Hi! Welcome to my blog.
I’m Ghayyath, a Druze Lebanese guy who lives in Chicago, and have created this blog as a way to chronicle the life of a socialist with an MBA.
As we live through the logical conclusions of extractive and exploitive systems, and as the resulting polycrises – hopefully – jolt us into a higher consciousness, I felt it necessary to have a home for these experiences.
Having lived in the U.S. for five years now, it never ceases to amaze me how hostile this country is to actual socialism. Through sustained propaganda and cultural imperialism, Western media has convinced many of my own people that capitalism and its punitive nature is a necessary fact of life.
Can you tell I recently read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fischer? 10/10 highly recommend.
I also want to acknowledge – despite it giving me permanent heartburn and spiritual nausea – my complicity simply by being a tax-paying white-collar worker in the heart of the empire.
I guess that’s the thing about socioeconomic systems, they end up becoming practically self-sustaining… something that runs in the background.
It’s every time you “Add To Cart”.
It’s every time you click “Play”.
Every time you add a banana to your grocery basket and every time you buy a new phone.
Maddening. Conspiracies don’t always require conspirators.
I am also aware that my anti-imperialist – and therefore anti-American – stance bothers many who are appalled at how I reject this supposed boon of citizenship that they have bestowed upon me. I want to address this from the get-go: in 2025, you are either hiding behind the killer or you’re staring at the barrel of his gun. And in this case, he’s a notoriously bad aim, so it’s really more like a machine gun duct-taped to a cannon mounted on top of an M15 fighter jet. Especially if you’re Middle Eastern. We take refuge in the empire because of this silly little thing called survival instinct. It’s pesky and inconvenient when it happens to plague those of us who are supposed to be invisible.
I chose to immigrate from my homeland in Lebanon, and so I will not be making excuses for how my tax dollars are currently being used to bomb children in Palestine. What this empire does and has been doing for over a century is horrific and at this point our crimes are irredeemable.
My best friend who lives in Brooklyn gave me a poem by Noor Hindi that she came upon at a pro-Palestine protest and in it was this line I cannot get out of my head:
“I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.”
It haunts me.
But I kind of wanted it to because I have that up on my fridge and I look at that everyday.
In this blog, I will be sharing my experiences as a Chicago-based baby activist. I hope you will join me as I unlearn the economic theories that underpinned my graduate degree, and I promise to make it worth your while.
My primary aim will be to create a space for us to challenge ourselves to get creative about we will be resisting fascism given that we practically live in a police state.
My secondary one will be highlight the insidious ways in which imperialist propaganda is reinforced culturally (might as well put that advertising minor to use somehow).
Welcome, comrade! I hope you’ll join me as we learn together.
Free Palestine