Untitled from August 24, 2024

Friends. I’m saying today what I need to say then moving on. Because I feel like a broken record and yet there’s a new hot mess every week now that dominates my brain space. 

On Thursday, I awoke to the many calls for a Palestinian speaker at the DNC. It was a void my soul had felt deeply the previous night as I’d watched Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg speak so beautifully. It was not a both sides feeling, but a Jewish feeling. A maternal feeling. And an elected official feeling, within this Council member body of mine that believes in the possibilities of both countries that occupy different iterations of my home: Israel and the US. 

On Thursday morning, I messaged our State Dem chair and a couple others asking what I could do as a Jewish elected to help. They didn’t respond but, mid day, a letter to the DNC and Harris campaign — spanning several paragraphs and calling for a Palestinian American voice on stage — was forwarded to me by a friend for elected officials to sign. I signed it, as did many others across the country. 

I worked, got my kid, turned on prime time. 

We all know what happened and also what didn’t. The convention was meticulous and targeted in its messaging, and I deeply hope it worked to raise money, activate volunteers, and get votes, even if I disagreed with a lot and grieved the loss of what could have been on that convention stage. I thought Kamala Harris’s speech was, on so many levels, fantastic. 

But for so many, none of that mattered. None.

I have said this since Oct 8, at every juncture, consistently: I will forever hold space for those for whom pain is personal. And I have been inspired consistently by the leadership, impact, storytelling and organizing prowess within that ever deepening pain.

The Uncommitted movement leaders, faith leaders including rabbis I have learned from for years, folks on the ground like Standing Together, Indigenous voices across the globe, many content creators and countless others have done an inspiring job making space for both generational and present hurt as well as verifiable coalition building and movement forward.

And yet. 

On Friday morning I saw the so.informed redline post. It’s on their Instagram; look it up. 

I saw the white women wielding Angela Davis and bell hooks quotes while calling it quits because the sitting Vice President didn’t say exactly what was wanted in a 38 minute acceptance speech that officially launched the last shot before the buzzer on whether we maintain any semblance of democracy and civil liberty or not. The posts that had immediately berated the perfection and Goldilocks lines when Michelle Obama spoke were still drying off. They were telling other white women to stop replying with anything other than validation and to go call our Trump-supporting-cousins as if we don’t all have one we need to call. We do. Somewhere.

There is a man who lives in Edgewater. Y’all who live here know him. He comes to every city council meeting primarily to keep a watch on us and patronize us when he doesn’t think we’re doing Council member correctly (yes I made that a verb). He’s libertarian, kind at times, but excruciatingly exhausting at others. And he put me through absolute hell when I ran gun violence prevention legislation, which caused an entire state of pro-gun activists to bully me and condescend me and yell at me and about me for an entire summer while I kept my baby who had Guillain-Barré syndrome alive in her hospital bed with the milk my body was still making.

It doesn’t work. Protest works. Activism works. Bullying from a place of supposed moral superiority does not, and cosplaying as an ally of oppressed people by exclusively posting pessimism for clicks is going to break us even more. 

Progressive means progress. Idk what about this particular moment of hell in Gaza has unleashed a revolution against progress within our collective but I’m heartbroken. 

I am heartbroken when I see vacancies of realistic calls to action in dialogue and discourse, I am heartbroken when my identity and truths are tokenized and weaponized, I am heartbroken when convenient quips against Democrats that may as well be from Trump’s cruel nickname-loving-mouth gain virality, I’m heartbroken when folks Monday morning quarterback every hour on the hour the careers and intentions of others who have battled past every hurdle conceivable to be some of the most powerful and influential voices of progress in America, and I am heartbroken at the burial of hope. 

I am heartbroken not having the space to process the real and blatant antisemitism I witness and, yes, have received from the right when I’m too busy interrogating it within the folks I thought I had stood near and was held by for 40 years on the left.

I’m tired y’all. I have never been this tired and I know I’m too online and probably too untreated in my anxiety and neurodivergence but for real, I am tired. And I am a relatively insignificant molecule on the global scale of harm. And because of that I’d shut up, if I didn’t know we could do better. 

We can do better. 

I believe we will, I have to. I believe we will defeat domestic fascism on the ballot and continue beyond that to dismantle all that is ugly and hurtful, to make space for the future we demand. 

But it doesn’t have to be this hard, friends. Let’s stop making it so hard.