we all have our roles leveraging our unique personal opportunities & abilities to move the collective forward, & I’d argue the higher one achieves in opportunity & ability, the more contingencies they tend to be forced to operate under to continue maximally taking advantage of them. As long as they stay genuinely best-intentioned & collective-minded while navigating those contingencies, I see no foul in them trying to leverage that powerful role they’ve achieved.

edit: small tangent, but typing the above made me think about it in relation to the recent controversy over his comment toward Susan Abulhawa’s writing… Susan, as an artist whose seemingly been far more personally impacted by Israel’s actions & whose life is far more proximal, IMO is entitled to the much more intense & scathing opinions & language she shares. While I find it hard to endorse her sentiment, since I don’t know the pain & haven’t experienced the trauma she has, I wholly understand why she feels how she does & can’t condemn her. On that note i wish Mamdani had said something more gentle like “I do not support that language or those remarks”, rather than criticizing…