By Nick Mottern, World BEYOND War, December 4, 2023
On a gray, damp Thursday noon hour, November 9th, I walked up to Smith College from my apartment in Northampton MA because I had heard that there would be a rally there in support of the Palestinian people as they were being slaughtered by the Israel Defense Forces and the United States government.
A week earlier there had been a mass protest of these attacks by at least 800 Smith students at the nearby L3Harris factory, demanding that L3 stop supplying Israel with weapons. By local standards, the crowd was massive, and we all expressed our shock and disbelief over Gaza with our roaring chants which included one I had not heard before at any of these rallies: “F___the Democrats.”
So, I was surprised when I walked up the sidewalk to the Smith Administration Building on November 9 to see no one outside except two students, leaving the building separately, eyes somberly looking down as they might if they were leaving a funeral.
Inside, there was a crowd of young women seated on the floor along the corridors and on a flight of stairs, reading the names of Gazans who had just been killed, with the very raw sense that the owners of the names might not even by buried yet. The name of each of the dead seemed to hang suspended in the air like a rain drop in super slow motion, landing hard and inevitably to be immediately replaced by another.
The memorial reading among the young women, some of them perhaps holding the potential for creating new lives, perhaps on the brink of decisions whether to do just that, was stunningly powerful. It was also a massive expression of women’s lament at the horrible sadness of the loss of children, visited on women so cruelly and inevitably by the always hidden engineers of war, the plotters for private gain, the so very respectable serial killers aspiring to power, expensive suits and fancy wrist watches, who may fear only the meaning of an infant’s gaze.
There are many ways of expressing to the so-called leaders that we are very aware that lives and hearts are being broken, that we will not forget and that there will be consequences, non-violent and for that reason, all the more powerful.
3 Responses
Thank you to the women of Smith College for being on the right side of history.
Sandra Shatilla
Montreal
Thank you. As an alumna, I am more proud of this profoundly spiritual and emotional action than many of the more trumpeting things being done. Every act of resistance to this mass murder, this cycle of hatred and revenge, helps. But the names of those who have been taken out of life by this violence – they are sacred and to say them summons their wisdom from where they are, assuages their grief and ours, and helps us all, I believe, in invisible but powerful ways. Thank you.
Thanks, Mimi.