Yesterday for lunch I got a bacon egg and cheese on an everything bagel. As I ate, I scrolled Twitter and got mad. For the past 23 months or so, I’ve run every decision through a mental filter of the Serenity Prayer:

But I’d never felt so pressed up against the first clause than as I read about what seems to me to be the foundation of a genocide playing out in real time. After Hamas attacked and killed hundreds of innocent people last week, I messaged my friend who lives in Palestine to see if he, his parents and his two young children were ok. They were alive. When we lived together in Cape Town in 2015 and 2016 I used to get drunk and rant about how Israel was an apartheid state, just like South Africa used to be. He would tell me to relax, and that most Israelis and most Palestinians just wanted Hamas and the IDF to stop being stupid. All idiots, he would tell me.

It’s now a week since Hamas acted like idiots. They didn’t just attack their oppressors, but slaughtered random people. Now the worst case scenario is playing out, as Israel, the IDF, and their many defenders have seemingly taken the stance that Hammurabi’s eye for an eye was too lenient. Hamas gave Netenyahu what he wanted, and the world changed.

At work, a colleague and former IDF solider posted about how in “the IDF we were trained to do everything possible to avoid taking a life in an altercation. Taking a life is a last resort.” 43 people responded with the Israeli flag emoji. Since then, thousands of Gazans have been indiscriminately killed. Schools, hospitals, convoys attempting to escape bombed. The Serenity Prayer says I have to accept this?

😟😠😞

Before I ate the bagel, I stopped by my apartment to add extra hot sauce. I had to open a new super spicy one and this one didn’t have the small hole to make it pour slower, so I put too much. As I ate, I began to cry. I could not tell if it was from the news or the hot sauce, and so I started to laugh, which hurt. I started to feel insane, and realized I had to go back to an AA meeting. The Serenity Prayer says that because I have no power to change it, I have to accept that hundreds of Israelis were murdered, that the IDF will use those murders as justification for more murder, and that people in my life will cheer.

This attack really was like 9/11 in its brutality. But also in the senseless response of thinking more murder is an answer. When I was a kid, I remember thinking those yellow “support our troops” stickers were stupid. “I don’t support our troops,” I would think. Why should I? What is admirable about going to terrorize and kill innocent people? I foolishly thought we learned from the Iraq war. Now instead of using stickers, you signal your callous support for destruction with an emoji (and I know not everyone who clicked that button thinks or supports this. Sometimes people just click a button).

I’ve wondered this week why people keep sharing unverified horror rather than the horror we know happened. We know Hamas murdered innocent people, but instead people kept sharing that Hamas beheaded babies. Biden repeated this needless inflation of evil, prompting the White House to clarify that actually, no he has not seen these pictures that don’t exist.

But this narrative reminded me of a story I wrote in 2014 about Obama and ISIS. I had just come back from South Africa, where I felt energized by student activism that demonstrated how to transmute oppression into action. But back in America, I felt stuck in the mud. People didn’t act, they just talked and talked and watched tv and talked and talked.

Back then, people were afraid of ISIS, a legitimately evil terror group that I suspect also tickled people’s 9/11 nostalgia and yearning for an enemy. ISIS aided this moth-to-light morbid fascination with their highly produced beheading videos. In response, Obama ramped up his rhetoric and gave the people what they wanted. At the time I wrote:

The strikes will keep coming and the reports will keep flowing. We’ll read about the capture of cities we’ve never heard of and be assured that they’re strategic checkpoints. We’ll hear of deaths of people whose names we can’t pronounce and be told that they’re military leaders. We’ll be promised things are getting better, and that our advanced techniques of decapitation by missile are beating their barbaric knife-in-hand approach. 

Nine years later, we’re again debating the preferred style of destruction. Think back to when you were a baby: would you rather be shot, beheaded, or crushed under rubble?

🙁😔😑

Before I went to the AA meeting, I thought about how I’d share about my struggle with the Serenity Prayer and how if I had to accept all those things, I could at least live out the second clause; I could go to the meeting. I could take some small, tiny action. It’s better than nothing.

I wanted to describe a metaphor where there’s a deep dam of emotion inside of me, and in normal times it fills and recedes with my daily fluctuations. But that in this moment it overflowed with anger, and now it’s flowing downhill towards a diverted path. It could go left towards self destruction, fights, relapse. Or I could block that path and squeeze the anger to the right. Like the activists I admired in South Africa, I could take the input of anger and re-form it into productivity. I loved this little metaphor and was excited to share it. At the meeting, the topic was ego, so I thought it would be appropriate to not talk.

It was good to see my old friends, and I felt better. After, I got dinner with my parents. I felt happy. Then I took the train back to Hoboken, and walked 45 minutes back to Jersey City. All day I’d been listening to Kimya Dawson. She’s sober, and her music formed the soundtrack to the first year of my sobriety. At some point in the walk, or maybe on the train, Spotify chose to play Walk Like Thunder. It’s a 10 minute journey about resilience and purpose, but what struck me this time was how about 3 minutes and 15 seconds in, Kimya sings that “at some point I got so comfortable, that I didn’t even realize that I’d started to crawl.” For my first year of sobriety, I walked. I don’t know if I walked like thunder, but I walked. But in the past year, I’ve prioritized the wrong things. I’ve repaired some relationships, messed up others, worked out more than I need to. But I haven’t been going to AA and I haven’t really been helping people. I’ve read a lot about inflation and its causes? Why? Is that what happens when you crawl?

I’ve developed a philosophy for life that people are only their actions, not their words. Applied to myself, I’ve become something different than what I want to be. Nothing bad, just not what I want. I can’t stop people across the world from murdering each other. But I can do better here. We all share this world, but we also can only impact our individual ones. This past year, I got comfortable and started to crawl. I don’t know if I’m walking again yet. I’m going to try.