A Day of Action

The last year has only deepened inequities both abroad and at home. We have the power to set ourselves back on the right track, but it's a long road ahead.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with
Meet your Girl Danielle Moody, recording from the Home Bunker. Folks.
It's been a time, right Like the last week or
so has seen a lot, and every time that I
start a show out on Monday, I'm always like, well,

(00:32):
what will the week bring? You know, by the time
that I kind of sit down to record, sometimes I
feel like everything has been usurped by the time that
I get ready to record. But I want to start
off today with kind of where I left off, where
WAJ and I left off on Democracy Ish on Friday

(00:54):
and just a reminder of Democracy Ish is live on
Friday's twelve pm Eastern on my YouTube channel and then
the podcast is available after. But today marks the one
year of the war in Israel and Palestine. It is

(01:18):
one year since the horrific attack that killed over one
thousand Israelis and had hundreds kidnapped. It is over a
year since I think over forty thousand, forty thousand Palestinians, men, women, children, doctors, journalists, nurses,

(01:46):
academics have been murdered. Now Netanyahu has stretched that war
outside of the borders of Israel and Palestine and is
now waging war in Lebanon, where over two thousand Lebanese

(02:07):
have been murdered. And there will be people who tell
you often that this conflict is complicated, that it goes back,
you know, decades upon decades, and that lay people like

(02:29):
ourselves will never understand, and to a certain extent, they're right.
I will never understand. I will never understand justifying an
apartheid system. I don't care if that apartheid system is
based on race. I don't care if it's based on ethnicity.

(02:52):
I don't care if it's based on religion. If you
have an apartheid system, I don't care if it's based
on gender or orientation. If there is a system in
which a country exists where everyone that lives inside of
that country is bound by different laws and is held
to different standards, it is wrong. This is why I

(03:18):
look at America with a tilted head and squinted eyes,
because America does not apply democracy and equity and justice
equally amongst those that are American citizens. We know that
black people in this country are treated woefully different than

(03:44):
white people in America. We can know that based on
the breakdown of economic, health, education, disparities. They exist because
of racism. They exist because of who had the power

(04:10):
to deem who was human and who wasn't. Now we
are certainly in a place in this country where we
are relitigating the past, because there has never really truly
been an honest reckoning not only of America's founding, but
also of the disparities that continue to exist because of

(04:36):
the Transatlantic slave trade, because of Jim Crow, and decades
nearly a century of segregation, because of the targeted attacks
and sentioned domestic terrorism against black people in this country,
all the way to now where you have a former

(04:57):
president of the United States making immigrants, black immigrants, Haitian
immigrants a target simply because of what they look like
and where they're from. So when I am looking at
the state of Israel, I am looking at it through

(05:20):
the lens of a black queer woman living in America.
And when I look at and saw with my own
eyes when I traveled there in twenty fifteen, the blatant
and obvious apartheid system that was in place that they

(05:43):
copycatted from the United States, I have a great deal
to say, as do many Americans who do not want
our tax dollars to go to uphold a segregationist system

(06:04):
where Israelis and Palestinians drive on two separate roads, have
two different types of access to water, have two different
legal systems. We live in a world right now where
black lives and Muslim lives do not matter, because one
year later there seems to be no sign of slowing

(06:30):
of the genocide that is taking place. And there is
nothing other than to call it in my eyes, when
one group is being murdered relentlessly every single day and
the world remains silent. So I don't care if it

(06:50):
is based on race, gender, orientation, religion, ethnicity. If you
are creating a multi tiered system that is not expressed
equally for everyone, we have a fucking problem. And so

(07:17):
it is with an extremely heavy heart that the reality here, folks,
is that we have two candidates for president, one who
is a felon, one who is an adjudicated rapist, one
who is a racist, misogynist, and a liar, and the

(07:39):
other one that is a former Attorney general, current Vice
President of the United States, former Senator. Do I believe
that the policies that have been upheld through Republican and
democratic administrations are going to change as it relates to

(08:02):
Israel and Palestine. I pray that it does. But I
will tell you that the difference right now between Donald
Trump and Kamala Harris is that when Donald Trump looks
at Gaza, he sees beachfront property, as did his son
Jared Kushner, who was drawing up plans is in the
midst of drawing up plans soon, as we know, exterminate

(08:25):
an entire population of people. Then you have Vice President
Kamala Harris, who does not hold the same tired sentiments
that I think that Joe Biden and past Democrats have
because they're from different generations, and believes in the self
determination of the Palestinian people. But what does that look

(08:48):
like in practice? Only electing her will we see. But
I know that Donald Trump has already begun to lay
the groundwork that he told a group of Jewish Americans
that if he lost the election, it was going to
be their fault. So when we start tossing around terms
like anti Semitic for those that actually have a critique

(09:11):
as opposed to those who have shown consistent anti Jewish sentiment,
we lose the plot. The question that we should be
asking ourselves as we close in on the end of
this presidential election cycle, is what kind of country and

(09:32):
what kind of world do we want to live in?
Because what I have seen over the past ten plus
years is vast inequities that grow by the day. You're
looking at Elon musk on the version of becoming the
world's first trillionaire. Meanwhile, a majority of people in this

(09:54):
country couldn't pay a four hundred bill if it came due.
You have a system that has been rigged for the
rich to get even richer while the rest of us
struggle each and every day to make ends meet. And
it isn't because oh, they work harder. Fuck that, that's

(10:15):
a lie. It's that we are working harder. Middle working
and low income and poor people are working harder each
and every day to get less because of the hoarding
that is happening at the top. We look at the
inequities when we're looking at the effects of climate change,
what countries, what areas of being the hardest hit or

(10:37):
not those that have done the worst amount of pollution.
We're seeing how this is affecting areas that are not
on the coasts. Look no further than to see what
has happened in Asheville, North Carolina. That is a mountain
city that has been wiped out by a hurricane. Folks.

(10:57):
So there is so much work to do, not just
in this country but around the world. And I don't
want us to turn our eyes away because it becomes
so overwhelming the despair and inequities that we see, because
we have to look inside. We have to look at
our own communities and figure out what can I do

(11:19):
here that will have impact? What can I give, what
can I create? What kind of communities can I build?
Because for those of you that have children, whether you
are a teacher, a parent, a caregiver, what kind of
world are we creating for them? War to me has

(11:39):
just never made sense. And I think now back to
the times when I learned about, you know, the world
wars and how we learned, you know, from this heroic
lens of Americans coming in to save the day in
World War II and bump up, up, up up. But

(12:02):
we allowed six million Jewish people to be murdered before
anybody took any action. Hundreds of thousands murdered in Vietnam, Cambodia,
all around the world for what for power? So today
is not just a day to remember. It's a day

(12:24):
of action because every day, every hour, thousands of Palestinians
are being murdered. Every day, every hour Jewish people in
this country and around the world become less safe. Every
day a black person is losing their life for no
other reason than being black and in the wrong place

(12:46):
at the wrong time. We don't have to live like this,
But it's when we throw up our hands and believe
that there is no other way to be, that how
things have been done is just the way that they
need to be, that we rob ourselves of agency and
of our imagination to possibly reimagine a world that isn't

(13:10):
feeding off chaos and violence and misery. I do think
that we have an opportunity in this upcoming election to
rewrite America, to begin to rewrite America. But it's going
to take each and every one of us looking at
our own lives and seeing where we can be better,

(13:31):
Where we can be more offline and more connected to
one another in real life, when we can stop making
assumptions about the neighbor down the street and just knock
on their door. I encourage us all to get out
of our own shells more and connect with folks so

(13:53):
that we can begin to build what we want to
see in our own community and then watch that action grow.
And I think I believe that if we elect Kamala
Harris and Tim Walls, that we have the ability to
begin that rebuild. But this election, like I said, is

(14:15):
not going to be a one and done election because
MAGA is never going away. They just reinvent themselves, different names,
different suits, slicker language, but it's all the same white supremist,
Christian nationalist agenda that has been being pushed in this

(14:39):
country since its formation. Donald Trump just gave them permission
to always be who they have always been. People that
want to erase history, that want absolute power to control
and make people conform to their way of thinking. There
will always be those people, but i' believe that there

(15:00):
are more people that want to live and let live,
that want everyone to have the same opportunities and the
same access, regardless of their race, religion, ethnicity, orientation, gender, ability, etc.
We can't leave it up to the people that we

(15:21):
elect to wave a magic wand and make things better.
The country is better and becomes better because of us.
Things will change in Israel and Palestine because we the
people will demand better and elect people who believe in
everyone's humanity and dignity and ability to have self determination.

(15:46):
That's how change happens, person by person, brick by brick.
We have the power and that is something that we
need to remember every single day, folks. Just stay quick
reminder as I get out of here. The Danielle Moody

(16:08):
Show is live every Monday through Thursday, five pm Eastern
on my YouTube channel. Just head over to YouTube dot com,
type in Danielle Moody channel and whi la subscribe and
you can even add a notification to the show so
that you never miss it. And right after it is live,

(16:29):
it is posted up on my page as a video
that you can watch at any time. I hope to
see you all over there very soon. That is it
for me today, dear friends on Woke af as always,
Power to the people and to all the people. Power,
Get woke and stay woke as fuck.