Wednesday Walk: I'm Still Learning
Wednesday Walk: I'm Still Learning
How I've learned to keep learning, supporting small farmers in the West Bank, and some resources on Fast Fashion
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Every Wednesday, I offer a few short ideas that I hope will inspire you to do some more reading, thinking, and exploring. Let’s take a little walk together and see where the path leads…
Still Learning
I was recently asked to help a friend prepare some remarks on the basic history of Palestine and the conflict with Israel for a speaking engagement. I agreed to help, but I honestly harbored fears that my understanding of the situation was rudimentary at best and that I might mess up on important details.
Even without articulating that feeling, my friend offered reassurance, observing that “you really know what’s happening in Palestine” about me. Which gave me pause.
Perhaps I do know more than many average Americans at this point, but that absolutely was not the case three months ago. I could give a general location for Israel on a map, but probably couldn’t name the neighboring countries.
I was very much afraid to get it wrong in the early days and fall back on phrases like “it’s complicated” or “I’m not (Jewish/Muslim/Middle Eastern, whatever) so it’s really not my place to get involved or offer an opinion.”
When the fighting first broke out in October, I wrote a piece about my own learning gap. At the time, I was pretty neutral or at least was open to seeing both sides as valid.
My perspective has evolved considerably in the last three months, and I hope talking about my own journey may help some of you who are still on the “complicated” fence from jumping in and learning more.
As I mentioned in October, rewatching Anthony Bourdain’s visit to Israel and Palestine was one of the first things that really helped me instantly visualize the region and see what life was like before there were daily bombings of civilians (in times of relative “peace,” life in Gaza was especially grim). It’s available to rent on most streamers and is an excellent introduction.
I also began reading. One of the books that I have found helpful in understanding the history that led to the founding of Israel and the fracturing of Palestine was The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi has family ties to many in politics and resistance movements in Palestine over the last 100 years and is able to draw on his own family’s experience while also doing journalistic work to chronicle how we got to now. It’s a heavy read that I haven’t quite finished, but it has been enlightening.
As for conventional news media, most Western journalists are reporting from outside of Gaza, which has meant that the first hand reports are coming almost exclusively from Palestinian journalists. Israeli forces have been targeting journalists, killing at least 79 since October, which has made their job increasingly dangerous.
The Washington Post published a profile of Plestia Alaqad last month, who has become one of the faces of Palestinian journalism on social media. I was surprised to learn from the profile that she was not working as a professional journalist before the war, but was actually a recent graduate from a journalism program and was set to start her first career job on October 8. She has spent the last three months documenting life in Gaza, while also trying to spread imagery of how beautiful of a place it was before the latest bombardment. She was recently able to flee to Australia through Egypt, and the WaPo profile goes into her complex thoughts about staying behind to work and face likely death or leave and protect her family. I can’t imagine how difficult that choice must have been.
Other journalists worth following include:
@motaz_azaiza
@wizard_bisan1
@wael_eldahdouh
@saleh_aljafarawi
@hindkhoudary
(Sadly, I had shared this list in November and had to double check to ensure this list still representing living journalists before sharing again)
By watching these direct accounts on social media, while also trying to understand the historical moments that have brought us to this point, I have come to understand the situation better.
If you’re still unsure of what’s happening, I can promise you that it doesn’t take long to get up to speed. Read some things, follow Palestinian journalists, and look at everything with a critical eye. That’s been the approach that’s worked for me and I hope if you’re still unsure what role you play in this, it’s one you’re willing to try.
Farm Aid
I posted about this on TikTok recently, but thought it was worth sharing here too.
If you’ve been feeling unsure how best to support Palestinians during this struggle, I have been feeling that way too. It can be hard to know who charitable contributions are actually benefiting and what impact they are having.
But my wife recently found a way to show support for Palestinians that also helps farmers in the region (and if you’ve been reading this newsletter for any length of time, you know that’s right up my alley).
Equal Exchange, the co-op that partners with small farmers around the world to ethically source coffee, chocolate, and more is currently selling two Palestinian food products that were grown in the West Bank and which directly benefit small farmers in the region.
We ordered a case of their olive oil, which is organically grown using Nabali olives. The oil has a garlic/pepper taste that we really like.
October is olive season, and understandably, the current war has greatly impacted Palestinians abilities to harvest olives. On top of that, factors from climate change have already led to a low harvest around the world for 2023, with the West Bank harvested expected to be half its usual output even prior to the war.
Equal Exchange also offers Palestinian dates for sale, though we haven’t tried them yet.
If you’re looking for ways to support growers in Palestine, ordering these products are a great way to do that.
Resolutions
With 2024 not even two weeks old yet (though at times it feels months old), I’ve been thinking about New Year’s resolutions a bit. I am not usually one to make these pledges, which may explain why I’m ten days late in writing about them, but one area of focus for me this year will be working even harder than usual to curb my consumption.
I really enjoyed going through the No New Clothes challenge last year, which was inspired by a conversation with Amory Sivertson in October, 2022. From October, 2022 through October, 2023, I would occasionally share my thoughts on fashion, clothing consumption, and my own progress with resisting new clothes in this newsletter.
I appreciated documenting it, as I was able to say with certainty at the end of 12 months that I had purchased one new item (though it was on clearance from an outlet store), one vintage sweater, and one used flannel. Even though the challenge officially ended, I have only since purchased three other used shirts from thrift stores, putting my total clothing purchases over the last 15 months at six items.
I mentioned last week that I’ve been reading the book The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B. MacKinnon. In the book, MacKinnon compares how the wealthy elites shopped in the early 1900s with how average young folks shop today. At the turn of the last century, ordering 12 dresses in a year was considered excessive, while today, a working class Generation Z person could consume 80 to 200 fashion items per year! Reading that really put my six pieces in perspective.
I’ve been emailing with MacKinnon and he shared with me a follow up article that he published for Sierra where he traveled to Bangladesh to tour clothing factories that produce garments for major Western brands. The piece is a long, vivid read that really brings the reality of these clothing factories to life.
Perhaps most poignant, MacKinnon’s article highlights just how manual the process of clothes making still is:
“When I saw a line of three young men, each bent over a padded form onto which they slipped one leg of jeans after another, sanding each by hand to fade the knees and thighs, I began to feel a profound shock.
I had never imagined (or, more truthfully, stopped to consider) that it might be people and not machines doing this work. ‘Mass production’ connotes sleek technology, yet much of the work of making clothes is still essentially artisanal, an expenditure of life energy. It’s shocking how little we value this fact, as reflected in the prices we pay for what we wear.”
Of course, the problems with our current fast fashion industry aren’t just on the labor side. There’s a large environmental cost to the clothes that we discard every year, a cost which is usually heaviest in the Global South.
My friend Jesse recently sent me an article by Julia Shipley and Muriel Alarcón for Grist which looks at the giant open air landfill of discarded clothing from around the world located in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
Like MacKinnon’s piece, Shipley and Alarcón paint a descriptive picture of the problem, but also point to the humanity behind all of it. When I had previously heard of clothes dumps like these, I imagined they were somehow sanctioned by businesses and were official operations of some kind.
In the case of the Atacama clothes pile, it started with an entrepreneur who was storing clothes in the dry conditions of the desert, hoping to resell them until the volume of clothing became too great:
“In 2001, Manuela Medina, a former gardener, saw an opportunity in Iquique’s growing textile abundance. Relocating to Alto Hospicio, she established an unauthorized compound on government lands at the base of El Paso de la Mula, the huge sand dune at the far side of an unregulated shantytown. Every few days, she hired a fletero — a driver with a jalopy — to travel the switchback roads, out of the brown dunes of Alto Hospicio, to arrive in the colorful oceanside city of Iquique, which sits a thousand miles north of the country’s capital, Santiago.
Near the dock where cranes unload massive container ships, inside Iquique’s free trade zone, Medina ventured into the contiguous warehouses, asking secondhand clothing importers, ‘Do you have any garbage?’
Back at her compound, Medina unloaded her wares in piles on the ground where she had the luxury of storing them indefinitely — the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth, meaning items don’t undergo normal degradation from elements like rain. Here, Medina sold her piles to merchants and others for $10 each.”
Shipley and Alarcón’s article is a good read, but if you’re more the listening type, I wanted to plug the podcast that I produce for Here4TheKids.
This week,
has an amazing conversation with , who is a U.K. based stylist and author about some of the problems with the fashion industry. Aja wrote an amazing book which details all of this, and her conversation with Jo is a really good one!If you’re not already, subscribe to the Here4TheKids Substack and you’ll get alerted to when that episode goes live on Thursday.
Cutting consumption even more in 2024 will be an ongoing thread in this newsletter. I hope you’ll join me in thinking about how you can thrive with less. And please share your thoughts on New Year’s resolutions, resisting consumption, or supporting Palestine.
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Other Wednesday Walks
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.
appreciate all the resources in "still learning"
White supremacy culture has taught us to not trust our own eyes and heart, to not know how to be in true community with people who don't look like us. So in addition to the pressure of not having "the proper knowledge" to be able to speak up, we are taught in any number of ways that silence is the only safe, respectable path forward. We don't see how deadly this is for all of us, but especially for Black and Brown people.
Thanks for helping to change the dynamic around speaking up. We're going to mess up, but moving away from silence is the ONLY path forward.