I think about war.
Today, yesterday, tomorrow.
Every day until I am finally murdered by a government somewhere, most likely my own.
Unwillingly, I dwell upon it.
Of how my disability and frailties are framed as a conflict between myself and my body.
When I am being killed slowly, every single day, and the only thing my body does, is scream out how it is being murdered.
But we silence protesters.
We vilify them.
They are the problem.
My body breaking, well, the fault lies with it.
Not business as usual that dumps poison into rivers, floods the air with toxins, fills the oceans with microplastics, burns down the rain forest at a time when drought is everywhere.
Not governments that genocide, not stagnant wages and skyrocketing living costs, not lack of access to healthcare, not the prison industrial complex, not living in daily fear of another mass shooting.
Not politicians promoting hate crimes, pushing nationalism, spending money and carbon on feeding militaries everywhere.
Not billionaires who dream of using our flesh and bone to enrich the soil of Mars, who think they can create oceans to transform a world out of our blood and tears.
Not a society that measures beings in terms of units moved and products consumed.
I think about war.
Waking, sleeping, barely breathing.
I must, because immigration is not for the disabled.
Bombs in the distance, fighter jets too close overhead, endless threats by a government somewhere, everywhere.
They tell me I must fight.
Fight my body.
Fight my instincts.
Eventually, fight what remains of my morals.
Principles sometimes feel a luxury, cognitive dissonance manufactured to keep us compliant.
Taiwan’s relationship with the US, in the face of China looming, and genocide.
My relationship with Google, Amazon, Apple, so on, and genocide.
Does a person who lives under the shadow of another get to draw lines?
Often, it feels like “not”.
I think about war.
Of how I am not important except when I am being wielded against something, probably a government elsewhere.
Of how I am a collection of numbers, interpreted in ways to suit others.
Of how one day, perhaps soon, I will be a statistic in some way or another.

I refuse the framing.
I refute it.
I am not at war with myself.
There is nothing to fight, here within myself.
Not in my blood, not in my bone, not any ounce of flesh.
Here in this housing of fragile spirit, we do not police police police and then brutalize the inevitable protests.
We do not fill our blankets and parkas with willow fluff and then gaslight inevitable frostbite.
We do not fill our pots with chaff and then wonder when we are starved of strength.
We do not attempt to cover over heart-wounds with consuming.
We do not sacrifice one thing and then another and yet another, in hopes of appeasing insatiable greed.