As a child growing up in Washington, DC in the 1980s, Christmas was a time when the usual monotony of my Catholic school existence gave way to indescribable magic. It wasn’t so much the presents, but rather the feeling that reality had been temporarily suspended and replaced by something far more invigorating – which I think is one of the reasons why I insisted on going to Santa until I was ten believe.
Of course, I had a relatively privileged childhood in the capital of the United States, an imperial headquarters that embodies that to this day Racism and socioeconomic inequality which regulates life in the so-called “land of the free”. While I knew only vaguely about such domestic issues as a child, I knew even less about my country’s contribution to global suffering; In 1982, the year I was born, for example, Washington gave the green light Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of people.
In our homeland, the decade of the 1980s was marked by support from the USA Mass murder on the right in Central America, all in the noble pursuit of making the world safe for capitalism. That boredom in Catholic school was my biggest complaint on earth meant that I was doing much better than many others – something that became even more apparent when I left the US in 2003 at the age of 21 and embraced an itinerant lifestyle that brought me come into contact with the consequences of US misdeeds Colombia to Vietnam.
I’m 42 now and didn’t have high hopes for Christmas when I flew from Mexico to DC in mid-December, where my parents had recently returned to live after a long trip abroad the death of my father last year. This year it seemed it wasn’t just my father’s absence that preemptively marred the celebrations. The potential for indescribable magic seems to have been largely extinguished by the dire situation on Earth and the world US-sponsored Israeli genocide This continues to rage in the Gaza Strip, where almost the entire population has been forcibly displaced.
Meanwhile, America’s transformation of Christmas into a gigantic traffic jam of Amazon delivery trucks only highlights the all-consuming presence of apocalyptic capitalism and the reduction of humanity to an endless, soul-sucking series of economic transactions.
And yet, ironically, my first inkling of holiday cheer here in DC was triggered by just such a transaction-based interaction, when a Sudanese driver who works for my mother’s rideshare company hugged me.
The man from the Sudanese capital of Khartoum – we’ll call him Alsafi – was thrilled to see my “Free Palestine” sweatshirt when he arrived to pick me up. The 42-year-old had worked as a human rights lawyer in Sudan, where systematic killings and mass murders were no stranger forced expulsion – before leaving the country in 2013 after one too many sessions of arrest and torture.
However, upon arriving in the United States, Alsafi discovered that the American dream was not at all what it had portrayed. Not only did he regularly find himself the victim of overtly racist behavior, but he also quickly grew tired of the repressive consumerism that has become a substitute for life itself. He too was now planning to leave the country. Needless to say, we had a lot to discuss.
Days before Christmas, Alsafi invited me to dinner at a low-key Ethiopian restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, just across the street from DC. I had spent a month in Ethiopia in 2016; Alsafi spent several months there in 2013 between his escape from Sudan and his move to the USA. With Ethiopian Habesha beer and Injera As I carried piles of lentils and kale, I heard some details about Alsafi’s experiences in Sudanese prison.
During one of his detentions, he was blindfolded and beaten while his torturers continually ordered him to go to a corner of the room. He stumbled around looking for the corner, to no avail. “It was funny,” he remarked to me with a genuine laugh. “When they took off the blindfold, I saw that there were no corners in the room after all. It was round.”
Alsafi was not a fan of driving, but had to put in long hours to support his family in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, where they had sought refuge The ongoing violence in Sudan. On the drive back to my mother’s house in Washington, he showed me key landmarks in an area he now knew far better than I did: the Pentagon building, the Watergate Hotel, and the tents that housed homeless people, which Alsafi told me about reported that they had also been forcibly evicted in the interests of “security,” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had done in July came over the US capital advocating genocide.
There was something paradoxically exhilarating about our shared pessimism, and the evening ended with another hug in front of my mother’s apartment building—whose lobby now had a giant Christmas tree and an ever-growing pile of Amazon delivery boxes. Alsafi set off, and I had to remind myself that even in a society conquered by capitalism, there are still people – which is perhaps as magical as it gets.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
