A  little over a year ago, the Westphalia Periodic News broke the story in America that the Israeli plan was to get rid of all the Palestinians in Gaza and level the place like a construction site where a new city would rise up out of the ashes, like the mythical Phoenix, a new Mediterranean port with casinos and beaches tethered to the riches of the Orient by the Ben-Gurion Canal.

At the outset of the operation, right after Oct. 7, 2023, I didn’t think Israel wanted to kill all the Palestinians. I thought they just wanted to “remove” them. Plans had been approved at the highest levels of the Israeli cabinet to build a new place for the “troublemakers” to live in the Egyptian desert — a place for a couple million people. It would be a big project. Of course, as we predicted at the time, Egypt would never go along with it. So, the killing has just gotten worse and worse.

What to call it? Removal by other means? Self-defense? Only anti-Semitics who hate Jews call it genocide, right? Hate speech should be banned, right? What Trump does about it I guess depends on what he thinks it should be called.

A group of American medical doctors and surgeons who have been there, worked the trauma units and have made it back home, shaken, but alive, call it genocide.

They call their group Doctors Against Genocide. They have a website with communication links and the credibility our culture affords our doctors of medicine, whom we trust to probe our most intimate stuff… who we trust would never lie to gain an unfair advantage.

Last Saturday morning, January 4, some of them were invited to speak in a Zoom meeting I regularly attend that’s put on by an association called the International Peace Coalition (IPC). Internet technology is amazing. I get to be in the same room with hundreds of peace and social justice activists from around the world while sitting in front of my old Dell laptop next to the fireplace on a cold Saturday morning in Colorado.

I don’t want to talk about the stories the doctors told about what they saw and had to do over there where amputations are performed without anesthesia. Anybody can imagine it for themselves if they choose to confront the unimaginable. The doctors confronted it and call it genocide. I’ve yet to hear any other doctors who’ve been there call it anything else. So, ok, it is what it is.

What really caught my attention was when they said the genocide over there was making us sick here, in America. They call it “Genocide Sickness.” They are actively petitioning the American Medical Association to recognize “Genocide Sickness” as a real disease so treatments can be covered by insurance.

As I understand it, Genocide Sickness is a disruption of the mind-body system, a form of thought sickness. Your doctor might tell you that it’s all in your head, and she might be right.

I know from personal experience that thought sickness is a real disease because I often suffer from it myself. Intense mental struggles with an intractable paradox are often accompanied by anxiety, nausea, sleeplessness… the sympathetic nervous system goes into high alert, affecting heart functions and all the rest; like a slow, corrosive process over time that doctors are schooled and pledged to arrest.

Good doctors are never satisfied with treating symptoms, but are driven to get at the root of a problem. With thought sickness, the root is a thought, the thought, some kind of gnawing thought that won’t go away, like the time you saw an old lady get mugged on a street corner and did nothing… just walked away, unwilling to get involved with police reports and maybe a court appearance, abandoning the old lady to suffer out of sight, if not out of mind.

Genocide Sickness is what normal people get when they see something horrible happening that they think they can’t do anything about and look the other way. Maybe the house next door is on fire and the family is sleeping and there’s a child inside. You run towards them to warn them but come up against something like an impenetrable glass wall, like something in a dream, separating you from the reality of others, over there, on the other side. You watch, immobilized, helpless, hopeless, sickening the culture with your dream of a wall.

The doctors predict the sickness might reach epidemic levels not seen since the widespread outbreak in Germany following WWII when a population of “good Germans” were made to look in the mirror.

That night, after the Zoom meeting, Culley Jane and I went to see the new Bob Dylan movie at an IMAX theatre. I’d never been to an IMAX theatre before. The sound volume level at first about threw me out of my seat and onto the floor. The coming attractions were disorienting. But then we see a young Bob Dylan at the bedside of Woody Guthrie, an old revolutionary approaching his final breath. Dylan sings of a new world as seen through the old man’s eyes.   Times were changing. The Depression-era dust storms had lifted, revealing a new path and we had the keys to the gate. We could ban the bomb. Free the slaves. Go to the moon if that’s what we decided to do.

I was surprised by how few people were there to watch the movie. It was an older crowd, mostly. I imagined that they, like me, had tears in their eyes remembering a time when we were young in short skirts and sandals and the world was ours to shape. I didn’t want those times to go away, so, later that night, I made a decision, which I told Culley Jane about the next day, on Sunday, January 5, the day before January 6.

Culley Jane was upstairs at her computer working on her latest novel when I told her about my plan.

“Remember yesterday?" I said. "I told you about the doctors I saw at my Zoom meeting.”
 

“Yes,” she said, pulling herself away from the world she was creating.

“Doctors Against Genocide.”

“I remember.”

“They’re calling on health care workers nationwide to march with signs protesting genocide. It’s scheduled for tomorrow, January 6. I’ve decided to go.”

I’m a nurse, or was, but still think I am. After I got exiled from the press, and before I became an over-the-road trucker, I needed to find a new way to make a living. I went to nursing school. For ten years I worked as a nurse, doing what nurses do behind bedside curtains. For five of those years I was a VA nurse on a ward where old soldiers went to die.

I’ve probably forgotten more than I’d ever once known about professional nursing, but I’ve never forgotten the solemn heartfelt oath we all took at graduation to do no harm. Turning your back on an oath like that can cause thought sickness and make it hard to sleep at night.

“I’ll get poster board and some paint at Walmart,” I told her. I said I’d go to the sprawling University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Center on the other side of town. I told her I’d just walk around with a homemade sign: NURSES AGAINST GENOCIDE.

Culley Jane is an introvert, especially when she’s working on a latest novel. She doesn’t say many things just to fill empty space, but I could tell that an idea had started floating around in her mind.

I said: “We could make a sign: NURSES AND PROFESSORS AGAINST GENOCIDE.”

She didn’t respond, but started humming, haltingly at first, slipping in a word or two until it all started coming back and she got into it and let it all hang out:

Come mothers and fathers

Throughout the land

And don’t criticize

What you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin’

We sang it again and again, together.

Culley Jane joined me the next day. It was cold and hard to find a parking place. I was the only one there walking around with a sign. I don’t know if it did any good, but I’m sure it did no harm. And that night I slept peacefully, our home protected against the Genocide Sickness that was spreading around town.