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Green Energy Is Still a Better Bet Than AI
The buildout of lots and lots of power-gobbling data centers is not as inevitable as it appears.
Oct 15, 2025
Caveat—this post was written entirely with my own intelligence, so who knows. Maybe it’s wrong.
But the despairing question I get asked most often is: “What’s the use? However much clean energy we produce, AI data centers will simply soak it all up.” It’s too early in the course of this technology to know anything for sure, but there are a few important answers to that.
The first comes from Amory Lovins, the long-time energy guru who wrote a paper some months ago pointing out that energy demand from AI was highly speculative, an idea he based on… history:
In 1999, the US coal industry claimed that information technology would need half the nation’s electricity by 2020, so a strong economy required far more coal-fired power stations. Such claims were spectacularly wrong but widely believed, even by top officials. Hundreds of unneeded power plants were built, hurting investors. Despite that costly lesson, similar dynamics are now unfolding again.
As Debra Kahn pointed out in Politico a few weeks ago:
So far, data centers have only increased total US power demand by a tiny amount (they make up roughly 4.4 percent of electricity use, which rose 2 percent overall last year).
And it’s possible that even if AI expands as its proponents expect, it will grow steadily more efficient, meaning it would need much less energy than predicted. Lovins again:
For example, NVIDIA’s head of data center product marketing said in September 2024 that in the past decade, “we’ve seen the efficiency of doing inferences in certain language models has increased effectively by 100,000 times. Do we expect that to continue? I think so: There’s lots of room for optimization.” Another NVIDIA comment reckons to have made AI inference (across more models) 45,000× more efficient since 2016, and expects orders-of magnitude further gains. Indeed, in 2020, NVIDIA’s Ampere chips needed 150 joules of energy per inference; in 2022, their Hopper successors needed just 15; and in 2024, their Blackwell successors needed 24 but also quintupled performance, thus using 31× less energy than Ampere per unit of performance. (Such comparisons depend on complex and wideranging assumptions, creating big discrepancies, so another expert interprets the data as up to 25× less energy and 30× better performance, multiplying to 750×.)
But that doesn’t mean that the AI industry, and its utility and government partners, won’t try to build ever more generating capacity to supply whatever power needs they project may be coming. In some places they already are: Internet Alley in Virginia has more than 150 large centers, using a quarter of its power. This is becoming an intense political issue in the Old Dominion State. As Dave Weigel reported yesterday, the issue has begun to roil Virginia politics—the GOP candidate for governor sticks with her predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, in somehow blaming solar energy for rising electricity prices (“the sun goes down”), while the Democratic nominee, Abigail Spanberger, is trying to figure out a response:
Neither nominee has gone as far in curbing growth as many suburban DC legislators and activists want. They see some of the world’s wealthiest companies getting plugged into the grid without locals reaping the benefits. Some Virginia elections have turned into battles over which candidate will be toughest on data centers; others elections have already been lost over them.
“My advice to Abigail has been: Look at where the citizens of Virginia are on the data centers,” said state Sen. Danica Roem, a Democrat who represents part of Prince William County in DC’s growing suburbs. “There are a lot of people willing to be single-issue, split-ticket voters based on this.”
Indeed, it’s shaping up to be the mother of all political issues as the midterms loom—pretty much everyone pays electric rates, and under President Donald Trump they’re starting to skyrocket. The reason isn’t hard to figure out: He’s simultaneously accelerating demand with his support for data center buildout, and constricting supply by shutting down cheap solar and wind. In fact, one way of looking at AI is that it’s main use is as a vehicle to give the fossil fuel industry one last reason to expand.
If this sounds conspiratorial, consider this story from yesterday: John McCarrick, newly hired by industry colossus OpenAI to find energy sources for ChatGPT is:
an official from the first Trump administration who is a dedicated champion of natural gas.
John McCarrick, the company’s new head of Global Energy Policy, was a senior energy policy advisor in the first Trump administration’s Bureau of Energy Resources in the Department of State while under former Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo.
As deputy assistant secretary for Energy Transformation and the special envoy for International Energy Affairs, McCarrick promoted exports of American liquefied natural gas to Europe in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and advocated for Asian countries to invest in natural gas.
The choice to hire McCarrick matches the intentions of OpenAI’s Trump-dominating CEO Sam Altman, who said in a U.S. Senate hearing in May that “in the short term, I think [the future of powering AI] probably looks like more natural gas.”
Sam Altman himself is an acolyte of Peter Thiel, famous climate denier who recently suggested Greta Thunberg might be the anti-Christ. But it’s all of them. In the rush to keep their valuations high, the big AI players are increasingly relying not just on fracked gas but on the very worst version of it. As Bloomberg reported early in the summer:
The trend has sparked an unlikely comeback for a type of gas turbine that long ago fell out of favor for being inefficient and polluting… a technology that’s largely been relegated to the sidelines of power production: small, single cycle natural gas turbines.
In fact, big suppliers are now companies like Caterpillar, not known for cutting edge turbine technology; these are small and comparatively dirty units.
(The ultimate example of this is Elon Musk’s Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, a superpolluter, which I wrote about for the New Yorker.) Oh, and it’s not just air pollution. A new threat emerged in the last few weeks, according to Tom Perkins in the Guardian:
Advocates are particularly concerned over the facilities’ use of Pfas gas, or f-gas, which can be potent greenhouse gases, and may mean datacenters’ climate impact is worse than previously thought. Other f-gases turn into a type of dangerous compound that is rapidly accumulating across the globe.
No testing for Pfas air or water pollution has yet been done, and companies are not required to report the volume of chemicals they use or discharge. But some environmental groups are starting to push for state legislation that would require more reporting.
Look, here’s one bottom line: If we actually had to build enormous networks of AI data centers, the obvious, cheap, and clean way to do it would be with lots of solar energy. It goes up fast. As an industry study found as long ago as December of 2024 (an eon in AI time):
Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the US Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives.
As one of the country’s leading energy executives said in April:
“Renewables and battery storage are the lowest-cost form of power generation and capacity,” according to Next Era chief executive John Ketchum l. “We can build these projects and get new electrons on the grid in 12 to 18 months.”
But we can’t do that because the Trump administration has a corrupt ideological bias against clean energy, the latest example of which came last week when a giant Nevada solar project was cancelled. As Jael Holzman was the first to report:
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power–equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen, and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration.
But now it’s dead. One result will be higher prices for consumers. Despite everything the administration does, renewables are so cheap and easy that markets just keep choosing them. To beat that means policy as perverse as what we’re seeing—jury-rigging tired gas turbines and refitting ancient coal plants. All to power a technology that… seems increasingly like a bubble?
Here we need to get away from energy implications a bit, and just think about the underlying case for AI, and specifically the large language models that are the thing we’re spending so much money and power on. The AI industry is, increasingly, the American economy—it accounts for almost half of US economic growth this year, and an incredible 80% of the expansion of the stock market. As Ruchir Shirma wrote in the FT last week, the US economy is “one big bet” on AI:
The main reason AI is regarded as a magic fix for so many different threats is that it is expected to deliver a significant boost to productivity growth, especially in the US. Higher output per worker would lower the burden of debt by boosting GDP. It would reduce demand for labour, immigrant or domestic. And it would ease inflation risks, including the threat from tariffs, by enabling companies to raise wages without raising prices.
But for this happy picture to come to pass, AI has to actually work, which is to say do more than help kids cheat on their homework. And there’s been a growing sense in recent months that all is not right on that front. I’ve been following two AI skeptics for a year or so, both on Substack (where increasingly, in-depth and non-orthodox reporting goes to thrive).
The first is Gary Marcus, an AI researcher who has concluded that the large language models like Chat GPT are going down a blind alley. If you like to watch video, here is an encapsulation of his main points, published over the weekend. If you prefer that old-fashioned technology of reading (call me a Luddite, but it seems faster and more efficient, and much easier to excerpt), here’s his recent account from the Times explaining why businesses are having trouble finding reasons to pay money for this technology:
Large language models have had their uses, especially for coding, writing, and brainstorming, in which humans are still directly involved. But no matter how large we have made them, they have never been worthy of our trust.
Indeed, an MIT study this year found that 95% of businesses reported no measurable increase in productivity from using AI; the Harvard Business Review, a couple of weeks ago, said AI "'workslop' was cratering productivity.”
And what that means, in turn, is that there’s no real way to imagine recovering the hundreds of billions and trillions that are currently being invested in the technology. The keeper of the spreadsheets is the other Substacker, Ed Zitron, who writes extremely long and increasingly exasperated essays looking at the financial lunacy of these “investments” which, remember, underpin the stock market at the moment. Here’s last week’s:
In fact, let me put it a little simpler: All of those data center deals you’ve seen announced are basically bullshit. Even if they get the permits and the money, there are massive physical challenges that cannot be resolved by simply throwing money at them.
Today I’m going to tell you a story of chaos, hubris and fantastical thinking. I want you to come away from this with a full picture of how ridiculous the promises are, and that’s before you get to the cold hard reality that AI fucking sucks.
I’m not pretending this is the final word on this subject. No one knows how it’s all going to work out, but my guess is: badly. Already it’s sending electricity prices soaring and increasing fossil fuel emissions.
But maybe it’s also running other kinds of walls that will eventually reduce demand. Maybe human beings will decide to be… human. The new Sora “service” launched by OpenAI that allows your AI to generate fake videos, for instance, threatens to undermine the entire business of looking at videos because… what’s the point? If you can’t tell if the guy eating a ridiculously hot chili pepper is real or not, why would you watch? In a broader sense, as John Burns-Murdoch wrote in the FT (and again how lucky Europe is to have a reputable business newspaper), we may be reaching “peak social media":
It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI.
And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns—usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus. Across the developed world, adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024, down by almost 10 per cent since 2022. Notably, the decline is most pronounced among the erstwhile heaviest users—teens and 20-somethings.
Which is to say: Perhaps at some point we’ll begin to come to our senses and start using our brains and bodies for the things they were built for: contact with each other, and with the world around us. That’s a lot to ask, but the world can turn in good directions as well as bad. As a final word, there’s this last week from Pope Leo, speaking to a bunch of news executives around the world, and imploring them to cool it with the junk they’re putting out:
Communication must be freed from the misguided thinking that corrupts it, from unfair competition, and the degrading practice of so-called clickbait.
Stay tuned. This story will have a lot to do with how the world turns out.
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How Surveillance Quietly Moved Into Your Social Media and What To Do About It
The public must be vigilant about those who claim vigilance as a mandate without bounds. A republic cannot outsource its conscience to machines and contractors.
Oct 11, 2025
The feed has eyes. What you share to stay connected now feeds one of the world’s largest surveillance machines. This isn’t paranoia, it’s policy. You do not need to speak to be seen. Every word you read, every post you linger on, every silence you leave behind is measured and stored. The watchers need no warrant—only your attention.
Each post, like, and photograph you share enters a room you cannot see. The visible audience, friends and followers, is only the front row. Behind them sit analysts, contractors, and automated systems that harvest words at scale. Over the last decade, the federal security apparatus has turned public social media into a continuous stream of open-source intelligence. What began as episodic checks for imminent threats matured into standing watch floors, shared databases, and automated scoring systems that never sleep. The rationale is familiar: national security, fraud prevention, situational awareness. The reality is starker: Everyday conversation now runs through a mesh of government and corporate surveillance that treats public speech, and the behavior around it, as raw material.
You do not need to speak to be seen. The act of being online is enough. Every scroll, pause, and click is recorded, analyzed, and translated into behavioral data. Algorithms study not only what we share but what we read and ignore, and how long our eyes linger. Silence becomes signal, and absence becomes information. The watchers often need no warrant for public content or purchased metadata, only your connection. In this architecture of observation, even passivity is participation.
This did not happen all at once. It arrived through privacy impact assessments, procurement notices, and contracts that layered capability upon capability. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) built watch centers to monitor incidents. Immigration and Customs Enforcement folded social content into investigative suites that already pull from commercial dossiers. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) linked open posts to location data bought from brokers. The FBI refined its triage flows for threats flagged by platforms. The Department of Defense and the National Security Agency fused foreign collection and information operations with real-time analytics.
Little of this resembles a traditional wiretap, yet the effect is broader because the systems harvest not just speech but the measurable traces of attention. Most of it rests on the claim that publicly available information is fair game. The law has not caught up with the scale or speed of the tools. The culture has not caught up either.
From Watchfulness to Watchlists
The next turn of the wheel is underway. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans two round-the-clock social media hubs, one in Vermont and one in California, staffed by private contractors for continuous scanning and rapid referral to Enforcement and Removal Operations. The target turnaround for urgent leads is 30 minutes. That is not investigation after suspicion. That is suspicion manufactured at industrial speed. The new programs remain at the request-for-information stage, yet align with an unmistakable trend. Surveillance shifts from ad hoc to ambient, from a hand search to machine triage, from situational awareness to an enforcement pipeline that links a post to a doorstep.
The line between looking and profiling thins because the input is no longer just what we say but what our attention patterns imply.
Artificial intelligence makes the expansion feel inevitable. Algorithms digest millions of posts per hour. They perform sentiment analysis, entity extraction, facial matching, and network mapping. They learn from the telemetry that follows a user: time on page, scroll depth, replay of a clip, the cadence of a feed. They correlate a pseudonymous handle with a résumé, a family photo, and a travel record. Data brokers fill in addresses, vehicles, and associates. What once took weeks now takes minutes. Scale is the selling point. It is also the danger. Misclassification travels as fast as truth, and error at scale becomes a kind of policy.
George Orwell warned that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” The struggle today is to see how platform design, optimized for engagement, creates the very data that fuels surveillance. Engagement generates signals, signals invite monitoring, and monitoring, once normalized, reshapes speech and behavior. A feed that measures both speech and engagement patterns maps our concerns as readily as our views.
The Circle Tightens
Defenders of the current model say agencies only view public content. That reassurance misses the point. Public is not the same as harmless. Aggregation transforms meaning. When the government buys location histories from data brokers, then overlays them with social content, it tracks lives without ever crossing a courthouse threshold. CBP has done so with products like Venntel and Babel Street, as documented in privacy assessments and Freedom of Information Act releases. A phone that appears at a protest can be matched to a home, a workplace, a network of friends, and an online persona that vents frustration in a late-night post. Add behavioral traces from passive use, where someone lingers and what they never click, and the portrait grows intimate enough to feel like surveillance inside the mind.
The FBI’s posture has evolved as well, particularly after January 6. Government Accountability Office reviews describe changes to how the bureau receives and acts on platform tips, along with persistent questions about the balance between public safety and overreach. The lesson is not that monitoring never helps. The lesson is that systems built for crisis have a way of becoming permanent, especially when they are fed by constant behavioral data that never stops arriving. Permanence demands stronger rules than we currently have.
Meanwhile, the DHS Privacy Office continues to publish assessments for publicly available social media monitoring and situational awareness. These documents describe scope and mitigations, and they reveal how far the concept has stretched. As geospatial, behavioral, and predictive analytics enter the toolkit, awareness becomes analysis, and analysis becomes anticipation. The line between looking and profiling thins because the input is no longer just what we say but what our attention patterns imply.
Speech Under Glass
The First Amendment restrains the state from punishing lawful speech. It does not prevent the state from watching speech at scale, nor does it account for the scoring of attention. That gap produces a chilling effect that is hard to measure yet easy to feel. People who believe they are watched temper their words and their reading. They avoid organizing, and they avoid reading what might be misunderstood. This is not melodrama. It is basic social psychology. Those who already live closer to the line feel the pressure first: immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities, journalists, activists. Because enforcement databases are not neutral, they reproduce historical biases unless aggressively corrected.
Error is not theoretical. Facial recognition has misidentified innocent people. Network analysis has flagged friends and relatives who shared nothing but proximity. A meme or a lyric, stripped of context, can be scored as a threat. Behavioral profiles amplify risk because passivity can be interpreted as intent when reduced to metrics. The human fail-safe does not always work because human judgment is shaped by the authority of data. When an algorithm says possible risk, the cost of ignoring it feels higher than the cost of quietly adding a name to a file. What begins as prudence ends as normalization. What begins as a passive trace ends as a profile.
The Law Lags, The Machine Leads
Fourth Amendment doctrine still leans on the idea that what we expose to the public is unprotected. That formulation collapses when the observer is a system that never forgets and draws inferences from attention as well as expression. Carpenter v. United States recognized a version of this problem for cell-site records, yet the holding has not been extended to the government purchase of similar data from brokers or to the bulk ingestion of content that individuals intend for limited audiences. First Amendment jurisprudence condemns overt retaliation against speakers. It has little to say about surveillance programs that corrode participation, including the act of reading, without ever bringing a case to court. Due process requires notice and an opportunity to contest. There is no notice when the flag is silent and the consequences are dispersed across a dozen small harms, each one deniable. There is no docket for the weight assigned to your pauses.
Wendell Phillips wrote, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” The line is often used to defend surveillance. It reads differently from the other side of the glass. The public must be vigilant about those who claim vigilance as a mandate without bounds. A republic cannot outsource its conscience to machines and contractors.
Do Not Stand Still
You cannot solve a policy failure with personal hygiene, but you can buy time. Treat every post as a public record that might be copied, scraped, and stored. Remove precise locations from images. Turn off facial tagging and minimize connections between accounts. Separate roles. If you organize, separate that work from family and professional identities with different emails, phone numbers, and sign ins. Use two-factor authentication everywhere. Prefer end-to-end encrypted tools like Signal for sensitive conversations. Scrub photo metadata before upload. Search your own name and handles in a private browser, then request removal from data-broker sites. Build a small circle that helps one another keep settings tight and recognize phishing and social engineering. These habits are not retreat. They are discipline.
The right to be unobserved is not a luxury. It is the quiet foundation of every other liberty.
Adopt the same care for reading as for posting. Log out when you can, block third-party trackers, limit platform time, and assume that dwell time and scroll depth are being recorded. Adjust feed settings to avoid autoplay and personalized tracking where possible. Use privacy-respecting browsers and extensions that reduce passive telemetry. Small frictions slow the flow of behavioral data that feeds automated suspicion.
Push outward as well. Read the transparency reports that platforms publish. They reveal how often governments request data and how often companies comply. Support groups that litigate and legislate for restraint, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Center for Democracy and Technology. Demand specific reforms: warrant requirements for government purchase of location and browsing data, public inventories of social media monitoring contracts and tools, independent audits of watch centers with accuracy and bias metrics, and accessible avenues for redress when the system gets it wrong. Insist on disclosure of passive telemetry collection and retention, not only subpoenas for content.
Reclaim the Public Square
The digital commons was built on a promise of connection. Surveillance bends that commons toward control. It does so quietly, through dashboards and metrics that reward extraction of both speech and attention. The remedy begins with naming what has happened, then insisting that the rules match the power of the tools. A healthy public sphere allows risk. It tolerates anger and error. It places human judgment above automated suspicion. It restores the burden of proof to the state. It recognizes that attention is speech by another name, and that freedom requires privacy in attention as well as privacy in voice.
You do not need to disappear to stay free. You need clarity, patience, and a stubborn loyalty to truth in a time that rewards distraction. The watchers will say the threat leaves no choice, that vigilance demands vision turned outward. History says freedom depends on the courage to look inward first. The digital world was built as a commons, a place to connect and create, yet it is becoming a hall of mirrors where every glance becomes a record and every silence a signal. Freedom will not survive by accident. It must be practiced—one mindful post, one untracked thought, one refusal to mistake visibility for worth. The right to be unobserved is not a luxury. It is the quiet foundation of every other liberty. Guard even the silence, for in the end it may be the only voice that still belongs to you.
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What the Children of Gaza Might Say to the Children of America
You can make a difference. You can look your parents and your politicians in the eyes and ask why they are not stopping the genocide in Gaza.
Oct 04, 2025
In Gaza, 200,000 Palestinian children have already been murdered by the Netanyahu regime, with American weapons. A survey last year by a British civic group found that 46% of the children in Gaza wanted to die, and over 95% believed they would be killed. This is not surprising. The Israeli genocidal regime has daily bombed tiny Gaza’s 2.3 million residents (the geographical size of Philadelphia) with the TNT equivalent of seven Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, smashing civilians and their infrastructure from water mains, electricity, fuel supplies, roads, agricultural crops, to hospitals, clinics, schools, housing, and bakeries into bits and pieces of flesh and debris.
Imagine the horror, the screams, starvation, chronic diseases, and untreated, bleeding injuries, the huge number of limbs amputated from children, most severed without any anesthesia.
Here is what a letter from the children living in the rubble of Gaza might say:
To the children of America—a plea for mercy from the adults in the United States. Our names are Yasmine and Ahmed, neighbors in Gaza City, and both of us are turning 12 next month, unless we are killed or die from starvation. We are weak, sick, and suffering from terrible dysentery from drinking dirty water. We are luckier than most children here, able to eat one small meal a day of lentils or canned peas. We have both lost our mothers and our sisters and brothers. They were killed in our apartments. Only our dear fathers are with us. They keep us alive by giving us much of their own small amounts of food.
We may not be alive when you read this last desperate plea that you demand your powerful president to tell the Israelis to stop the killing and let in the trucks.
Why are your leaders sending Israel the weapons that are killing us? Have you ever heard the terrifying whining of drones armed to kill above you, night and day? Can you imagine US-made F-16s and tanks blowing up our homes and destroying everything in Gaza that kept people alive? Israeli snipers seem to be everywhere, aiming at babies, children, mothers, and fathers. We are innocent. The snipers have no feelings. To them, we are lambs to be slaughtered.
Please, if you are following the genocide in Gaza, don’t believe the reports that 20,000 of us have been killed. It is more like 200,000 of the 800,000 children in Gaza who have been deprived of their lives and dreams. Most have been buried in mass graves if they have not been blown apart by American missiles. Ahmed told me that he saw his 7-year-old sister, Nahedah, blown into hundreds of pieces in the rubble of their fifth-floor apartment. Her doll somehow was only broken in half, lying on her blood-soaked bed. She could never be properly buried. As American doctors volunteering here have said, the survivors are sick or dying from hunger and diseases.
Oh, children of America, you have great moral authority. Your pleas come from your hearts, your minds. We feel some hope when we see thousands of you marching or attending rallies all over America, calling for an end to the killing in Gaza and for a “Free Palestine.”
We know that the great majority of you have other things worrying you and drawing your attention. The obliteration of faraway Gaza is not on your screen. We hope you will join the protests to stop the destruction of our people.
The Palestinians have never threatened or harmed your country. Yet, your family is paying taxes to make the weapons killing us. We want to live, to grow up to fulfill our dreams—Yasmine wants to be a doctor, and Ahmed, a book reader, wants to be a journalist. We dream just the way you dream. We are filled with fear and know we may not survive. The stench of death is everywhere. Dogs and flies are eating the corpses of our neighbors and families in Gaza. There are no more morgues—they have all been bombed. Funerals are being directly attacked by tanks and planes. People praying in Mosques and Churches are blown up by the Israeli military.
You can make a difference. You can look your parents and your politicians in the eyes and ask why they are not stopping the genocide in Gaza. We know you can reach many other children through social media and start a wave of peace demands, a call for a ceasefire, and the deliveries by the thousands of trucks your parents have paid for waiting on the border with lifesaving food, water, medicine, petrol, and equipment. Why allow the cruel Israeli government to block this nearby humanitarian aid?
Right now, flyers written in Arabic are dropping from Israeli planes ordering a million of us to leave our tents and crumbling homes in Gaza City for the fourth time. They say to go south to “safe zones.” There are no safe zones—there are no shelters, food, or water. The so-called safe zones have been bombed many times.
Our fathers do not know what to do—to stay and be killed or to leave on the roads of death to be killed. We are terrified. We remember the other times we were forced to flee to places like Khan Younis or Rafah, which now are rubble. Along the way, screaming, starving children and babies, all coughing, bleeding, families having to bury relatives who collapsed right on the side of the road. The Israelis have bulldozed our cemeteries for their use. Flies and mosquitoes, and blinding thick dust, are everywhere.
We may not be alive when you read this last desperate plea that you demand your powerful president to tell the Israelis to stop the killing and let in the trucks.
Millions of children in America can see our dying Gaza. You will remember forever how you saved what is left of us. So will we, the survivors, if there are any remaining to call you “the beloved ones.”
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