How a Sudanese refugee made my Christmas less pessimistic

As a child growing up in the 1980s in Washington, DC, Christmas was a time when the usual monotony of my Catholic school existence gave way to an indescribable magic. Of course, mine was a relatively privileged childhood in the United States capital, an imperial headquarters that continues to this day to embody the racism and socioeconomic inequality that governs life in the so-called “land of the free.” While I knew vaguely of such domestic issues growing up, I knew even less of my country’s contributions to global suffering; in my birth year of 1982, for example, Washington had greenlit the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of people. Hailing from the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, the man – we’ll call him Alsafi – had registered his enthusiasm at the sight of my “Free Palestine” sweatshirt when he arrived to pick me up. On the drive back to my mother’s place in DC, he pointed out key landmarks in a geography he by now knew far better than I: the Pentagon building, the Watergate hotel, the patch of tents housing homeless persons whom Alsafi informed me had also been forcibly displaced in the interest of “security” when in July Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had descended upon the US capital to make the case for genocide. There was something paradoxically uplifting about our shared pessimism, and the evening ended with another hug in front of my mom’s apartment building – the lobby of which now hosted a gigantic Christmas tree and an ever-multiplying heap of Amazon delivery boxes.