Every day, I feel sure we have surpassed the limits of our endurance against the injustices being perpetuated by the powers that be. Yet, every day, they adamantly recalibrate the lines, knowing fully well that the culture of impunity they have helped construct through propagandist methods will allow them to get away scot-free, despite committing the most heinous crimes. Yesterday, I saw a video of a Palestinian man whose eyes struggled to contain all the trauma he had both witnessed and been subjected to — constant bombing, collecting the remnants of the deceased, continual displacement, and soul-crushing hunger. His eyes pierced through the camera’s lens when he recounted the experience of being systematically stripped of dignity. He ended by saying something like ‘what other cause is there beyond our humanity?’

I felt humbled by such profound clarity amidst his own suffering. His testimony seemed like a discursive legacy. Every day, those of us still in possession of a conscience, have to hold space for grief amid the senselessness of our mundane because accommodating grief is the only way to resist the hyper-normalisation of our broken present in which one-day old infants are being killed by killers who enjoy the backing of world governments, in which people continue to be prosecuted for speaking a certain language or for professing a religion, in which people are still being lynched because of their race or caste. The rule of domestic as well as international law seems null and void, invalidated. Even the findings of institutions like the UN, which were formed in the aftermath of the last world war to prevent us from returning to the precipice of mass destruction, seem to no longer bear any currency. Amid the catastrophic intensity of our current reality — genocide, human-caused starvation, homelessness, desperation because of extractive politics to fuel our over-consumptive tendencies under racist-capitalist-patriarchal systems, this starved skeleton of a Palestinian man about to flee for the hundredth time with a vessel on his head castigates us, reminding us that indeed, what other cause could there outside of protecting our humanity — our ability to care for one another.