978 Days
I was scheduled for brain surgery on October 23rd 2023. While I waited, something happened. It happened on October 7th in Israel.
I will open by saying that my positions on the Middle East were arrived at organically. I have no ties to the Middle East, or anywhere else for that matter. I am a mongrel. I have mostly European blood, with a dab of Native American for flavor. I have never felt any sort of ancestral loyalty to any race, nationality, or otherwise. I was raised to believe that all people were equal, and should be treated as equals. I personally believe that we are all connected, not just metaphorically, but physically. We are intrinsically connected to every living thing on Earth, as well as the entire Universe.
For me, 2023 started fine. I had made up my mind to start trying to paint again. I had spent some time and effort at it decades earlier, but I had too much on my plate and had to let it go. But by 2023, I had been retired for a few years. Busy, but retired. So I had the time, I just needed to put some effort into it and see if it at least made me happy, even if I wasn't much good at it.
Not long after I began experimenting, I realized that my vision was changing and it wasn't good. I kept at it, kept trying, but my vision was getting worse. So I made an appointment with an optometrist. After what I thought was a thorough eye exam, the optometrist told me my eyes were fine. I just needed a new eyeglass prescription. So, I purchased new glasses. New glasses that really did me little good. They were bi-focal and the improvement in my distance vision was negligible at best, and my close vision was really no different at all. I had been wearing reading glasses for a long time already, but they were no help with the vision issues I was experiencing.
I reluctantly had to give up on painting. It was a disappointment, but I was not unfamiliar with disappointment. A day without some sort of disappointment was unusual, so I just pressed on with my life. I had other things to keep me occupied.
By summer, my vision had gotten much worse. I was having difficulty reading. I had already seen an eye doctor, so I tried to just power through the difficulty for as long as I could. Then it got to the point that when I was trying to read a page of text, it was as if it had been ripped in half vertically, and the two halves were shoved together, leaving the center of the page just gone.
At that point it was intolerable. I bypassed the strip-mall optometrist and made an appointment with an eye surgeon.
When I arrived at my appointment before seeing the doctor, I was put through a series of tests which took about 30-45 minutes. I was then sent to an exam room to wait. When the doctor arrived, he looked over the tests, asked me about 5 questions, and told me I had a pituitary tumor.
I finally had a real diagnosis!
An MRI confirmed the tumor and also explained a cluster of other health issues that had gone undiagnosed for years. The endocrinologist I was referred to didn't hesitate - the tumor had grown large enough to press against my optic nerves. Left untreated, that kind of pressure can eventually result in permanent blindness. And I may have had the tumor for decades at that point. He sent me to Ohio State with a referral to whom he called "the best he had ever seen," a pioneer in the type of surgery I needed. He was concerned, and told me it couldn't wait.
This was in September of 2023. After consultation and another MRI, I was scheduled for brain surgery on October 23rd 2023.
While I waited, something happened.
It happened on October 7th in Israel.
The story coming from mainstream news media and Israel was a tale of a surprise attack by Hamas against Israel. Details were scarce at first, but as hours and days passed, I noticed sharp contradictions between different sources. The narratives being repeated by Israeli spokespersons and mainstream media alike began to seem to me not only incomplete, but fabricated - a steady stream of tall tales, including horrifying atrocities. All clearly intended to dehumanize not only Hamas, but Palestinians as a people.
From Israel, I was hearing horrific tales of beheaded babies, babies put in ovens, rapes and other atrocities. These stories were being repeated by government officials, mainstream press, and even PBS.
But none of that even made sense.
I was also seeing eyewitness accounts from young Israelis describing barely escaping with their lives when the cars they were fleeing the Nova Music Festival in were targeted by IDF Apache helicopters. I saw photos of cars and homes so destroyed that it could only have been done by high powered rockets or shells fired from above.
Until then, I had considered myself well-informed - I had watched and read news almost exclusively for decades. What I was now seeing changed me, my world view, and my trust for mainstream media, permanently.
Prior to October 7th, I was as ignorant and uninformed as most Americans when it came to the plight of the indigenous people of Palestine. Like most Americans, I didn't give it much thought. I had told myself, "These were distant conflicts on the other side of the world" that "they had nothing to do with me."
I am now deeply ashamed of my own ignorance and indifference.
We are all connected! Everything is connected! And everyone matters!
It was time to learn more. I started where I felt I could find solid footing: I sought out Jewish voices - writers, historians, activists - who were publicly expressing their own anger and grief over what was unfolding. That search opened a trove of history and testimony I had never encountered, despite decades of following the news closely.
On mainstream news, many were asking why Israel, who had kept the Palestinians in Gaza behind a prison wall unlike any other in existence, could have possibly been taken by surprise.
Gazans lived behind a heavily fortified, steel and concrete wall, 20 feet above ground topped with surveillance cameras and remote controlled weapons, a deep subterranean wall equipped with sensors, and a buffer zone outside the wall with motion sensors, barbed wire, and killer robots.
None of this made any sense. It was truly impossible to believe.
While I continued waiting for my scheduled surgery, I kept reading, and learning. In addition to the Jewish voices that I had sought out for clarity, I was searching for and discovering many independent news sources and journalists who were speaking the unvarnished truth, as well as providing historical context to everything I was witnessing in absolute horror.
In spite of struggling to even read, I learned a lot.
And when I began responding publicly to what I was learning, and witnessing with my own eyes, I was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. Old friends unfriended me. Facebook removed posts. I found myself out on a limb, largely alone - with a handful of local friends who shared my alarm, and many others who either stayed silent or voiced support for Israel.
But this had become deeply personal to me. As a man who had suffered the horrific loss of a child myself, watching the deliberate slaughter of innocent people, mostly women and children was not only heartbreaking, but kept me moving between tears and rage hour after hour. I began to see every lost child as a personal loss.
It was my solemn duty to speak out. I no longer cared whether it cost me friends or family. It was my duty.
I naively believed that when enough people heard the truth about what was happening and what lead up to it, (That Israel had been attacking the Gaza strip the entire year before October 7th, and truly throughout the existence of Israel.) that the people of this world would rise in solidarity with the oppressed, and downtrodden people of Palestine, and force the US to stop helping Israel slaughter innocent people. I was wrong.
But I never gave up, and I never will. I can't.
I was still waiting for brain surgery. As I waited, I watched, and I learned.
Within two days of the 7th, I had already seen enough to believe that this was not some sort of intelligence failure. It was not a blunder of the Israeli Defense Forces. They were not "caught off guard." The failures were deliberate. Israel, and it seemed all of the Western press, were lying to defend the indefensible.
I was still somewhat guarded in my public posts, but was still seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer and conspiracy theorist. But in spite of being almost blind at the time, I could not remain silent. Even though I was largely ignored, I kept speaking out. I could not divert my near blind eyes from the terrifying outsized response of Israel in the name of "self-defense."
At this point, many of the posts I was making in my horror and grief were met with comments trying to shift all of the blame to Hamas. And many are still doing that. So I was careful in my early posts to refrain from giving anyone the impression that I supported Hamas, even though I have come to understand that Hamas was always inevitable, because resistance is always inevitable under occupation and there is no member of the Hamas resistance that wasn't born in a prison.
I did not remain out on that limb, seemingly alone, for very long. I realized that as disappointed as I was in the many friends I have, I could not force them with the truth, with guilt, or with shame, to rise and stand on the right side of history. I couldn't force them to speak out.
And honestly, I had no idea whether they even believed what I was sharing with them. But if they didn't, they could see how important it was to me, so if they were really my friends, it was their responsibility to make an effort to understand.
Innocent people were being slaughtered. I needed allies. I needed other people who got it.
So I began reaching out to others. Ultimately, I made friends from all over the world who shared my ongoing heartache, grief, and distress. They became my allies, my sounding boards, and many became my dear friends.
Meanwhile, this brutal slaughter was being referred to and characterized as a war. It still is to this day, even though it does not bear any resemblance to a war. The continuous bombing, fire bombing, robot murder drones, sniper killings, the use of white phosphorus, all on innocent civilians, mostly women and children, are not acts of war, they are war crimes.
October 23rd came and went. I had surgery, and was back at home in a couple of days. I had some recovery time ahead of me, but I could already tell that my vision was beginning to improve. My surgeon told me that they were able to remove the entire tumor. But because this damaged my pituitary gland, which is responsible for regulating your entire endocrine system, I would likely be on hormone replacement therapy for the rest of my life. But in the days following my surgery, I already felt better than I had in years...physically.
While my vision was improving slowly, I didn't need perfect vision to gain clarity on what was happening in Gaza, nor my own country's role in it. It was a bloodbath. It was genocide.
That much was crystal clear to me. I was still struggling though. Wondering when my government that has seemingly prided itself on being a model of human rights, democracy, and freedom, would do anything at all to stop this.
I don't remember exactly when it was. But it finally became clear to me that my government was not only supplying arms, and funding the most live streamed, in your face, genocide in history, but was a full partner in it.
And they were never going to do anything to stop it. That moment of clarity came long before the 2024 presidential election, so it has been a full partnership through two administrations. And during all of this time, every resolution for a ceasefire that came to a vote in the United Nations, was vetoed by the United States. My country was going out of its way to support a genocide
I have spent almost every day of the last two and a half years since writing to politicians, speaking out on social media, engaging in protests, signing petitions, and breaking as a human being.
I do not want to spend most of my free time fighting for justice, fighting oppression, fighting against a genocidal terrorist regime that has clearly dreamt of doing exactly what they are doing now, throughout their existence.
But I have to. Everyone has to.
In the months that followed, a clearer picture emerged.
Israel was aware of the planned incursion into occupied Palestinian territory by Hamas for a long time. One report claimed that they knew it was coming as far back as 2018.
The commander of the area where the Nova Music festival was being held was warned that "something was going to happen," and tried to call it off. But that request was denied.
The original site for the Nova Music Festival was much further away from Gaza, but was changed at the last minute to a site within walking distance. So much of what happened on that fateful day cannot simply be coincidence.
A stand down order was issued to the skeleton crew of troops in the area in the early morning hours of October 7th.
And somehow, one of the most sophisticated surveillance systems in the world was nonfunctional on October 7th. The story about why has evolved, but with that much surveillance and remote controlled weaponry, it is hard to believe that Hamas was able to take their entire surveillance system out. (But there really has been nothing but lies from the Israeli government and IDF spokespersons)
Israel did not mount any kind of response, or defense to the incursion for hours. And when they did respond, 28 Apache helicopters fired 28,000 rounds into the Nova Music Festival and area Kibbutzim, reloaded, and did it again. The majority of Israeli casualties on October 7th, were victims of IDF shelling.
Israel began bombing civilians in Gaza on October 7th. In spite of the fabrication that Israel was doing their best to limit civilian casualties, they were in fact targeting civilians throughout. Including Snipers shooting infants in the head and chest, sending killer drones playing the sound of crying babies to pull concerned civilians into the street to be killed. (I saw the same quad copter drones chasing and killing children in the streets.) Firebombing refugee tents, and dropping white phosphorus on children. There is so much more, it will fill books that have yet to be written.
There is the story of Hind Rajab. A 5 yr. old little girl trapped in a car with dead family members for hours. Begging for help on a telephone, while the IDF fired over 300 rounds into the small car she was in.
This is not an act of war, it is a crime against humanity.
We now have firsthand accounts of the systematic rape of Palestinians in Israeli custody - documented by Al Jazeera in their investigative film Bodies of Evidence: Israel's Darkest Weapon, and corroborated by the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Among the testimonies collected is that of Muhammad al-Bakri, a Gaza civil servant who describes in precise detail being stripped, blindfolded, handcuffed, and sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers using trained dogs, while soldiers laughed and filmed. He was not alone. Multiple former prisoners gave similar accounts. Rights organizations including the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor have documented the same pattern.
Israel has been murdering, raping, robbing, maiming, and humiliating the Palestinian people for over 78 years - and every year it gets worse.
There has been nothing in my life that has broken my spirit, short of losing my own child, as much as these last 978 days as of June 11, 2026.
I have felt the pain and hopelessness of these people in my soul. I have felt utterly devastated by what I have seen with my own eyes.
The futility of begging my own government to please stop arming this terrorist genocide has not stopped me from continuing to appeal to their own sense of morality.
But morality is in short supply in the power structures of the imperialist predators that seem to be ruling the world we are living in.
The conclusion that many arrived at early on, including myself, is that Israel wanted October 7th more so than Hamas. They needed an October 7th to provide pretext for genocide.
That is why there were so many lies created about the events of that day. In reality, Hamas had a mission.
Their mission was to capture prisoners to be used in exchange for their own people who were being held hostage and tortured in Israeli prisons.
It would only make their intended goal much more impossible to have engaged in ANY of the atrocities that Israel accused them of.
But, what many have concluded from the many accusations Israel has made against Hamas, is that they have become less accusations, and more admissions of guilt.
Because everything they accused Hamas of, they have done themselves. On a much larger scale.
The true number of Palestinian casualties of this genocide will likely never be known.
And throughout the last 2 years, the official death toll has been hovering at around 70,000 and that is simply impossible.
More realistic estimates are between 500,000 and 750,000.
Since October 7th 2023, Israel's reign of terror has included a number of other countries.
Lebanon, next to the occupied territories of Palestine has been the harshest victim. With no concern for civilians, children, or ancient historical sites. Israel has been relentless in their brutality.
Tens of thousands of attacks, thousands killed, and many thousands of injuries. Israel has also attacked Syria and Yemen.
This is colonial expansionism, and every bit of it has been supported and financed by my own country. Even while the overwhelming majority of American citizens are against all of it.
Israel even manipulated a compliant American president into war with Iran on the basis of a false claim they have been making for forty years.
In February of this year, a full-scale war with Iran was launched. And among other things, my country bombed a school on the first day, killing over 165 school children
There is more, so much more, and I do my best to shout it from the rooftops every day.
Have I changed any minds? I have. I know of several at least that have given me credit for that.
But there are many more that have shifted their beliefs from the propagandized, brainwashed, people who just trust whatever the propaganda machines tell them, to people who can at least accept the truth, even as they remain mostly silent.
After what I have witnessed and experienced over the last several years, I have never been more ashamed of my own country, or the entire western world.
War crimes, crimes against humanity, international crimes. All being ignored by what I once believed to be a civilized world.