December 23, 2024

Over the last year we have witnessed a devasting year of tragedy. While we watch a genocide unfold and international laws broken in Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria, we have also contended with alarming events occurring domestically. Constitutional rights are under threat in the streets, in the classrooms and in the workplace.

Students have lost degrees, scholarships and paid steep legal costs for their civil disobedience and human rights activism. Abuses of university leadership and law enforcement sought to end academic and 1st Amendment rights, in the sole pursuit of support of a foreign rogue government and their allies. University administrations bowed down to pressure by Congress and state legislators, all while touting the need to resist (Chinese, Russian, and Iranian) foreign influence.

Families have struggled financially while billionaires profit off a manufactured inflation, seeing their bank accounts rewarded with millions of dollars in bonuses while grocery prices are artificially inflated. We are struggling to pay rent and buy homes while those same billionaires exert influence on the government to make sure they can continue.

Our elected officials, in whom we should be able to put our trust, violated basic foreign policy law, and international human rights law, that Eleanor Roosevelt proudly helped champion. The United States presence on the national stage has never been lower, as they have time and again gone against the majority will of the world’s people who are standing against human rights atrocities.

All of this is very bad news. You already know this. So why am I bringing it up again when we are exhausted, burned out, and our hearts can’t take any more?

For years we have stood against the status quo and people who say, “this is the world, and it will never change. Names of lawmakers change, but their actions don’t.” We believe in a better world. We believe that we can do better. We believe we must do better. All of the above feels like fights that will never be won. I am here to remind you every battle for rights and freedom ever won, came at the hands and feet of people who refused to give up. The powers that be want us tired, they want to wear us down so we will quit.

How can we go into 2025 and fight on? We remember the momentous opening of the floodgates of awareness on Palestinian history and rights. We remember how many allies were born and connected to support students worldwide. We remember how much money was raised to help save lives. We remember how many legal battles were begun to hold people accountable. We look for the peacemakers, and we come alongside them when all seems lost.

We remember that the Palestinians are but a symbol of people all over the world begging for dignity, life, and freedom. From Myanmar, to Armenia, India, Sudan, DRC, China, Ukraine, the U.S.A., Burkina Faso, West Sahara, Afghanistan…. Every human being is deserving of love, life and human rights, no matter what bit of soil they were born upon.

For every bit of evil working to break us down, we must build three times faster. We must join together in 2025, setting aside our differences, and support anyone who is a victim of government oppression. We must be a collective voice from the Florida Keys to the northern border Gulf region.

Give rest to your body and soul this end of year. Breathe in and out, resting in a season that begs and waits for new growth. Then come back stronger in the new year, ready to walk alongside the cause of the weary and persecuted. Ready to love your neighbor.

Please join us in loving our neighbors, by joining our Advocacy Hubs. Volunteers all over the state are joining together to say, “Not on my watch!”

Visit bit.ly/advocacy-hubs for more information.