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My Reminder to Offer Both Cheeks
A word isn’t a missile but a cry for love in a broken world.
“Whyte colonizers are a scourge and should be silenced and decommissioned.”
I read words to this effect recently in response to the on-going tragedy in Gaza. This must mean me. Oh, the outrage of one word. It felt like a dagger. Of course, this called for my reaction. You can’t just not react on the internet.
“Why do you call a huge chunk of the globe Whyte? We’re not all part of the problem,” I asked. Someone had to speak up to this capital misspelling crime.
Vowels and consonants. Go figure. They threw me into a tailspin.
Back in 1947 when the UN partitioned Israel, I was drifting in paradise in a non-flesh-and-boned existence. I didn’t need a body. It would just separate me from other souls.
No bombing, blasting, demolishing, blowing limbs offs. No disease or starvation. No designations of more or less favor with our all-loving Source. In anyone’s wildest imagination, it couldn’t be any other way and make any sense at all.
Then I woke up and found myself on Earth in a privileged country on a planet with bombing and hierarchies of skin color. I’m so disoriented it takes decades to stop the spinning.