What Else Is There To Say?

Following the journalists and others posting updates from Gaza and the West Bank about the ongoing genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinian people, one thing that's very noticeable is the repetition of the first phrase that seems to come up for people when they get especially exasperated -- "what else is there to say?"

Day in and day out they are describing the same atrocities.  Day in and day out they are recording the same unbearable cries of the wounded, orphaned children crying out through their parched throats that universally familiar word into the smoke-filled, toxic air, "mama!"  Day in and day out, the cries go unanswered, and they tell us about that, too.

Every day I and other people around the world fantasize helplessly about marching to Palestine to stand with those being slaughtered.  To care for the orphans -- and especially, to fight back.  But even just getting there to do such things seems so impossible.

Every day I wake up thinking about these things.  And faced with the impossibility of physically doing anything useful, rather than resigning myself to being completely useless, I remind myself, I'm an artist, I'll write something again.  And then I ask myself the same question the journalists in Gaza occasionally ask the program host safely sitting in some nice office in Doha or London:  what else is there to say?

There are always more stories to tell, I can hear some editor encouraging their shellshocked reporters in the field.  That's what I tell myself, too.  Each one of those orphans has a story, worthy of many songs.

But some days, many days, increasing numbers of days, "what else is there to say" is all I have.  Just look at what's happened in the past 48 hours or so, and I'll hyperlink to songs I've already written about that.

• air strikes across the Gaza Strip killed hundreds more people
• among those injured were orphans whose entire families were killed
• hundreds of thousands of people around the world protested against the genocide
• other people have been trespassing in arms factories and smashing equipment
• even the US State Department now admits there is a famine happening in Gaza
• there is yet another settler-led, soldier-supported pogrom happening in the West Bank
• journalists are being targeted by snipers
• the heroic fighters of Ansar Allah continue their campaign on Red Sea shipping
• Jews in Germany continue to get arrested for being antisemites
• aid workers and people seeking food continue to get shot
• pro-Israel trolls continue to flood social media with bile
• South Africa's genocide case against Israel continues