The Least I Can Do
I woke up today on a beautiful morning in a beautiful city with hours left before celebrating my engagement with family and friends. One of the first things I did was open Substack and watch babies clustered in failing incubators. I watched starving children crying out for their mothers. I saw babies trying to comfort other babies with devastating futility. Then I prepared myself to celebrate.
You might be wondering why I would start my day this way. Especially a day of celebration. Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m watching these videos at all. The answer is two fold. First, I never want to forget the level of privilege I enjoy on a daily basis. I never want to forget that my privilege exists at the expense of these children’s lives. Second, witnessing their suffering under unspeakable brutality is the absolute least I can do.
I cannot feed them. I cannot clothe them. I cannot reattach their limbs. I cannot return their families to them. I cannot reach out and touch them with a caring hand. I cannot give them a kind word. I cannot give them hope or relief of any kind. Unfortunately, my powers do not yet extend far enough to accomplish that.
What I can do is bear witness to their suffering. I can remind myself why I am disconnecting from a system and country that is perpetuating this evil. I can remind myself why I am creating antiracism seminars to teach Americans how we became complicit in this atrocity and violence around the world (including in our own backyards). Bearing witness to the world I helped create is the absolute least I can do for them.
So each morning I will continue. I’ll wake up, wipe the sleep from my eyes, stretch, and witness their suffering. Then I will write. Then I will speak of what I’ve witnessed with others regardless of whether they’ll listen or not. Then I will host my antiracism seminars. Then I will pay for independent media making the connections between this genocide and Americans’ individual lives. Then I will laugh, cry, eat, hike, read, bathe, and live my life.
I have to fight the thoughts that it isn’t enough even while I am fully aware most are not doing remotely as much to create a better world. How can I sit here and watch this without taking immediate action? How can I celebrate in the face of this evil? How can I live while they die?
And then the answer comes to me. My life is the fight. I fight with my words both spoken and written. I fight for my soul, the soul of my fellow countrymen, the soul of my country, and the soul of humanity. In joy and sorrow, I fight, and I bear witness to what I’m fighting for. It’s the least I can do.
Brother Fullwood,
Well written. I came across your post, just as I read a post on the historical Dutch contribution to human suffering. I am Dutch, and partly Indonesian in ancestry. I sometimes wonder how those blood lines got mixed — anticipating the violation of the colonised Indonesian female.
I think about human suffering often. Not just of the brawl of man versus man, but of the organised kind. It must not be a very original thought, but I think that those who strive for positions of power are categorically inclined toward sociopathy or psychopathy, or forms of narcissism. Such a categorical prevalence is apparently factual according to psychology, such as degrees of psychopathy being notably present in fields centered around sheer logical deduction. Who knows, this might explain the scientific comfort with animal experimentation.
But when you ask the average person on the street: _do you want human equity and world peace?_ the answer is a genuine _yes._ The everyday person is ready. But it are those who crave stations of power, those who can actually move the world, that are otherwise inclined. For them, the only way to rise is to keep another man down. Wealth can only come through another's poverty. And your life must mean the death of another.
It is as if the collective human body suffers from an autoimmume disease — a body that attacks itself. Eats itself. Destroys itself.
In these considerations, I find it important to remember this is human nature. Every creature on this world has evolved out of a hierarchy of dominance, including human beings. I am grateful we are now evolved enough to recognise the importance of moral consideration and indeed empathy. As a vegan, I went so far as to consider ethics even in diet (no, I'm not the militant type).
I feel it is important to understand this as a universal human trait, in order to prevent racial framing. When we speak of the misdeeds of this or that nation, we merely speak of where this trait is presently manifesting itself and through whom. Next time, it will be via the other party. Or a combination of both.
At the root, everything is just tribal expansion — when conflated with technology and affluence, we call it colonialism. But the heart of this mechanism is old. It is primal.
The human monkey reasons in fear, and fear is never reasonable.
— If you're interested, the post on historical Dutch atrocities: https://substack.com/home/post/p-167804377
I was in Fiji yesterday for a holiday. Feeling the same way, your words are exactly the same way I feel. Thank you for putting into writing.