The bad news keeps on coming.
There's a real possibility that Trump may get re-elected president in November, for starters. There's the loss of the comforting illusion that the U.S. Supreme Court is an independent branch of government. Russia's got the upper hand in Ukraine, and Macron and Scholz are squabbling publicly over how to form a common European response to Putin. American media now accept as normal and routine the brazen lies that the Republicans in Congress openly spout publicly, night time comedians are openly grateful to them for providing them with a clown to satirize,* and there is evidence that lying openly is now acceptable American behavior. Then there is the feebleness of the will to stop pollution and support rapid development of renewable energy, there's homelessness, there's the dumbing down of American youth, aided by the Covid Shutdown and leading to the open embrace of ignorance as a positive virtue.
And if that were not sufficient to drive you to despair, there is the capture of the Christian faith community by a political subset of the Evangelical Community committed to an authoritarian populist who speaks of his opponents as "vermin" and claims the flood of people seeking asylum in the United States are "polluting the blood" of Americans, in ignorance or denial of the fact that these notions are derived from the language of Hitler and the Nazis. And, not least of all, there is the failure of people all around to distinguish between Hamas and ordinary Palestinians of good will and between Benjamin Netanyahu's "take it all for Israel" right-wing jingoist policy and Israelis of good will. It leaves you breathless and profoundly discouraged.
It's all too much to deal with in a single response. Let me take up the last one only for now, the battle over how to frame the current Israeli war on Hamas in response to their surprise attack on Israel last October 7 and the capture of some 130 Israeli hostages. Hamas states they will be released when the 5200 Palestinians now in captivity in Israel are released. (Allow me some space here - I make no claim to accurate numbers, since they can change at any time.)
To bring this home, I have just read a forty-one page letter written by the Brandeis Center for Human Rights to the Department of Education complaining about the way the Berkeley Unified School District has failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from sometimes violent and commonly intimidating anti-Semitism in Berkeley schools. As a life-long educator, even though I have no children in school, I feel this calls for Berkeley citizens to inform themselves and speak out.
And that, in turn, leads to the stone wall that is the discourse on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. You can't even ask the question, "Where do we start?" because by now it's clear the narrative you will become part of by taking a stance is so long and convoluted that you will be considered an enemy by the other side the moment you pick a starting place. And every outrage and injustice you point out on one side will be met by a "What about...?" question from the other side, citing a similar outrage or injustice perpetrated by them.
I have tossed in my two cents a number of times. In brief I have argued that the only reasonable approach to take is one based on today's realities, not on history filtered through the lens of religion or other ideological starting points. Israel exists as a powerful modern country. That has to be a given. People who call themselves Palestinians also exist. Efforts to make them Jordanians or Syrians or Egyptians or push them out of their homes or bomb them out of existence only hardens their resolve and makes them cry out even louder for justice. If there is to be a solution, it will not be found in the extremist positions both sides take. There are Israelis and Palestinians willing to work together toward a mutually satisfying outcome; these are the people we should be identifying and then working with.
I know there are many arguing that reason doesn't work in America anymore, that you have to appeal to people's emotions, not their intellect. Maybe so. But I maintain it's not one or the other, but one and the other. Whenever anybody asks me to take an either/or approach, I automatically always find a reason to take a both/and instead. Better to cover all the bases.
If I had Aladdin's lamp I'd ask the genie to get the Berkeley High School faculty to remember their first priority is to create a safe place for those in their charge to learn and create knowledge. And their second is to remember the distinction between education and indoctrination, and to value argument as a means of persuasion over assertion. I'd also ask the genie to remind them and anyone else dealing with the Israel/Palestine question that there is space enough between the Jordan and the Mediterranean for both peoples. Neither has to be expelled.
Education is a never-ending task. No sooner does one generation learn the importance of distinguishing between fact and fiction and between a person's ideas and their personhood than it falls upon them, in turn, to teach it to the next generation.
We yearn for reliable authority, for a leader to take us out of this mess we're in, (remember the German word for leader is Führer). But we're on our own.
That's bad news if we continue to fail to make the proper distinctions between truth and lies and follow the liars. Not such bad news if we seek out and join with others of good will.
There's so much we can still do.
Start by writing Joe Biden and telling him to disassociate himself from Netanyahu and his policy of killing Gazans and encouraging West Bank settlement by Jews. Tell him to do it now.
It may swing the election in November, so it's not just the right moral step to take but a practical step as well.
If you're frustrated at all the things going wrong, do that. It's a small thing, but it's an important one.
*I appreciate that some of them - I'm thinking of Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, in particular, have taken the gloves off and their satire has gotten very sharp indeed - and I also appreciate the fact that Jon Stewart is back at it.
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