The fight for diverse and conscious voices

Last night we went to a vigil in Arlington in response to a couple of the recent hate crimes. News here: https://www.masslive.com/news/2019/05/joint-terrorism-task-force-investigating-suspicious-fires-set-at-jewish-institutions-in-arlington-needham.html

I hate that I have to write "a couple of the..." because there isn't just one. There were two local, and at the time this was happening, a similar attempted firebombing happened in the Chicago area. The targets there were friends-of-friends; the people targeted in Arlington were people we know. People who taught the kids for their b'nei mitzvot. I have ALL the feels and no idea what to do about any of it.

No persons were harmed and property damage was much less than it might have been. Still, a hate crime not just directed at my marginal group but at people I specifically know is a qualitative step change in the atmosphere.

Last night's vigil/rally of support was well-attended. We essentially filled Arlington Town Hall (moved indoors by last-minute rain). Lots of officials turned out in support (*) and the acting Chief of Police spoke. Everyone thanked the police, who have apparently been diligent in pursuit of the attackers so far. As noted, this is also a qualitative difference. Nobody in Arlington is claiming that the bombers are "fine people", and you can't underrate having public support from government and law enforcement.

"Love Lives Here" as a slogan to complement "Hate Has No Home Here" is an invention and artistry from a friend of ours. I don't think she has a DW or site I can link to; she's helped with art and production work on several Arisias. The slogan is available on postcards and signs, in English and Hebrew. She got at least general acknowledgement from the podium, along with several of the hand-crafted signs students had made. One of those signs said "Please don't bomb my rabbi" which hit me RIGHT in the feels.

After the vigil we got to go out with her and much of her family, which was a nice social for the adults even if the teens were largely anti-social.

I've been trying to find good coherent words about this since last week when I heard about the attack. I don't have any. At the vigil the Rabbi said that his response to "what can I do" was "do a mitzvah". (**) I appreciate that sentiment and I can't help thinking that the greatest mitzvah would be to defeat the Hater in Chief so we don't have four more years of this kind of filth feeling it's OK to show themselves in the daylight.

Hair Furor didn't create these monsters, and yet he is still their great champion. I don't imagine that this is a "cut the head off the snake and the body will die" moment, but I can't think of anything more nationally effective right now.


(*) There was also an unscheduled appearance by a consular official from Israel, whose verbal hypocrisy caused me to grind my teeth rather a lot. Talking about how Israel stands against hate is not very convincing when you represent a government that is actively harming refugees and Jews of color, while perpetuating a discriminatory national system, and an occupation with no end in sight. I consider myself a Zionist, and see hate crimes like these and worse worldwide as a reason for Israel to exist and to be supported. But I hate that a movement I grew up associating with egalitarian socialism has been taken over by fascistic religious fundamentalists and perverted to their ends.

(**) Literally, following a commandment. More generally, doing a good deed. It's a very Jewish form of "pay it forward" because we believe that putting out goodness into the world is its own reward. Jews don't follow the commandments - do mitzvot - because we're afraid we'll go to (Christian style) Hell if we don't. We do it because fixing the world begins with fixing oneself, and fixing oneself is both a personal reward - you're a better person - and a global good because you get to live in a world with more healthy better people.

I am angry and frustrated that Arisia has eaten so much of my energy that I've had to pull back from doing political things, and many social things. The phrase "oh FUCK no" is appearing my vocabulary more and more often, as I just don't have the patience for things I'd normally shrug off or leave for other people to deal with.

Like, no, you can NOT divert this argument into stupid definition wars. Focus on fixing the problem or get the hell out of my way.

Like, no, you can NOT use some passive-aggressive BS to critique another staffer. True, I don't get along with them all that well but you don't do that to my colleagues. Not on my watch. My personal dislike for P-A BS far exceeds my dislike for this one individual.

Meanwhile, on the politics front I read this morning that early turnout in Texas exceeds the _entire_ turnout for the last midterms, and I cried a little bit.

Yesterday I found out about the "Massholes not Assholes" video (seriously, watch this if you haven't - https://vimeo.com/298693753) from my Congressman's Twitter feed. I cried a bit at that, too.

Here's the thing: if we can save the entire freakin' country, we can sure as hell save one volunteer organization. Time to lace up your boots, people. We got work to do. And as it has been said: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Like a number of other commentators I've largely given up on trying to keep up with the stream of head-snapping political news. By the time I've sat down to digest and understand a political story, and decided I have something thoughtful to say, it's gone like Dorothy's house in the tornado.

Fortunately, there are people who get paid to do that kind of longer-arc analysis and it looks like one of them may have landed a big one. Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, of UPenn's Annenberg School and a founder of factcheck.org, is about to release what ought to be a bombshell of a political book.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump

In the current climate I doubt this kind of thing will make an impact - positions are already hardened and nobody who still backs Trump will actually care about the subtle distinctions between "foreign agent" and "useful idiot" for Russia. Congress isn't going to prosecute either charge, anyway, and the President will continue to obstruct efforts to protect elections and investigate past malfeasance by those around him. The importance of this book is as historical record, as well as proof-in-fact.

As the New Yorker piece points out, much has been made of the idea that we "can't know" what influence Russia had and what the effect of that influence was. Professor Jamieson's scholarship stands in contrast to that dismissive attitude and is important in showing how we can actively set and follow standards for investigation. Airtight proof, such as you'd want in a criminal case, is extremely hard to come by - it's virtually unheard-of in social science research. But the "preponderance of evidence" standard is also viable, and something we use for many matters. That seems to be what Jamieson is going for here.

I will want to read this book, but the New Yorker delivers the punchline that has been circulating for some time - the election was tipped by getting people who would have voted to stay home, and encouraging others to come out. It was remarkably effective, using a few tens of thousands to counterweight three million. The question now is, what do you do about it?

A week away plus I mostly don't read on weekends means I'm way behind. I might catch up, or not. Please link me to things you think I should read.

In exchange, here's an interesting link from 538 - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-do-men-think-it-means-to-be-a-man/

A survey of 1600 men on what they think it takes to be a man. Run by two women. Data on github so you can play with it yourself if you like. Very 21st century.

This:

A majority of men in the workplace say they haven’t rethought their on-the-job behavior in the wake of #MeToo

might be the scariest thing I've read in a while. Along with the suggestion that there are "no advantages" to being a man at work it makes me feel like we've got a really long way to go.

Almost all the takes I've seen on this have been simplistic and generally wrong, or at least built on top of a set of assumptions that are, at best, unclear. I'm going to noodle at this for a bit.
( likely this is boring to most people, so I cut )
I think I understand the arguments for and against and I wish I felt it was easy to state a clear position but each lap around this mental track just further convinces me there is no easy answer. I can understand each side's position without agreeing to it, and I can become more convinced that those who think there's an obvious easy answer are wrong. But that's it, so far.

Billy Graham died this week, age 99.

They say only the good die young. Seems about right.

One of the great teachings I find in the Passover story is when G-d admonishes the freed slaves for celebrating the drowning of the Egyptian army. How can you dance when my children are dying?

One can take from this the idea that all people are children of G-d and deserve respect and compassion (Graham seems to have missed this memo). One can take from it that even people who commit great evils (check!) deserve compassion and respect. One can take from it that we are not fit to judge the fates of others; that it is up to us to live our best lives and leave G-d to sort it out in the end.

I know there are those who take these lessons to heart and follow them better than I. I can't celebrate Graham's death, but I can at least be grateful that he can no longer directly harm people like me, my family, and others I care about.

Anyone know if it's actually illegal to dance on someone's grave? Asking for a friend...

Nun, Gimel, Hey, Shin - the four letters on the dreidel - are an acronym for this phrase, meaning "a great miracle happened there". In Israel the last word becomes "Po", for here. It's been suggested we should send "po" dreidels to Alabama. Let's talk about that for a bit.

Like every election in this new world, analyzing this thing is like Rashomon: everyone has a story; the stories share elements; where does reality lie?

Story 1: how far have we fallen that we treat it as a miracle when a mediocre Republicrat squeaks out a victory by less than 2% of the vote against a racist, antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic child molester?

In this story the Trumpists remain a solid festering bloc of hatred. On the one hand choosing party over principles - any vote that will push forward a destructive, starve-the-poor-to-feed-the-rich agenda is an OK vote. The GOP backed Moore, despite some early pearl-clutching. When the chips were down, they went all-in for hatred, bigotry, islamophobia because that's who they are.

White women voted nearly 2:1 for someone who thinks it was OK when "we had slavery"(1) and women couldn't vote. You people voted for someone because you think possible unborn children are more important than actual living 14-year-old girls. The twisted level of self-justification here is literally nauseating.

Story 2: black people will save us. Well, they sure did last night. Black women, black men, and young voters (those Millenials that it's fashionable to blame for things) carried the day for Jones. I'm not even going to talk about the white men, except in disgust. The picture is not entirely terrible - Moore lost handily in a number of affluent white suburbs. These people have been voting with Trump (or Trump-alikes) in the past. But I'll talk more about this in the next story.

This current story has a number of great elements and a number of problematic ones. To begin with, the problems. They start with the DNC, which has just sort of offhand expected black folk to show up. When I called Jones a Republicrat I wasn't particularly kidding. He's pro-choice and made a name for himself prosecuting Klansmen who killed black children, but he hasn't done a lot lately. And he did play to the conservative white voter more than to liberal black voters. And he left black folk out of his calculation until it became clear in the last few weeks that they might actually put him in office.

There was some great effort led by organizations like the NAACP to do neighborhood-level organizing, door-knocking, phone banking, and engaging with traditional black religious figures to counterweight Moore's overt religious appeals. There was more great effort done by other grass-roots organization to document and counter the extremely racist voter suppression that went on. Black people and black polling places were singled out in frighteningly overt ways.

Where is the goddamn national Democratic leadership on this? Why the hell aren't they flying in any (or all!) of the 46 faces I count on this picture: https://cbc.house.gov/ Why is the DNC so goddamn afraid to speak with a black voice, to black communities? Partly it's because they'd have to address the neglect that the national (and many state) parties have inflicted on communities of color. Yes, the Jones campaign brought in Deval Patrick and Cory Booker, but only at the last moment.

We have a Voting Rights Act because of places like Selma, Alabama. Why aren't national Democratic figures recognizing the decades-long debt we owe and putting resources into repaying it?

Story 3: the black belt. The core of this story is the idea that no matter what else happens, the Republicans are now going to have to play defense everywhere. People emboldened by Alabama are going out to take on Paul Ryan. A year ago, he seemed unassailable. Now, it may well be the case that there are no safe seats. Trump lost this race, twice. Chief Strategist Bannon lost. Moore lost while tying himself hard to the Trump wagon.

There is blood in the water, my friends, and if the Democrats can get out of their own way, stop having stupid circular firing squads, and really seriously NEVER EVER AGAIN UTTER THE WORDS "Bernie" or "Hilary" then we might stand a chance. In particular, that deeply red south elected a Democrat governor of Louisiana. It just elected a Democrat to the Senate in Alabama. Democrats crushed it in Virginia.

The demographics of the rest of the Southeast United States can be modeled as more like Alabama, more like Louisiana, or more like Virginia. But right now we have models for how to win. Those models all start with the reality that there are significant, if not dominant, communities of color in those states.

We cannot count on the Republicans consistently to nominate and back monsters of Moore's caliber. "At least we're not Trump" is not a winning strategy. If we want to win those states it's going to involve going to those communities of color, listening to their needs, understanding and starting to reverse the decades of neglect, and picking/training/funding new candidates who come from those communities. This means using resources, and time. White voters who are uneasy with hard, angry, divisive politics can be peeled away from the core Trumpists but only if they see a better vision on offer.

It is, however, a winning plan - as last night demonstrated. We have benefited much more than I think anyone anticipated from the open civil war inside the Republican party but that's not going to last forever.

(1) I hate that phrase so much. It's like "we had bunions" - a thing we "had" rather than a horrific system of torture and murder we built, funded, and perpetuated.

Instead, I've just gotten used to the daily ravings of the dumpster fire in Washington, by which I include the entirely awful Republicans in Congress(*) as well as in the White House and installed at the tops of various Federal agencies.

Also, people who are smarter and more knowledgeable than I am keep writing things better than I would write. Here, for example, are two very concise lawsplainers from Ken White on Popehat about the first real legal moves in the ongoing Mueller investigation.

https://www.popehat.com/2017/10/30/lawsplainer-the-george-papadopoulos-guilty-plea/
https://www.popehat.com/2017/10/30/lawsplainer-the-manafortgates-indictment/

Treason's Greetings, folks, and may we all have a Merry Indictmas this year.

(*) Interesting thing - Trump and the Senate have sucked nearly all the air out of the room. When was the last time you read a story on something in the House that had substance other than "House rubber-stamps the latest horror show"? I can't recall and it's a delicious irony that people who've worked so hard to puff themselves up in importance have now faded to a sideshow. That's what you get for hitching your wagon to a cult of personality - there's no room in the spotlight for anyone other than the Dear Leader.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/us/cub-scout-colorado.html

The video is worth watching, at least through the question. The response from the politician is awful, teeth-grindingly bad. But really it's the Scouts who ought to be ashamed, here.

Add it to their list, and pass the URL on.

Start here: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2017/10/02/2017-word-counts-and-writing-process/

John Scalzi talks about how living in 2017 America has affected his writing process. The way in which the ongoing horror show affects his ability to focus, to create, to detach from the clamoring needs of a house on fire. He talks about how he's political by nature (yep) and despite being privileged (yep) there's no easy way to build a Faraday cage against this stuff. More to the point, if you're a caring human being you don't want to. More below.

Next here: https://www.kameronhurley.com/ongoing-national-horrors-cant-unplugged-go/
A woman, with a disability that could kill her if she loses health insurance, holding onto the idea that the only way out is through.

So, Yom Kippur. On one side, it's a religious observance. The holiest of days in the Jewish holiday cycle. The day on which the Book of Life is closed, and the fates of every person are sealed. Philosophically, it's also the day on which some Jews fast and pray and not only do we ask G-d for forgiveness for our own transgressions, we take responsibility for those committed by others. We safeguard our fellow humans as best we can from G-d's displeasure. Jews who follow the behaviors and patterns of this holiday will often wish each other a "meaningful" fast. That is, observe the strictures of the holiday not because they're strictures but because they help bring meaning to your life.

Y.K. is also supposed to be a day of introspection and reflection. Can I tell you just how hard it is to do that kind of internal work when you are worried that millions of your countrymen are without power, or water, or medicine and your government is ignoring them because they're "uppity" brown people?

And in case there was any doubt, I'm also not OK with pleading for G-d to preserve a pile of shitbag Nazis who would like nothing more than to exterminate me and all my kind. I'm not a big fan of punching them and I'll clench my jaw and extend rights of decent treatment and free public speech to them. But that's my limit. I am not going to lie to myself by saying I want anything more.

So, what to do? I don't go to synagogue anyway. But I fasted - partly to see what would happen and partly because I could. I know there are lots of people who would like to be able to do that, but whose bodies, medical situations, or other obligations prevent them. So in part I fast to stand in for those who cannot. Partly it's that I recognize I do very few things that are hard for me and I was hoping that having the experience would help me move toward some level of meaning.

Instead I got a lot of headache and not much else. But I did realize that this is not a one-off. As Ms Hurley says, anyone who thinks that the 2018 elections are going to bring any relief is fooling themselves. I think I have the majority of the self-care routine down. What I lack is some way to survive four years of constant shock treatment.

Lots of good stuff written these days about the way this Administration is deliberately keeping the population in a state of shock and keeping us terrorized in order to stifle effective resistance. I'm reading and thinking, but don't have anything to say, yet.