Op-Ed: You Don’t Get To Burn It Down If You’ve Never Built A Thing

I hear you. All your tweets. All your slogans.

All your online trolling that treats human lives like strategy—disposable, rhetorical, and forgotten. All your fantasy revolutions with no aftermath plan, no mourning, no math.

I hear you. And I’m saying it plain:

Sit down.

You don’t get to wear the language of liberation while you cheerlead for slaughter. You don’t get to name-drop movements you’ve never built, grief you’ve never held, or strategy you’ve never risked a damn thing for.

Because real organizing—real liberation—looks nothing like this.

When did you become the world’s funeral clowns?

You are out here treating struggle like a spoken word night gone off the rails. Quoting Audre Lorde to justify war crimes. Invoking King while denying Jewish and Palestinian suffering. Using “decolonization” like a bludgeon with no vision for life after death.

Let’s be clear: the legacies of radical thought are not yours to cosplay.

We’ve buried mentors and friends who gave everything to this work. They held coalitions together across race, religion, class, and creed. They did not sacrifice for hashtags. They did not sacrifice so you could embrace nihilism.

This is not speaking truth to power. This is performance art for your echo chamber.

And it’s killing people.

Not every oppressed person becomes free by killing their neighbor.

Some of you are lost in a lie:

“They harmed us. Now anything we do is righteous.”

That’s not justice. That’s trauma reenactment. You can’t resurrect your dead by creating more orphans. You can’t grieve your people through rape and kidnapping. You don’t free Palestine by turning the words allyship and solidarity into a warzone.

And if your vision of liberation or safety requires the disappearance of an entire people, then what you want is supremacy, not freedom.

We’ve seen this false story before. Stalinism told it about Soviet Russia. Fascism told it about Europe. Apartheid told it about South Africa. The Khmer Rouge told it about Cambodia. White nationalists tell it about America.

You’re not breaking the cycle. You’re reenlisting in it.

Fear and retaliation is not a strategy.

I haven’t forgotten Oct. 7. I haven’t un-heard the screams or unread the testimonies.

And unlike too many of our leftist peers, I will not erase Jewish trauma just because it complicates the narrative.

But trauma cannot become permanent policy. It doesn’t justify erasing another people. It doesn’t excuse a government that treats safety like domination. It doesn’t make the starvation of children or the bombing of hospitals any less horrific.

If your Zionism demands that Jews who say, “Not like this” be silenced. Be made to feel less than—then it is not Zionism.

It is fear masquerading as heritage. And fear will never keep you free.

Enough soft language—We need hard courage.

Let me be unequivocal:

I believe in Palestinian freedom. I believe in Jewish safety. I believe the occupation must end.

I believe no government should decide your humanity based on your bloodline or the language your mother sings in. I believe in coexistence that is not cute but complicated.

Messy. Painful. Real. Worth it.

And I’m long done pretending that mass killings, hostage taking, displacement, or vengeance will take us there.

I will not moralize murder. I will not intellectualize annihilation. I will not accept an “either/or” world where only one people get to breathe.

Not after Supernova. Not after Gaza. Not after Plainfield. Not after Brooklyn. Not after D.C. Not after Boulder.

I am not asking you to agree with us. I’m demanding that you reckon with the fact that ideology can become idolatry—and idolatry kills.

This is not the time for lukewarm moderates. But it is not the time for arsonists who have never built shelter either.

We need builders.

We need disruptors who also reconstruct.

We need warriors of repair.

We must not forget the dead—But we must choose to honor them.

This isn’t the revolution you thought it was. It’s not slick. It’s not aesthetic. It’s not a viral video or a clever post.

It’s the mother in Tel Aviv who still sets the Shabbat table, one seat short. It’s the father in Rafah who writes his daughter’s name in dust where her bed used to be. It’s the queer medic ferrying insulin across checkpoints. It’s the protester who carries no flag but carries a stretcher. It’s the imam and the rabbi sitting beneath a tarp, drinking bitter tea but not walking away.

This is the revolution:

Not the one you fantasized about from your timeline. The one being lived by people who didn’t choose this violence—but refuse to be consumed by it.

I’m not here to win a debate. I’m here to bury all the dead with dignity—and ensure there are no more to bury.

So, if you came looking for a manifesto, here it is:

We will not escape the fire just to fan its flames elsewhere.
We will not carry the master’s tools and call them liberation.
We will not build new systems that mirror the violence we claim to oppose.

I’m not asking permission. I am calling for courage. I am invoking grief as resistance. I’m part of building something that doesn’t yet have a name—but you’ll know it when you see it.

It will look like life.

Eric K. Ward is a longtime civil rights leader, co-producer of the documentary White With Fear, and the only American to receive the Civil Courage Prize.

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