ensara's corner

Hello Beautiful People,

Something happened at work recently that’s been sitting with me. My coworkers were talking about their favorite chain restaurants and asked me about my order there. I told them I don’t really eat at chains especially those on the BDS list. They laughed, and when their love for McDonald’s, and an Israeli-IOF-supporting-owned restaurant came up, they brushed it off as “not that deep”, “it doesn’t matter”, “it makes no difference”, “it’s too hard to boycott”. What stuck with me is that this conversation was happening in Chicagoland, surrounded by Arab-owned local spots, and with three children of immigrants & people of color, living in Trump’s 2026 America. I found myself frustrated, once again explaining why boycotts matter and why dismissing genocide while financially supporting complicit companies is disturbing. They took it fine in the end, but I can’t stop thinking about it, because this mindset is way more common than we want to admit. It’s just the average American, yes, liberal American too.

All of this is happening while ICE has recently murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis, Keith Porter in Los Angeles, and just days ago, Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. This doesn’t even account for the countless people who have died in ICE detention, people you could absolutely argue were murdered by the state. These are people shot in broad daylight. In two cases, the footage has gone viral, showing their innocence clearly.

And yet, none of this shocks me.

This is exactly what we paved the way for over the past three years while we watched a livestreamed genocide unfold in our feeds. The world didn’t stop. The world didn’t shut down. Day after day, Palestinians in Gaza, men, women, and children, were shot by Israeli bombs, snipers, and settler violence. Six-year-olds like Hind Rajab. Nearly 2,000 people were killed while seeking food during a manufactured famine. This wasn’t hidden. This wasn’t unknowable. It was documented, and it was funded by American taxpayer dollars.

The same people who didn’t flinch at a genocide, who watched children carry their siblings in grocery bags and school backpacks because only pieces of their bodies were left, are the people who now act surprised. The bombs our tax dollars sponsored, signed off on by American representatives and senators (Democrat and Republican), created a reality so brutal it coined the term WCNSF: Wounded Child, No Surviving Family. 

When we live in a nation, and among people. who can’t draw the line at genocide, who say it’s “too complicated” or that “there are two sides,” who turn a blind eye because the suffering is thousands of miles away, we become a society where Americans can be shot in broad daylight.

Another thing that deeply bothers me is the idea being mentioned that state violence is somehow new. It isn’t. This didn’t start with Donald Trump. America has been enabling and perfecting this for centuries. Our Black brothers and sisters have been brutalized since the founding of this nation. “Liberty and justice for all” was always conditional. Police brutality against Black people has a long history. American torture abroad, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and beyond, has a long history. For-profit prisons are designed to trap people in cycles they can’t escape. Systemic racism is the engine of this country. This evil reality was true during Japanese internment camps, the Chinese Exclusion Acts, Jim Crow, and it’s true now. This is not new. It’s a continuation.

I’m exhausted by the rhetoric that says, if Kamala were in office, things would be different. That “we’d all be at brunch”. Americans aren’t inherently against immoral systems, they’re just against figures like Donald Trump because he’s easy to oppose. That’s why elected officials who call themselves liberal still refuse to say “abolish ICE.” That’s why a mayor whose city witnessed ICE killings in broad daylight says they need “better training” instead of demanding abolition. I’m tired of voters being blamed when elected officials refuse to do their jobs. It’s their responsibility to give us something to vote for. Voting against something is not enough. Touring with people like Liz Cheney to court undecided voters while ignoring the base is not enough.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about local elections close to home as well, where candidates are openly anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian statehood, anti-war, and refusing corporate PAC money. And yet, I hear white moderates and white liberals say genocide “doesn’t matter” when voting. “Don’t be a single issue voter”. The reason we’re facing so many crises is because genocide was allowed to continue unchecked, and now it’s being weaponized as a political tool while voters are blamed for the failures of politicians.

I’ve written far too much already for a blog post, and there’s still so much more I could say. It’s saddening. It’s infuriating. It’s exhausting. Waking up every morning to another unthinkable headline isn’t shocking anymore, because for years, we woke up to hospitals being bombed, doctors kidnapped, journalists killed, men stripped naked in Nazi-like execution lines, children forced to make TikToks and reels for donations just to eat, women with no access to period products or giving birth without anesthesia. The list is endless.

I know we must not lose hope. I’ll be the first to tell you that. But what’s happening now did not come out of nowhere. It’s the result of years of ignoring other people’s pain because it was “not that deep.” We need change, and we needed it yesterday.

I’ll leave you with this quote from One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad: “There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say ‘these horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day.’ To repeat the famous phrase about ‘who they came for first’ and ‘who they’ll come for next.’ But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted upon them, they would tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.”

Well. Look at us now. Lots to think about.

I hope I’ll see you soon. I’m really trying to commit to keeping this blog updated because I love chatting, writing, and sharing. I can’t promise the next one will be a happy story, given everything, but we’ll see.

With love and solidarity,
Ensara Sejko ꨄ