(Photo by Peggy Sirota)

Hey, Ed Sheeran,

Well, you’ve had quite a busy week.

You’ve caved to your billionaire buddy Robert Kraft, you’ve deferred to the pearl-clutching Pink, you’ve fallen in line behind your promoters, and you’ve kowtowed to a handful of football stadium owners and allowed rapper Macklemore to be booted from your tour for saying the words “Free Palestine.”

I can imagine how traumatic that must have been for your audience, the emotional scars they must be carrying right now by being asked to see the Palestinian people as deserving of dignity and self-determination…. the horror.

My newsfeed is absolutely littered with news stories, think pieces, and video critiques lambasting you for what people are saying is your cowardice, your selfishness, your obvious racism, your thinly veiled Zionism.

And with the fierce media firestorm raging all around you right now, I wonder if anyone’s considered your feelings, what it’s like to walk a mile in your custom Air Jordans.

I mean, this couldn’t have been an easy decision for you. In this economy, a guy with a net worth of 400 million has to stay on the road to keep the lights on, right? We can’t have you missing any meals out here, can we?

Oh, sure, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been brutally murdered, once vibrant cities leveled to dust, and an ancient culture violently erased. Yes, generations of human beings have been assassinated, starved, tortured, and burned alive. And yeah, children are being raped and shot and ripped from their mutilated parents in these very moments, but the show must go on, right? Can’t let a little gen*cide stop the party.

So what if a few thousand miles away an entire country is being wiped off the map with the taxes of your fanbase, you got a gig to do, merch to move, a few more homes to add to the mere three dozen or so you’re being forced to make do with.

You’ve dismissed Macklemore for having the audacity to choose integrity over the paycheck, for giving a damn about thousands of brown-skinned people who can’t buy concert tickets or boost your streaming numbers, and you’re going to bravely carry on with business as usual, playing the part of the happy, humble white savior of soccer moms and suburban preteens everywhere.

You’ll continue packing out stadiums, basking in the breathless adoration of a mix of the uninformed, the lazy, and the heartless; people who either don’t know what’s going on in Palestine or who simply don’t care enough to be inconvenienced enough to opt out (though you could inform and inspire them).

And you’ll get up there awash in spotlights and the intoxicating roar of an army of the most privileged people on the planet. You’ll wear that grinning everyman facade you’ve perfected. You’ll joyfully churn out your loops and whirl around in the middle of a massive sea of humanity (the largely white kind, the kind whose worth and safety might actually matter enough to you for you to get “political,” as you did with Ukraine, btw).

I’m sure it’ll be a blast… but not the kid-killing IDF kind.

But I wonder if the crowds at the shows will sing loud enough to cover the screams erupting from the rubble of Palestine. I wonder if the stratospheric tour revenue will be worth the suffering you’ve ignored to get it.

Maybe I’m being too hard on you. Maybe you’re really struggling with this. Maybe you’re going to have a change of heart and show some courage and something resembling a spine, and allow your humanity to take the lead. Maybe I’ll end up apologizing to you for underestimating you. I would welcome that, because it would mean you decided to leverage your privilege to save the lives of people who are being treated like animals.

But right now, Ed, for a guy who’s made a fortune with words, it’s your silence that is most telling. You are choosing to say nothing, and there is a cost to that, too. Unfortunately, you won’t be the one paying the highest price.

Maybe you are what your critics say you are. Maybe you’re a coward, or worse. Maybe the people of Palestine aren’t worth the show guarantees you’d have to part with to stand up to the bullies and Zionists. Maybe it isn’t that you’re not willing to take sides (because you have been), but that the Palestinian people don’t fall within the borders of your empathy or the comfort of your courage.

I suppose no matter how successful and powerful someone gets, every person has their price, and yours was a 10-city tour.

The Palestinian people deserve our discomfort, Ed. They deserve to be on our breath because the voices of white people can carry their cries to people in the world who need to hear them, despite how uneasy it makes them—or us. That turbulence is where our humanity gets to prove itself.

It’s just really sad that with the size of the stage and the reach of the microphone you’ve been handed, and with the voice you’ve been given that could resonate so loudly on behalf of imperiled human beings, you have such moral laryngitis now.

Enjoy the rest of the tour, Ed… knock ‘em dead out there.

Free Palestine.