Seeing these places really gives you pause and makes you think. Like, I lot of us see ourselves as “revolutionaries” or people who are here to make the world a little bit better of a place than how we found it. A lot of us have a lot of ideas and know theoretically what we want and what it might take. But being in the martyrs’ cemeteries in Rojava makes me think about how some took their ideas and fought for them. I don’t mean that anything short of dying for your beliefs isn’t somehow revolutionary. I just think that I’m seeing the sacrifices others have made should be reason enough for each of us to all strive to do a little more than we are currently doing.

This world is a fucked up place. We can talk about what’s wrong all day. And we can also talk about what the world we want to live in looks like. And we can talk about how to get to that place. But we must move beyond talking and start taking the steps. Rojava should be an inspiration for anyone concerned with the well being of one another. The revolution here that has ended a century of repression, torture, imprisonment, murder, and oppression was just ideas at some point in the past. But then people organized and carried out the steps that were in their ideas.

We *can* change the world- or at least lay the groundwork for it in the future. But we *must* move beyond talking about these things and get to work.

I hope this image can somehow convey some of what I was thinking when I was standing there in the snow in a cemetery for revolutionaries half a world away from “home” in pursuit of seeing out some of my beliefs.

I just want everyone who believes that a better world is possible to get to work on this. We are more powerful than we think we are.