This is beautifully and wisely said by my friend Faisal Khan. And this also reminds me of a quote that my oldest son, Brian, first shared with me decades ago: “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
May we all courageously and deeply reflect on the essence and vital importance of what is shared here. May we embody the values we profess through how it is that we live our lives. And may we be committed to the hard and courageous ongoing work of ending injustice and alleviating suffering wherever we may find it. — Molly
The Struggle of Values
Over the past few years, and especially in the last six or seven months, I have been in a deep state of reflection. Reflection about friendships, loved ones, colleagues, activists, and former activists. Reflection about choices and failures, mine and others. I do not claim perfection and none of us can, but one thing struck a deep chord in me last night after my conversations with Mikko. Beneath all the noise, beneath all the arguments, debates, and posturing, the struggle is not ultimately about politics, nor even about movements, coalitions, or strategy. It is about values.
Strip away the rhetoric of peace and justice, of solidarity and human rights, and what remains is something elemental: what do you value as a human being. Not as a politician. Not as an activist. Not even as part of a larger cause. But simply as a person. And who are the people you choose to gather around you, do their values align with yours.
For me, this clarity has come slowly, painfully, but with peace. And the principle is simple. When it comes to human decency, when it comes to compassion, when it comes to caring about life, the question is: do you agree, or do you not.
Take what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. Take the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians, a catastrophe unfolding in plain sight, though its roots stretch back more than seventy seven years. If you can look at the killing of children and say “but if,” if you can reach for excuses or slogans like “right to defense,” if you can justify bombed hospitals and starving families, then your values are not mine. If you can watch human beings being slaughtered and remain silent especially when your votes and tax dollars are being used, your values are not mine. And no amount of political sophistication, intellectual cleverness, or personal charm can disguise that truth.
My values are not complicated. Racism is not my value. Prejudice is not my value. Anger and hate are not my values. Ripping children from their parents in our communities is not my value. Starving a population into submission is not my value. Killing one child in Sudan, Palestine or Ukraine or anywhere else is no more acceptable than killing one child in Gaza.
If these things are acceptable to you, then your values are different. And the answer is already given. I carry no hatred for you, but we part ways there. Because clarity demands that we do.
This is the heart of it. We live in an age of overwhelming confusion, and that confusion is not accidental. It is manufactured. Governments and corporations thrive by dividing us, by turning values into noise, by saturating us with information so that we cannot distinguish right from wrong. Defense companies rake in billions while civilians are buried. Politicians posture while blood runs. Profit margins and campaign coffers swell while hospitals and schools are bombed. And while all this unfolds, we are urged to keep debating, to keep looking for complexity where there is none.
But I have come to understand that life does not have to be so complicated. Simplicity has its own beauty. And it begins with asking: what is my value. What is yours.
If someone justifies ethnic cleansing, then their values are not mine. If someone hesitates to call genocide by its name, their values are not mine. If someone demands compromise where the only moral response is truth, then their values are not mine. And that is enough clarity to know where to stand.
This also extends to personal relationships, to our work, even to our relationship with ourselves. There is no need to waste time convincing those who have chosen to stand elsewhere. There is no need to argue endlessly with those who hide behind “ifs” and “buts.” That struggle of values is over the moment the truth is made plain.
So I will walk with those whose values align with compassion, with justice, with honesty. I will continue to speak truth, to educate myself and others, to support liberation movements that reject compromise with oppression. And when it comes to political candidates, I will withhold my support from those who wear the veneer of progressivism while refusing to act on fundamental values. If you cannot stand on a public platform and defend human life without condition, if you cannot oppose genocide without hesitation, then you do not deserve my vote.
Values are not complicated. They are not negotiable. They are the compass by which we know who we are and who we stand with. And when the fog of propaganda clears, what remains is this: the struggle is not about left or right, not about policy or politics, but about whether you value human life or you do not.
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