DPxDC Prompt:
[this is a long one please forgive me]
Bruce lied to the others about his trip through time. Not all of it! Just…one specific thing.
During the early parts of his timeline hijinks, before Tim realized Bruce was still alive, he had a bit of a respite in between his endless time jumps. (Maybe a certain ghost was helping him out.) With a fuzzy memory at best and a strange itch to investigate the unknown, Bruce had been taken in by an old couple who had no kids but wanted to pass on the family name. And who better than a thirty-something amnesiac stranger who could actually be related by blood?
Bruce, with nowhere to go, accepted his new name, grew out his hair, and quickly got accepted into college for engineering. There, he met two of his closest friends; a redheaded woman who could kick his ass and a wet chicken of a man who could also kick his ass. They both made him nostalgic for something he didn’t remember, and that made him sad sometimes, but the two were always there to cheer him up.
Years passed, and Bruce’s life moved on. He settled well into his new name, mourned his parents when the eventually passed, celebrated his wedding with the redhead, and grieved when the last of their trio fell out of touch. He had a daughter, and then a son! They were both so smart, even if they didn’t share the same passion he had for exploring the science behind the afterlife. (Something about the dead just itched his brain in an infuriating way, and Bruce wasn’t one to let sleeping dogs lie. He just had to find out why he was so obsessed with this stuff!)
Eventually, his and his wife’s research yielded results, and that’s when bits of Bruce’s former life started coming back to him. After the portal opened, he spent his days with his head in a fog, oblivious to the world around him as he struggled to continue his work.
Why did he remember a boy named Dick? Who would name their child that? And Jason…who was Jason? That name always made him sad. There were more names, more faces, but none of them were his. He could never remember what his name was supposed to be. All he had was the one his adoptive parents gave him.
His wife was worried. His daughter was struggling. And his son…his son sometimes hurt to look at. Bruce didn’t know why. He knew he was being a terrible father, but something in him wanted to cry whenever he gazed at those clear blue eyes, just like his own. His son was too smart for his own good, and realized his dad had started avoiding him.
The day his son purposely left the room so Bruce could relax was one that hurt him even now.
Time kept passing, and Bruce was becoming anxious. His brain fog was as bad as its ever been. He had constant headaches, and his hands kept twitching for nonexistent tools on his belt. Something was going to happen. Something had happened. A voice in his head told him it was all his fault.
So in an attempt to clear his head and spend more time with his family, Bruce insisted they all go to dinner at the local diner. His son invited his friends. Even better! More people meant more distractions from his messed-up thoughts. He wouldn’t spiral with the kids around.
And then something exploded.
The last thing Bruce remembered was his son’s (green??) eyes widening in fear and horror as something yanked him violently backwards. He fell farther than expected, through a portal and a green sky full of black stars. A hand tightened on the back of his jumpsuit, hauling his giant body through another portal with a roar of a motorcycle.
And then…and then…and then what?
All of a sudden, Bruce was sprawled in some mud in the middle of a forest, dizzy and coughing from the explosion’s fumes. He’s singed all over, and his ears still rang from the force of the…what happened again?
Bruce sits up, and all of a sudden, he’s in the era of the pilgrims. His memory has been wiped clean, his new name and family forgotten thanks to the hands of time. His adventures through the time stream continue, with him assuming many different identities throughout many different decades.
The memories of being Jack Fenton don’t return to him until he’s back in 2004, once again in his own time and living as Bruce Wayne. A glowing green sticky note informs him that “The Nasty Burger Incident” had just occurred. His “other self” just had his ass dragged to another era, so the time loop would continue.
It also informed him that he had an orphaned son crying for him at Bruce’s own grave.
Well, his forgotten son (that sounded bad, even to him) was supposed to be about fourteen now, right? Bruce hopes he doesn’t have to fight anyone for custody.
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Palestinians to platform, part 1
مؤمن الناطور / Moumen Al-Natour
@MoumALnatour
رئيس الشباب الفلسطيني للتنمية / President of Palestinian Youth for Development
Moumen Al-Natour is amazing. Not only does he run a Palestinian youth organization that is doing great work in Gaza, but he's also one of the organizers of the 2019 anti-Hamas protests.
Even to criticize Hamas, in Gaza, means to be interrogated, and potentially jailed, tortured, and/or killed. To actively protest Hamas is many times more dangerous.
To have survived that work and continued doing it? I cannot imagine the emotional strength this dude has.
Here's what Center for Peace Communications (another great organization) has said about him:
So many Palestinians, in or from Palestine, are out there talking about what everyday life in Gaza is like. About Hamas, about Israel, about what they want and what they need, about their struggles and their interests and their families.
My goal, in finding people for you to follow and platform, is to help more voices get out of Gaza after years of suppression, and to help more outsiders (like me) connect with them.
People care SO MUCH about Palestine. But frequently, all there is to share is outrage, semi-accurate news, and more outrage. Frequently, we're not calling for the same things they are. We call for a ceasefire; they demand Hamas return the hostages and surrender. We call for Israel to let aid in; they say Israel is letting the aid in, but it's being stolen, and call for air drops rather than trucks. We call for Israel to stop fighting; they say they hope Israel takes Hamas out first.
We aren't centering their voices and experiences. We aren't lending our reach and our strength to their demands.
I want to make that possible.
Ala Mushtaha, the son of this imam, evidently said, “On Saturday December 30, our front door was busted down and twenty masked men barged in and took my father, a widely respected and deeply learned imam here in Gaza."
“One dragged him by his head and another grabbed him by his beard. My younger brother tried to intervene and reason with the kidnappers, but they beat him. I have a medical condition that makes it hard for me to breathe, so all I could do was watch as the horror unfolded.
“He wouldn’t preach what Hamas told him to. He refused to tell Gazans that violent resistance and obedience to Hamas, is the best way out of our current hell.”
ok this dude needs his own post honestly, he goes on to say so much intense stuff about their lives.
OMG his dad was actually released!
This is what I'm talking about. This is effective activism. Imagine what all these people could do if they had the entire global pro-Palestinian movement behind them.
Al-Natour posts a fair amount of political commentary.
The "we want to live" hashtag is a callback to the amazing "We Want To Live" protests he co-organized against Hamas, in Gaza in 2019, and again in the summer of 2023. Activist Hamida Howidzy (who will also be getting a separate post) wrote about them in Newsweek recently.
Some things he posts in Arabic and then in English. Some of his posts are in Arabic only. In the thread above, he actually posted a couple more that were just in Arabic, presumably aimed at Arabic-language comments.
What I like about Twitter is that you can whack the "translate post" button and get a pretty decent translation most of the time.
Translation:
"I saw all the responses... What is wrong and forbidden in reuniting the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem through elections in which the people choose who will represent them??!?? Why are all the responses offensive...a collaborator, a traitor, and contain insults that indicate that whoever wrote them needs restructuring?! What prevents us, after ending the war, from returning our choice and choice to the Palestinian people?!+
"Everyone wrote that I opened??!! how did you know???!! Stopping the war is the most important thing now... Whoever sees the condition of the people and feels all this is easy for him does not have humanity, and is not a human being... Whoever, after the destruction of more than 80% of Gaza and the North, and still writing in a way that wants the war to continue while he lives abroad, should reconsider. He accepted to live the same suffering!++"
Note: I copied the "I opened" bit and threw it into Google Translate separately, because that cannot be right. It still insisted that it meant "I opened".... but it gave me the transliterated words, "ani fatah."
Everyone wrote that he's Fatah -- the party that runs the West Bank, the one Hamas violently kicked out of Gaza in 2007-08.
"The end of my speech... I know... whoever is not with you is a traitor and an agent... shameful... by God, by God, by God... there will be an account[ing] for all of this talk... so that you understand the word agent... and the account will be through a government of law... It is clear that there are many who benefit from the poverty and destruction of Gaza, and they must be held accountable according to the law.
"Have mercy on people with your tongues"
The comment on that one is noteworthy:
"Yes, whoever is not with the resistance is indeed a traitor, and those who must be held accountable are the traitors, agents, hypocrites, liars, and racists who slander the resistance and who want to hold it accountable only because it fights the enemy of humanity and defends truth and the oppressed. If you want to apply the law, apply it to yourselves first."
It highlights how much of what we hear in the West is Hamas propaganda. That's a whole other post too. But Hamas claims to be "the resistance," to "defend truth and the oppressed," while arresting people who refuse to preach its propaganda. While jailing and torturing someone 20 times for organizing a protest.
Which are the exact tactics that make it so easy for their propaganda to reach us . And so hard for us to even know that there has been an entire protest movement against Hamas in Gaza, much less to support its activists.
I'll just cut and paste the translations from his most recent thread, above. All emphasis is mine:
"When demonstrations took place in Israel demanding that Netanyahu stop the war and free the hostages, Al Jazeera and Hamas considered it a victory and an achievement, and that the Israeli government was under pressure. But what is striking is that these demonstrations were not suppressed. They were secured. The hostage issue and public pressure were dealt with professionally.
"The demonstrations that took place in Gaza demanding an end to the war and the return of the displaced...they were classified as suspicious [by Al Jazeera etc] ...even though the displaced Israeli lives in a 5-star hotel and has the privileges of the displaced, and when the Palestinian displaced in Gaza receives help, he needs a mediator, and if he wants a tent, he needs leadership intervention, and if he does not have the mediator And the intervention wants to scratch his pocket..+++
"Why did Israel allow demonstrations and look pressured, always trying to contain everything... while we have a displaced person lost, homeless, and no one is trying to contain him, and when he talks, they call him a fifth column???"
Last month, he posted about pregnancy in wartime. Note the cost of the tent later in this thread! Numerous Palestinians have posted about humanitarian aid getting stolen -- by Hamas, by NGOs, by others -- and sold on the black market. Food and tents especially get mentioned a lot. Everyone mentions the tents are being sold for more than (the equivalent of) $700, even though they were supposed to be free.
I'll leave you with this one for now:
You can read all the posts in this series in my "platform palestine" tag.
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