Photo: John Rooney for the AP

Russian Consulate

Russian Consulate

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05/18/17

The news out of Aleppo today is so incredibly sad. Photographs of dead children, people sending their last/final video messages as Assad’s Russian-backed forces advance, journalists' accounts of people being gunned down in the street and women committing suicide rather than be raped by soldiers. A cease fire has been negotiated to evacuate remaining citizens, but the remaining people of Aleppo are essentially negotiating with their own murderers. Syria has felt for some time like the first notes in some new symphony of dread — a tainted wave of vain and overbearing dictators, kleptocrats, despots, narcissists, and bullies. Those who don't ask permission but blame the people whom they violate for failing to stop them. What can we as average citizens do? Wouldn't it be easier to just tune it all out? Confine our outrage to Donald's photo opp du jour? I think we have to resist desensitization at all costs. I think we have to turn away from trivial and look the truth of this world square in the eyes. To "talk about what we are actually talking about," as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie put it. To remember that even bearing witness can be an act of defiance in a culture that invites us constantly to look away. To remember that the future exists and to work stubbornly for our version of it, our vision for it. Thousands of people are, as we speak, gathered in front of the Russian consulate in Istanbul to protest the ongoing massacre of Syrian citizens. In one way, they are simply standing in a particular spot on a particular day. In another way entirely their acts say, we will not play along. We will not pretend this isn't happening. We will not tolerate the murder of our fellow human beings. We see peace and mutual respect not as weakness, but as accomplishments. Friends, though the days are short and the news very tragic of late, I want to thank you for being luminaries of peaceful resistance in this world. For using your power to work toward a culture of inclusion and respect. Your acts go beyond the ordinary and ring out into the larger world where they too say, "Let us not accept the unacceptable. Let us resist."