The Two Years Since I was expelled for Protesting the Palestinian Genocide

Ran into one of the women that was on the conduct board that kicked me out of UT. Didn't know how big the wound was til I felt it split open right then at that moment. I was in honors. I was a great sociologist. I was beloved by my professors. I wanted to be like them, get a doctorate and all that. I had something I love, I had a purpose

Now l'm nothing, abandoned by a world I can't make sense of. It's all been one long lucid dream but there's nothing to return to anyways. Nothing to wake up to. People like us are relegated to living half lives.

I hate this world in all its cruelty and apathy. It's a barrel of rats. The only two things people can be, in a true sense, is an abuser or the abused. So everyone clamors and claws at each other so the hurt they give is worse than the hurt they receive. I reject that hierarchy. I don't to be hurt and the pain of hurting others is much more, almost too much more, to bare. I was opposing a genocide for christs sake

The worst part is they'll never care. It’ll only ever be me who is bleeding.

A year after my trial, the UN officially called the genocide a genocide. But there is not reconciliation. I’d still receive those same glassy eyed stares from the university faculty chosen to shred my hopes, my dreams, my very sense of self, right in front of me.

Those dead eyes. Those scowling visages. Those impassioned speeches about how I compromised the integrity of the university, of how I endangered the student body. What a fucking joke. A performance, one that they revel in. Justice. Integrity. Arbitrary, fantastical means of dressing up and giving credence to power. When I say dead eyed, I mean not that nothing was there. I mean to say that they belonged to the dead. They were intoxicated. They earned there right to have an office relegated to corner of some building and given some authority. Their eyes were glimmering, not because they felt as though this was their chance to exact retribution.

It was the power to punish.

They knew I had nothing, that I was nobody. That there was nobody. I was alone. It was me and the rats.

That is the American dream. Dig your claws into the belly of any rat blow you and split his innards out. Revel in the blood. Let their pain serve as a testament to the necessity of cruelty. And on that pile of corpses you stand, waiting for something to vindicate you. To convince yourself you’re not some cannibal for the sake of it.

But what then was it for?

To be a part of something; to have a part of something

To be Power

That’s the tragic thing. DPS comes in and tears gasses and beat young adults senseless. They know they are power; it’s all they have. It’s what they take pride in. Their capacity to brutalize, to maintain “law”, to stifle the conscience, and to repressed internally colonized people of color.

But that is the American dream. America was formed by massacres and military conquest and then sustained itself with the blood of the global south.

This is to say, the American dream is to exploit, to control, and to protect the violence which is inherent to its existence as an entity.

The women at my trial recognized that anti-Zionism was a threat. They stood to gain nothing from the slaughter of tens of thousands of children. They didn’t need to. Yet they had earned themselves cozy positions within the power structure that enables and subsists off of children strewn across the ground. Their entrails tangled and meshed together, robbing the dead of the dignity of being whole again.

I couldn’t bear it. Having seen those images and being admonished because I had the audacity to shed tears at what I saw. I had the audacity to tremble with indignation and feel called to action. They spoke to me as though I were some delinquent putting up posters and getting gratifying some innate desire to be bad for the sake of being bad

They did not understand that I was someone with principles. Yuppie careerist shutter at the idea of someone who betrays their own self interest. They hate them. They glare and scowl at them, because that’s how they’ve lived their lives. Always begging for the favor of those above them, always resenting those above them. Accepting any abuse they’re given in hope of one day moving up in the world just enough to be tyrants in their own right. Have enough underlings that they can lord over and “teach the way of the world” through cruelty and condescension.

They said if I did not mention the names of the individuals I put the posters up with that I would certainly be expelled. I did not. Again, they failed to consider that people have principles. Principles that they would get expelled for, that they would die for.

It’ll only ever be me who is bleeding, but I have blood to shed. Life to give.

It is my life to give