Last weekend, I was sitting by the river, talking to a stranger about how our proximity to others, physical or sociological, determines the extent to which we experience them as fully alive, and also to mourn their deaths. It was twilight in the suburbs of Berlin; the quiet of this warm night air broken now and again by the party boats cruising by.
To illustrate my point, I said, “God forbid a bomb should go off in a café in Berlin. A few deaths would make headlines across Germany and all over the West, because we are—or feel ourselves to be—close to those who died. But if an apartment block in Beirut is leveled by an Israeli missile, it gets a single paragraph in the news, and then we all move on.” I felt a superstitious chill upon uttering these words.
That was around 10 p.m. Later, I would learn that this was the precise time someone drove a van into marchers attending the Christopher Street Day parade–the mainstream Pride event in Berlin–and then, after smashing into a tree, began stabbing those nearby.
Devastating.
This morning, after processing the attack with friends and fielding calls from distant family, I did something without even realizing: I turned the page on the carnage. I sat at my desk and I got back to work on a documentary I’m pursuing about the lie of denazification.
It was only when I messaged a friend about filming dates that I realized I was quite out of sync with those around me. She wrote back and said she was reeling from the attack and unable to talk right. And suddenly, I felt insensitive, reptilian even—cold.
So I had to ask myself: What was wrong with me? How could I already be back at my desk, catching up on work? Then I remembered: that’s exactly what I’ve been doing every single day for the past two and a half years at least, since Israel escalated its genocide against the Palestinians.
No one deserves to die because they chose to go out into the streets and affirm that their life has value—that they refused to be silenced or forced to hide who they are, by law, hate or violence. This is what Pride means to me.
Yet, just as no one deserves to die at a Pride march, no one deserves to die because they live in an apartment building selected seemingly at random by IDF high command, on the pretense that they shared their domestic space with “the enemy”.
Likewise, no one deserves to be turned into red mist because they’re sheltering in a tent in Gaza or Beirut when Israeli artillery drops.
120 schoolgirls do not deserve to die screaming in their school auditorium in Minab, Iran, in the opening act of the USA’s latest imperialist adventure.
A patient, lying in bed at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza, does not deserve to be set on fire when Israel carries out an air strike on a space that should be a safe haven.
None of these people deserved to die.
Yet time and again, after each slaughter was blotted out by yet another slaughter—even with the firebombing of the Al-Aqsa Hospital, the image of a shell of a person in a bed, seemingly shifting and rotating their stiffened body amid the raging flames—I just moved on.
As I sit at my desk, watching the footage once again, I wonder: Was this person alive? Or was it simply the force of the heat from the explosion caused by the Israeli airstrike that made their body move as if they were?
I feel sick, I physically recoil, as part of my mind tries to merge with the experience of this person, tries to imagine what it would mean to have your skin burn away and still somehow be conscious.
And yet, even after this gruesome exercise, I will move on. I know I will. This is what I do. And this is what disgusts me about myself.
I can only live this so-called life—go to work, pay taxes, dance, treat myself to a coffee, breathe the air, tell a joke, wonder if I should put grapes in my salad this evening—by pushing these memories away and welcoming the numb detachment that separates the functionally “normal” from the insane.
When did I decide that I wanted to be normal?
Pride exists because queer people—trans, lesbian, gay, intersex—have not always been seen as fully human. Yet when I look at the scores of daily deaths of brown people in the so-called Middle East, at the indifference to suffering when it occurs on bodies coded as “Muslim” or “Arab,” I see that the dehumanization runs far deeper for these communities than the violence and threats I experience as a trans woman in Berlin.
In the midst of this rising tide of imperial violence, Pride has lost its meaning. Proud of what? What is the goal? To assimilate into a nation state that exports deadly bombs to a warzone? And are we supposed to somehow take succor from the fact that the murderers who helm the German regime are willing to light the candles of us sexual deviants in this, our dark night?
Pride draws the lens of our awareness into a small, proximate circle—those around us, those who look like us, who think alike—and at best struggles to achieve access to an unjust power, while failing to speak to those killed or forced into unlivable lives by a bloodthirsty empire and its many, many tentacles.
I can’t think clearly anymore. I can’t feel freely. Because to feel the burden of these cruel days would mean to stop—completely—any exertion of energy, any movement within a single fiber of my being, unless that spark is an act of resistance to a world that normalizes the humiliation, degradation, herding, and slaughter of those whose lives are deemed to not matter.
