We Are Not Okay
From Gaza to ICE to Epstein, our children are not safe and the horror feels closer than before. By Bhakti Shringarpure.
The news these days is a tidal wave. Like many, I am drowning and barely able to come up for air. Dissociating or detaching is out of the question. The stakes are too high, the body count too staggering. The world’s genocidal impulse is in open view. Every vulnerable group whether migrant, Palestinian, queer, trans, disabled or poor are either being hunted down or being left to perish through systemic cruelty. Yes, this has always been happening but not at this speed, and not with this much collective consent.
Most of the despair and pain comes from seeing that children are the targets. The daily broadcasting of children being slaughtered in Palestine has now rolled over into children yanked from families and put in ICE detention has now rolled over into children being abused for a pastime by the depraved pedophiles on Epstein’s island.
Why is it always children?
I am not okay. We are not okay. Despite my many privileges, I’ve brushed up against some of these experiences: the humiliations that accompany visa and migration processes; the airport queue; the tightening of the chest, the anxiety of will-they-won’t-they, the obsequious smile, the faking of banter with border guards, the menace of it all.
I have a teen son with a curly mop who can pass as any number of the Palestinian boys roughed up and detained by Israelis everyday. He could also pass as any of the high school anti-ICE protesters being rounded up and beaten across the US. I have a 12-year old daughter, the same age as all the girls trotted out and violated by Epstein and his friends. I alternate between worry and relief. They are safe, they are not safe, it seems hard to be sure. The horror feels closer than before.
Adding to two years of unending terror is the Epstein tsunami. Until now, I have had the privilege of never having proximity to the filthy rich. I haven’t been to exclusive parties or attended Ivy League schools or worked in finance or politics or entertainment. I have never coveted these worlds. My introduction to the US was the expensive but unknown Bard College in upstate New York. Over there, we were all running around bedraggled and artsy and queer. We knew that the wealthy were amongst us — some of us spent weekends at fancy NYC apartments that their parents had bought for them and sometimes, we knew the ultra-pricey brand of the tattered scarf they were wearing. But there was an illusion of equality. Perhaps a trick of youth or the oddly cocooned nature of the rural campus.
This has now shattered with the revelation that Bard’s president of 50 years, Leon Botstein, has over two thousand mentions in the Epstein files — he visited the island, he made jokes about girls, he wrangled some funding, and Epstein even visited Bard in 2013.1
And us, the alumni, have been subjected to a denial letter from Botstein himself saying he’s been doing this for Bard’s own good, and that he fell sick when he was on Epstein’s island anyway, and didn’t attend any parties. We have always been critical of Botstein for outstaying his tenure and for his narcissistic way of lording over the college as if it were his possession. But this is different. For so many of us who felt far from the openly rotten and corrupt nature of the big name schools, the mood has broken. We feel dirty.
I am not okay. We are not okay. Some of it is survivor’s guilt. Technically, these are not my worlds. I have no citizenship precarity, my children seem fine, my close Bard friends aren’t part of this sleaze, I live outside of the purview of ICE and IDF militia, etc. Suddenly, all of this feels dangerously close, dangerously close to eruption, dangerously close to impacting us directly. It is terror by proximity. The trap is closing in.
With this backdrop, the dissonance in the public sphere is too acute. There are a lot of warnings: we better watch out; fascism might be near; we are teetering dangerously close to authoritarianism; Trump is the problem; ICE is the problem…on and on it goes.
Warnings be damned because newsflash: fascism is here, tyranny is here, surveillance is here, censorship is here. Here, in the West, that is. And this is what it looks like: violent militias roaming the streets; high-level redactions and cover-ups for rapists and spies; basic freedoms evaporated into thin air; a new world order that actively engages in genocide with impunity; war over the weak; unabashed colonization plans for Gaza or Greenland or Venezuela; the starvation of Cuba, Sudan and Palestine; and the normalization of terms like “slow” genocide or “silent” genocide.
It is a reign of terror. No wonder, we are not okay.
Love and solidarity❤️🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure
Recent publications and events
In the US, the House has passed the Save America Act, a bill that would dismantle online and mail-in voter registration and disenfranchise millions of Americans by forcibly requiring documentary proof of citizenship and photo identification when registering to vote and when voting at the polls. For the Radical Futures podcast, Anjali Enjeti’s offers a timely intervention on how the ballot has become a battleground in the US👇🏾
Mainstream liberal media has spun a gazillion think pieces claiming Bad Bunny’s Superbowl halftime show was an act of resistance despite the toxic, corporate, white supremacy that the NFL represents. Meanwhile, protests in Milan against Israel’s participation in the Winter Olympics and the environmental disaster brought on by the winter sports have been conveniently ignored by the media. The American team are struggling to represent their country in Milan because of their distress about ICE. Their distress mirrors the feeling that a majority of Americans have reached a tipping point about Trump, ICE and the American violence in the world. Yet, the revolt is not quite here. In our second livestream, Suchitra, Madhuri and Bhakti unpack these big spectacles and the limits of American revolt👇🏾
On Media Gaslighting: Bad Bunny, Winter Olympics, Endless Epstein & the Limits of American Revolt
As DHS says it’s “winding down” its activities in Minnesota, I can only wonder which city and state is next. 😥