Mosab Abu Toha

Mosab Abu Toha

▪︎ Palestinian poet

i ask you how you are and i'm saying "i love you" i send you a 15 minute voice note and i'm saying "i love you" i remember your coffee order and i'm saying "i love you" i watch the movie you recommended and i'm saying "i love you" i send you a movie you'd love and i'm saying "i love you" i buy the extra large bag to share and i'm saying "i love you" and i'm saying "i love you" and i'm saying "i love you" and i'm saying "i love you"

i feel so normal about him wearing glasses

I have noticed a tendency in some circles to, at least implicitly, disparage or diminish feelings of hopelessness and despair—feelings that touch on nihilism. I met and worked with a peaceworker in Iraqi Kurdistan who said that she didn't have much hope and didn't believe in God; and yet, she kept on working, even in the face of a tangible and profound violence and a rejection of metaphysical certainty, to document horrors and amplify the voices of the oppressed, read and love poetry, and witness to the possibility of nonviolence. I don't think that feelings of hopelessness and despair are inimical to the cultivation of devotion and a commitment to the notion that there are things that are worth saving, even or especially if the saving act feels impossible. We have to love even in the face of despair, even without the guarantee that love will, in some cosmological or eschatological sense, prevail. It is enough—more than enough—to move forward with our vulnerable and human hearts, our hearts that are softened and hardened and broken open and softened again, and hold to a love without guarantee.

On the second viewing, I realized that House of Usher is also a story about how Boomers made a deal with the devil - an easy life with the consequences to be paid by future generations. Gen X got to reap the most benefits from this deal - got to live longer and get more established and see where they were supposed to be able to get before they got cut off at the knees. Millennials got less - struggling to establish themselves in careers when the world is falling apart, ending up in weird digital jobs like streaming video games or throwing parties, retreating into nihilistic hedonism to deal with it. And Gen Z - poor Gen Z may not even get started, so many of them struck down before they can even really live by war and climate change and gun violence and disease. They're young enough and innocent enough to see what's wrong with the world but not powerful enough to fix it. And then the Boomers sit back and complain about how it's everyone else's fault - that they're all greedy and lazy and the cause of their own destruction - and refuse to hand over power when they should, choosing instead to collapse the entire house around them in their senility.