"Reporting From Within" - Published in The White Picket Fence Collection, FlowerSong Press & Juventud Press, 2025

Reporting From Within                          

            I took myself out to go see Dune: Part II. It was after teaching a class on Zora Neale Hurston’s work, her story “Sweat”. After we pondered in class on how it was possible she took a radical conservative side in her career, a side which defended politician Spessard L. Holland’s support for segregation at the time. She even opposed the 1954 desegregation decision. Perhaps it was just me who pondered. Well, the students who were mentally present and I.

            Shortly after another failed relationship with a man I thought I could grow to love, I decided to go watch the new Dune movie after work. The social drain from the entire relationship, like all relationships, took a while to regenerate from. It was not just that relationship but all my past relationships. It was time to look within.

            But honestly, that seemed trivial. How could I look within when the world is burning. As I grieved my relationship, taught, wrote, and ultimately watched Dune: Part II on the Screen X at the Regal Edwards Greenway theatre, a bigger feeling of loss was taking over me.

            Just days after the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell at the Israeli Embassy in Washington (Buckingham) we all witnessed the most radical thing any of us could do. The rest of us who witnessed it, through our screens, saw him in us. That would have been us if we could have mustered that courage in our lifetimes. Crazy courage. Insane courage. And sacrifice.

            It is what we would resort to do if we alone wanted to actually change the flow of our system, especially if we wanted it to immediately stop aiding and abetting a genocide. We don’t belong to the “ruling class” as Bushnell put it. Our mundane actions alone cannot alter the course of history immediately unless we resort to destroying all the power we have. Watch it burn.

            The rest of us still here, we saw what he caused. The attention it brought. We were grateful he did it so that we didn’t have to continuously ponder if even that would change things. Dozens of Palestinians were killed in a food truck attack, adding to the growing death toll in Gaza (Almasy and Elassar). Israel murdered dozens of teenagers running for food to feed their starving selves and families just days after Bushnell. So yes, we saw what would happen if one of us self-emulated.

            The rest of us had to accept, and continue to live within this system, this “machine” as he and many before have called it. And cope.

            To continue. To live on.

            I don’t know why I thought I could escape into Dune II, even with the three giant screens.

            As the US and our current administration continue to fund Israel, it demonstrates a sponsorship of GENOCIDE. Just like the past administrations, it follows like baby geese narrowly focused on their mother duck. Has been…for a long, long time.

            It’s good to mention before we continue, you reader and I, the writer, on this collective experience, that this is not a review, or advertisement for the movie Dune II. This will not be featured on Rotten Tomatoes. Even further, this will get published long after the movie has been released.

            Honestly, I enjoyed seeing All of Us Strangers more, even if it had me crying at the movie theater. There’s just something about the catharsis of a movie exposing old and fresh wounds that you didn’t even know were open. It allows the sewing of them to be more accurate as they rise into our visibility. In doing so, I realized that it was time to take a break from looking for relationships.

            In the Dune franchise, however, love interests are not so much felt. We see instead more clearly both the state and the oppressed; the consequences of supporting them blindly.

            As Paul Atreides, portrayed by Timothée Chalamet, screams “Long live the fighters!” I thought of October 7, 2023. In the film, Paul is leading a resistance that has culminated in an act of violence on the movie screens. Fiction in Dune, but in Israel, innocent people were murdered. I couldn’t help but think both resistances found those assaults as the only way out of oppression. We are supposed to be captivated by the explosions, the giant worms tipping the balance of the battle, but I know I am not the only one unconsciously making the connections. I grow more uncomfortable as the violence increases.

            While the audience around me was gripping their seats, the powerful vibrations from the immersive speakers continued. I bet I was not the only one remembering that earlier that week, the hospital in Gaza had been blown to rubble.

            As the Arrakis finally destroy the status quo, the system in place, only to be replaced unfortunately (spoiler alert) by an even more destructive force, I caught myself thinking how the people of Palestine can escape the iron grip of Israel’s government, which is run by a psychopathic president and administration, without having to go to that extreme. The Israeli government does not see the Palestinian people as human beings, but a nuisance in their objective to expand territory since 1948. Whether it is for money or religious fanaticism, that has been the objective.

            After the movie ended, we all walked away thinking of what we could do to help against massive suffering. At least that is what I hoped we all thought, as I walked away from the theater, away from Artimis, into Earth, back to our reality, to the 10:00 P.M. Houston traffic.

            I thought about ending it here. The essay. This essay, movie review, diary entry, ramblings—whatever you want to label this. I thought it would speak on how impotent we all feel, that at the end of the day there is nothing we can do but simply keep existing within the parameters of our reality, our system.

            But no. That is not entirely true.

            For some reason unbeknownst, I was born within this system of reality called America. In another multiverse, perhaps I was born in another system of reality that is currently being bombarded as we speak out of the sheer force of global dominance, colonialism, occupation, manifest destiny. Regardless of the why, the how, I am standing here today. A writer. A teacher. So I did what I could.

            I wrote. I taught.

            I incorporated “Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine” into my English II class syllabus. After I slept on the question, was their stories that captured what was happening in Gaza just like storytelling has always captured what is happening in our world, our collective consciousness. I asked ChatGPT if there was any collection of short stories, sure enough it pointed me to that book which anyone could buy on Amazon. The voices of the oppressed readily available for consumption. Only one of the handful of collections from Palestinian writers that are able to make their way on to us. Sometimes the machine works with us.

These stories were written in the backdrop of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s assault on Gaza that led to 1,400 deaths, more than 11,000 homes, and innumerable industrial buildings, shops, roads bridges, and other infrastructure destroyed.

This collection of stories was edited and made possible by Refaat Alareer, the prominent Palestinian poet who was himself murdered by an Israeli air strike in December 2023.

“These writers and activists are the ones who made this book a reality,” Refaat Alareer writes (Alareer 2014).  “And like any society, Palestine is not perfect, something the stories touch upon. In addition to addressing occupation issues, the stories also have social purposes, as they never fail to point the finger of accusations, usually symbolically, at aging Palestinian leadership and certain undesired social conventions…This is not to suggest that Palestinian fiction writing by emerging young writers is reactive; it's rather a very creative, proactive response: resist in words the horrible situations imposed upon them.”

I taught it with care, careful to not direct hatred onto all the Jewish population as so many quickly turn to as they are informed of what happens in Gaza, even if the information had existed since decades before.

Everyone, yes especially Jewish people, can see the injustice of it all. The Israeli Government, though. Netanyahu. They have created an altogether different kind of blindness, one close to insanity and the settlers, people, who have followed join their ranks.

            I stand here like anybody else doing whatever I can do to promote less suffering, even if it is within a system that has funded the very thing we oppose.

            I was supposed to finish this here, but yet again something happened that immediately attaches itself to this. Another self-immolation.

Maxwell Azzarello set himself ablaze during the Trump trial at a courthouse (Parkinson). It’s crazy because no mention of Israel or Palestine, but Ponzi Schemes. Now there is a question that rises in my head: does the act of self-immolation get automatic approval? Is the cause behind the intention justified because an individual paid the ultimate unbearable price?  I am not posing you to compare both causes to see which one is “better” to self-emulate under but rather be able to think about these two self-immolations that happened close to each other in the distance of time. 

Although Maxwell Azzarello did not mention Palestine or Israel, in both there is the real justified feeling of losing something, taken, by those who do have enough power and wealth to never have that feeling. Maxwell Azzarello is centered on the destructive, exploitive nature of capitalism that inevitably is designed to overcompensate the individuals who are already within the echelons of that hierarchical system.

            But surrounding all of this are the other real signs of mental instability, of losing the trail, of focusing on too much all at once and getting lost in it all. In the pamphlets he threw out before the act, Maxwell adds without concrete evidence that shows and movies are brainwashing us (Azzarello Pamphlets) specifically shows like the Simpsons.

He implies that this brainwashing is part of the root cause of our problems, regardless of whether the entire populace is watching those specific shows. It is disheartening that both Maxwell and Bushnell could have been saved if they had talked to someone, if we as society could have breached their isolation and perhaps resorted to something else. Was there something else?

The immediacy to both must also be considered. On the one hand Aaron Bushnell is throwing himself upon the gears of the machine to stop that very machine from killing more children. Maxwell follows suit, in an attempt to expose the believed operations of the machine.

            Does Maxwell’s self-immolation get dismissed because the overcomplication became close to the fringes of schizophrenia and psychosis, arriving definitely at an unhealthy mind? Was Aaron’s mind unstable as well?

            These are questions perhaps someone else can answer, whether it is truthfully or manipulating, or erroneously. But I can’t give you that answer.

            But all of this feels like psychosis.

            You blink, and you find yourself watching students all over the country protesting against the genocide on Palestine. You blink, and you hear people calling them antisemitic even though many of them are Jewish. You blink again and you see people complain about the ruckus, the mayhem they are creating. You continue to blink and see the next day pro-Zionist agitators finally brought violence on to these protests, starting with UCLA. Police become the new school shooters, as they storm through the campuses and shoot the students with rubber bullets. You blink yet again, and see the explosions in the news, explosions from the IDF drones and missiles, killing actual babies in Palestine indiscriminately with the excuse of HAMAS. 

            You blink. Until you want to keep your eyes closed and not blink again.

            Shaima Refaat Alareer, the eldest daughter of Refaat Alareer who edited the book I incorporated into my class that I mentioned, has been killed along with her husband and 2-month-old son while sheltering in the building of international relief charity Global communities. Shortly before her death she posted on Facebook.

            “I have a beautiful news for you, I wish I could convey it to you while you are in front of me, I present to you your first grandchild. Do you know, my father, that you have become a grandfather? This si your grandson Abd al-Rahman whom I have long imagined you carrying, but I never imagined that I would lose you early before you see him.”

            Bear witness. Do not look away. If the least we can do to fight against genocide is witnessing, then we must remember Paul Atreides' cry, ‘Long live the fighters!' In order to witness we must continue living.

  As I catch my breath on my own suffering, my own unique individual problems, I try to witness what I can because if I am not careful it can consume me into annihilation. I will not be of any use in any battle if that happens.

I am reminded of James Baldwin’s words,” It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ides which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a common place. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. The fight begins, however in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair” (Baldwin 1963).

Take care.  

Works Cited

1.     Almasy, Steve, and Alaa Elassar. "Dozens of Palestinians Killed in Food Truck Attack." CNN, 29 Feb. 2024, www.cnn.com/2024/02/29/middleeast/gaza-food-truck-deaths-israel-wwk-intl/index.html.

2.     Alareer, Refaat, editor. Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine. Just World Books, 2014.

3.     "Azzarello Pamphlets." TMZ, 19 Apr. 2024, dam.tmz.com/document/69/o/2024/04/19/69afe52280de4e22a6a2675833729a01.pdf.

4.     Buckingham, Marcus. "Man Sets Fire at Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C." NPR, 25 Feb. 2024, www.npr.org/2024/02/25/1233810136/fire-man-israeli-embassy-washington.

5.     Parkinson, John. "Man Sets Fire at Courthouse during Trump Trial." ABC News, 29 Feb. 2024, abcnews.go.com/US/man-apparently-sets-fire-courthouse-trump-trial/story?id=109433903.

6.     Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Dial Press, 1963.