyday injustice and suffering has reached its limit with the maimed, starved, and blasted children of Gaza. Even if the chronic hypocrites and double talkers of the liberal class can cross that red line, the rest of us must stand up, once and for all, and say as one: not for us—not one step further into the greatest of human evils: the mass slaughter of the innocents.
Every other issue and pseudo-issue that arises in this campaign recedes into insignificance before this unimaginable horror. Although tens of millions of Americans will cross that red line today, if we as a species are to preserve even the frailest hope of redemption, the slenderest reed of conscience or decency, at least some of us cannot follow. We must draw and re-draw that line, brightly and firmly, and challenge others to follow us in declining to cross over it—to cross over irrevocably into complicity in that “wasteland of garbage, rubble, and human remains” (Francesca Albanese, UN Rapporteur for Palestine) that final graveyard of the human spirit, of any last hope of speaking of humanity and civilization in the same breath.
We must then, follow the brave lead of Kshama Sawant (long-time socialist Seattle City Council member) and the Michigan Abandon Harris founder Hassan Abdel Salam in declaring: Here we stand—we refuse to cross that line—we can do no other. Kamala Harris and the Democrats must be punished at the polls on Tuesday—they cannot, must not, be rewarded for their genocidal assault on the desperate, destitute refugees of Gaza. The slogans of the human among us must be: Defeat Harris! Vote No on Genocide!
That no vote could take any form: leaving the presidential ballot blank, voting for or writing in the name of Jill Stein or Cornel West, or any vote except a vote for Harris.
The cries of the children of Gaza should be ringing around the world as a caution and a call—a call to return from the brink of irreversible savagery, a call to salvage a last best hope for “one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.” (E. M. Forster). Today you can answer that call by voting against Kamala Harris and never looking back.