Peace and Palestine

 Every generation is born into a world shaped by the unfinished prayers of the ones who came before. And every generation answers those prayers in their own way. Consciousness doesn’t move in a straight line. It spirals. It returns, as if to say: You didn’t get it yet. Try again. Deeper this time.


My mother was a white girl in Brooklyn  in the 1960s. She came of age during a time of great upheaval and possibility. Her generation was waking up from the postwar spell, of conformity, obedience, and blind trust in the state. The Vietnam War was the flashpoint, but beneath that, something deeper was breaking open. They began to question everything: authority, gender roles, race, empire, religion, and even the very definition of freedom.


The 1960s anti-war movement wasn’t just about ending a military conflict overseas. It was a rupture in the collective psyche. It forced the American public to see the cost of the empire,not just in dollars, but in bodies. In conscience. In soul. It wasn’t just students in bell bottoms shouting into megaphones. It was an entire generation refusing to be drafted into violence, refusing to be complicit. The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, second-wave feminism, the rise of environmentalism, gay liberation, all of these movements were braided into that awakening. The personal became political. The spiritual became radical. Love became an act of rebellion.


They changed history. Not all at once. Not cleanly. But the shifts were real. The Voting Rights Act. Roe v. Wade. The end of the draft. The birth of Earth Day. The Stonewall uprising. Indian activists occupying Alcatraz. Young people tearing down the lies they were raised on, demanding a new story. Yes, there were excesses and contradictions. Many of those movements were co-opted, silenced, or scattered. But still, something sacred was set into motion.


And now, I look at this generation, the ones born with screens in their hands and inherited trauma in their DNA and I see that same spark, but sharper. Less romantic. More precise. The fight is not over the same terrain, but the root is the same: Who gets to live? Who gets to be free? Who gets to tell the story?


Today, it’s Palestine. Gaza. Genocide in real time, beamed into our phones. And again, a generation rises, young people standing up, walking out of classrooms, risking their futures, their reputations, their safety. Saying: No. Not in our name. We see what’s happening. And we will not look away. They are naming apartheid. Naming settler colonialism. Naming white supremacy not just as a concept, but as a structure embedded in borders, bombs, and silence.


What’s different now is how quickly truth can spread. There is no waiting for a newspaper to catch up. The witness is global. The images are immediate. And the response is fierce. The current generation isn’t asking permission. They’re standing in the intersection of queer, Black, Indigenous, Jewish, Muslim, undocumented, neurodivergent and they’re not apologizing for their wholeness. They’re using every tool: art, organizing, ancestral memory, digital resistance, and embodied protest.


What strikes me most is their depth. Their grief is public. Their activism is rooted in feeling. They are not afraid to cry, to rage, to speak sacred names in the middle of the street. They are not numb. That’s the evolution of consciousness right there.


And yet, I hear echoes. The same fear from institutions. The same threats. The same attempts to silence. In the 60s, they called protestors “un-American,” “communist,” “dangerous.” Now they’re called “antisemitic,” “radical,” “naïve.” But this generation knows how to hold complexity. They know the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They know that solidarity does not have to be neat or approved of by power.


There’s a tenderness to this moment, and a ferocity too. A generation raised in the ruins of capitalism and climate collapse is saying: Enough. They’re not asking for incremental change. They’re dreaming something bigger. They’re remembering what their ancestors fought for. They are the children of the ones who never gave up.


And I believe we need to bridge these generations. We need the elders who remember the 60s , not in nostalgia, but in truth. We need them to share what worked and what didn’t. We need them to bless the courage of today’s youth, not scold it. Because this work, the work of waking up, of showing up, of tearing down and rebuilding, it’s not new. It’s ancient. It’s sacred. And it belongs to all of us.


The consciousness of the 60s cracked the veil. The consciousness of now is burning the whole veil down. We’re not transcending anymore, we’re descending. Into the body. Into the land. Into the uncomfortable truths. Into history.


And maybe that’s where real healing lives.


Not in perfection.


But in presence.


Not in victory.


But in remembering.


Again and again: we are not free until all of us are free.


~Shanti Freedom Das

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