Institutions are doing what they’re intended to do
Institutions are their outcomes, so what does that mean for the state of our world?
A few months ago, my aunt was deciding between which preschool she should send her three-year-old son to. She called my mother for advice during our morning commute. I’ll never forget the sobering assessment my mother gave her younger sister that day. What was the deciding factor, you ask? It was not the educational programming, or the ratio of staff to children, or any of the other normal considerations that parents and caregivers contemplate before enrolling their child in a school. No. The factor that made one preschool stand out over the other was whether it was equipped with a bunker.
You see, my aunt and three-year-old cousin live in Lebanon. And if say — hypothetically — a genocidal apartheid state decided to start bombing the small, struggling country in a bid to maintain power, then my mother’s assessment makes perfect sense. A preschool with a bunker is a clear advantage to keeping my little cousin safe.
Of course, my little cousin still has to make it home from that day of preschool. And even being at home is no guarantee that he can wake up unharmed the next day. After all, Israel bombed six — SIX! — residential buildings just to assassinate one target, a tactic that is named the Dahiyeh Doctrine.
I watch as the family group chat fills with messages of: “Did you hear that bomb go off?” “That one sounded close.” “What are we going to do?” “Should we leave?” “Where would we go?” And there is no good answer. Do you stay and die in your home or become a refugee that no one will care for? Even worse, if you do decide to evacuate, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be safe since Israel is also bombing those evacuating and bombing escape routes. What would you pick in this situation, reader? Really contemplate it for a moment and appreciate the impossible decision my aunt has to make as she looks at her three-year-old son.
Now remember the even crueler circumstances and decisions Palestinians have had to face for a WHOLE YEAR. Genocide. One year of genocide. Do not gloss over that. Documented and livestreamed. The annihilation of a people at your fingertips. Every journalist that documents the horrors ends up targeted. When you hear: “Hi everyone, it’s Bisan from Gaza and today is 365 days of the genocide.” Will you not feel shame? Does it not break your heart? More importantly, doesn’t it make you angry? We let our institutions continue to abuse the powers they’ve been given to murder and pillage. We believe it to be a corruption of the system, this thirst for blood and wealth. Yet, an institution is its outcome. And these systems are acting as intended, because colonialism and capitalism were the foundations for our world today, it never went away.
On September 24, Marcellus Williams was murdered by the state of Missouri supported by the U.S. Supreme Court. He was murdered. Murdered for a crime he was not proven to have committed. Murdered despite the prosecutors, the victim’s family, and numerous petitions pleading to save his life and stop him from receiving the death penalty. This was not a failure of the system. Not when a system still includes the death penalty as an option for prisoners despite it being a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) that was adopted by the United Nations in 1966. Not when due process is blatantly ignored by multiple levels of the judicial system. Not when the criminal justice system of the United States has the 13th amendment imbedded in it, which states that: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
The system that murdered Marcellus Williams, an innocent black man, also murdered six-year-old Hind, and now may also murder my family. These systems that have no value for human life have created our societies. The foundations of imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and white supremacy are at the very core of our countries. Nowhere is that more clear than in Canada, the country in which we live. The continued effects of genocide and ethnic cleansing have not been addressed substantially by either government or Canadian society. And we continue to see how the Canadian system has been intentionally set up to consistently disenfranchise Indigenous people in Canada.
So on the one-year mark of a genocide in Gaza, really sit with the fact that these systems are doing what they are meant to do: kill and pillage and profit. And remember that these systems are not set in stone nor are they human nature. They were created by people once, and so they can be torn down as well. Our history should not shackle our imagination for the future. And I will continue to fight for and imagine a world where a three-year-old boy does not have to go to a preschool with a bunker.
