My Heart is Heavy

11 Oct

How are you, people have asked. It’s a question I have asked others in situations where it can feel impossible to describe your mindset, all of the swirling emotions, all of the racing thoughts. The question comes from a good place, a place of empathy, a place, I think, of fear. A fear of staying silent, of abandoning those you love. And also a fear that there is a layer, a nuance, that we have missed. A landmine that we try desperately not to step on. We want to provide a listening ear, a sense of comfort in an impossible moment. And we don’t want to say the wrong thing, to inadvertently rub salt in the wound. Let me be clear: I don’t hate the question, I welcome it.

So to answer the question, the truth is I feel so many things. I feel angry. I feel hurt. I feel sad. I feel afraid. And I feel really, really lonely. It’s strange being an American Jew on any day, but it’s especially strange being an American Jew when Israel was just attacked. And it feels strange to write those words, “when Israel was just attacked,” and feel the need to explain what I mean, to justify it, to add in equivocations and caveats. It feels strange to see people celebrating this atrocity, an atrocity that would be widely condemned if it were to happen anywhere else. And it feels strange to realize that this long and complicated conflict has become something of a purity test for some people, for the people who weigh in angrily on everything and also the people who weigh in on almost nothing, but feel the overwhelming need to weigh in on this.

I try not to share my views on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle because I feel like there are too many assumptions that people make about what an American Jew, us of the ‘dual loyalties,’ must think. I also, quite frankly, don’t know enough to feel as though what I have to say is productive. The conflict is long, it is complicated and it involves so much unnecessary pain and suffering. So I am going to heed the advice I wan to give to others and just stay quiet on my thoughts about the specifics of the conflict itself. There is no winning there. Not in my mind, anyway. And so I think I am going to focus on two things.

One, self-protection.

Two, being better.

I’ve decided to take myself out of spaces where largely unmoderated comments are flying. I can usually find humor in the idiocy of comment sections, but not right now, not on this topic. And I’ve decided to focus on what I’m seeing, how I’m feeling and making sure that at some point in the future, if and when there is a similar situation involving other groups of people, that I do better. That I choose my words carefully, that I temper my responses. That I consider.

I remember when 9/11 happened. From the stairwell in my freshman year dorm I called my mom and I asked her: what horrible things did we do to push people so far that the only recourse they felt they had was to murder thousands of innocent people at their place of work? There was no justification, no excuse for those attacks. They were evil and cowardly. But the context, the history, it matters. We can mourn the dead, we can cry and rage, and we can also ask the hard questions. We can say that the policies and actions our government took helped to create a tinderbox without placing any blame on those who died. Without saying that anyone deserved it. We can say that those who carried out the attack itself, who planned and executed it, are responsible for the destruction they left behind. And we can also say that the retaliation that followed was ill-conceived and unnecessary, that nothing good came of any of it. That we are, all of us, worse off because of it. Many things can be true at once.

And so again, all these years later, I find myself holding a lot of conflicting realities at once. I find myself wishing the world was a different and better place. And I find myself here in my house knowing that it will get scarier and more complicated in the days, weeks and months to come and that, again, we will all be worse off because of it.

And I mourn. I mourn for those who have died in Israel and Palestine today, over this past weekend and every single day before. I mourn for the deaths that are sure to follow. I mourn for people who celebrate the massacre, rape, kidnapping and torture of civilians anywhere. I mourn as I tend to my heavy, broken heart.

So that’s how I’m feeling today. Tomorrow, I’m sure, will be different. How are you?

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A Year After the Fall of Roe

24 Jun

It might be cliche to say, but there are those moments in life, be they good or bad or somewhere in between, that sear themselves in your memory. You remember every conversation, every smell, where you were and what you did after. For me, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the almost 50 years of precedent that was tossed out with it was one of those moments. It was a moment so many of us knew was coming, even before the leak of the Supreme Court draft on the decision. It was a moment those of us who pay particularly close attention to reproductive justice felt was possible for years as we watched TRAP laws go into effect, and clinic doors shut. And still it wasn’t any less shocking: in part because as people we have a hard time imagining the way tragedy will feel, and in part because the knowledge of what would follow the patch-work approach to abortion access was too much to grapple with. At least for me. When that unthinkable decision finally came down, it was like a dam broke and all that horror became our shared reality.

I’ve had a full year to process this nightmare, a full year to figure out my role in fighting back. I read and listen to everything I can. I, as Jessica Valenti suggests in her daily newsletter (which is a must read), talk to someone about abortion almost daily. I have this compulsive need to be a witness to every story pregnant people have the strength to release, opening themselves up to an increasingly hostile country, despite the fact that a majority of Americans – 61%, in fact – believe that people should have access to abortions. That number is continuing to rise, with more and more people believing pregnant folks should have access to abortions later into their pregnancy. On this one year anniversary of the antidemocratic decision made by the Supreme Court, I find myself thinking about abortion and all the ways in which my feelings around it have changed.

There was a point in time where I was not bothered by the belief some held that what we all want is for there to not have to be any abortions, that until that point we have to protect abortion access for everyone. A year after Roe v. Wade was overturned I can definitively say that is a crock of shit. First of all, there’s no reality in which there’s no need for abortions. No matter how universal and affordable access to contraception is, there will always be unplanned, and unwanted, pregnancies. That is simply a fact. And if we live in a society where we believe all people have the right to self determination and bodily autonomy, then we live in a society where people get access to the healthcare they need without shame, no questions asked. Secondly, miscarriages happen. Quite often, actually. Sometimes they happen later in pregnancy. And at that point, doctors do a dilation and curettage (D&C) to remove tissue from inside the uterus. Doctors also perform D&Cs during surgical abortions. The difference between having a miscarriage and an abortion is sometimes, though not always, a difference in treating a wanted versus an unwanted pregnancy. So saying that we find D&Cs acceptable or desirable in the case of a miscarriage and unacceptable or undesirable in the case of a surgical abortion is us assigning an ethical and moral valuation to a healthcare decision that should ideally be made outside the influence of those feelings. There is nothing ethically or morally wrong about choosing to end a pregnancy. And I don’t think we shouldn’t think glowingly about a world existing in which abortions aren’t needed. Abortions are needed. Abortions are a fact of life.

I think people should be able to access abortions at any point during their pregnancy. People who are getting abortions late in their pregnancies are doing so because something traumatic has happened. It is likely that either the fetus has developed a potentially fatal abnormality or the pregnant person is at risk of death if they carry that pregnancy to term. If we truly believe abortion is healthcare, then abortion is healthcare at any and all points in pregnancy. And to me, that means that when we fight for abortion access, we fight for abortion access for every single person, whether they are in the first trimester or the third.

A year in, I don’t believe in compromise on this issue. I will not entertain a conversation with someone who tries to argue the point that abortions need to be legislated by the government. I don’t want to hear about “viability.” Yes, abortion needs to be protected, but that need only exists because the religious right has been permitted to define and lead the conversation for decades. Our entire national debate on this issue has been, and continues to be, carried out on their terms. In the past I think I was less outspoken about this, more interested in not seeming unreasonable. I also think I internalized some of the language because I’ve been steeped in it for so long. But now I realize that the unreasonable position is people thinking they have any right whatsoever to insert their religious or political beliefs into other people’s healthcare decisions. The only unreasonable position is calling yourself “pro-life” when you are forcing people to remain pregnant when they don’t wish to be, or when it is physically, mentally or financially dangerous for them to remain so.

Before this past year, I don’t think I ever truly thought about how accessible I want contraception and abortion to be. Vending machines that dispense the morning after pill? Yes please. Free contraception for everyone? Absolutely. Walk-in abortion services? Sounds great. The safe use of abortion pills being taught in health classes? Don’t threaten me with a good time! I want reproductive healthcare to be simple and inexpensive to access, and I want the government to do nothing more than make sure that those pathways are clear of Christo-facist bullshit.

I also have realized over this past year that we are all currently living in a failing state. I know, I know, it sounds alarmist and ridiculous. But that’s what people said about the overturning of Roe before it happened and look where we are now. (And that’s ignoring what the reproductive rights landscape was before Roe was overturned which, let’s be honest, was a shit show.) We are living in a country where the majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal at least in the first trimester. The number of people who believe it should be legal in the second trimester, though lower than those who believe it should be legal in the first, jumped significantly in the past year. And yet, countless state governments are passing bans and pushing ballot measures that are explicitly against the wishes of the voters. In Ohio, for example, the state government is putting forth a ballot measure to try and increase the percentage of voters needed to amend the state constitution from a simple majority to 60% of voters. Ballot measures such as these are being used by Republican-led state legislatures across the country to keep voters from enshrining the right to an abortion into state constitutions. The GOP knows that abortions are popular even among Republican voters, and they are doing everything in their power to make sure voters don’t get to decide this issue. This is wholly undemocratic, but if they are successful they will take control of more than just access to reproductive healthcare.

There’s more I’m forgetting, I’m sure. It comes in fits and starts. But suffice it to say it has been A YEAR. I’ve cried a lot. I’ve raged. I’ve felt like everything is pointless. And sometimes, I still feel that way. But I also believe that knowledge is power and I will keep learning and will try to share more often and maybe, hopefully, one day we will have more good news that bad.

But in the meantime, fuck the Supreme Court. And fuck the Republican Party.

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One Dream, Generational Connections and a Very, Very Scary Election

8 Nov

My Grandpa, Papa, and Grandma, Bama, appeared in my dream for the first time in a long time the other night. They died in 2010 and 2019 respectively and used to visit me while I slept every once in a while. Normally they’d appear as silent versions of their formerly more gregarious selves. One time, while attending a dream version of an art show put on my my Uncle Mikel, Papa morphed from his human self to skeletal remains. He was still upright and appreciating the art, but he was all bones, no skin in sight. I found it rather unsettling but I was still happy to see him. Yesterday morning, as I dozed off next to a loudly purring cat, I dreamed I was hosting a house party. There, in the living room, having a conversation with her back to me, was Bama. The second I laid eyes on her hair and the back of her velour black jacket I knew it was her. She slowly turned around, walked towards me and enveloped me in a hug. For a moment, I truly thought she was there. I believed it so ferociously that I was able to call up Papa, who appeared, seated, in a chair nearby. I woke up, still lying next to a loudly purring cat, and tried grasping for the quickly retreating tactile memories of sharing space with them.

Typically, I leave my dreams to the realm of sleep and think of them as sort of a brain adventure. My mind is simply using its down time to work out whatever silliness is going on and, for the most part, I think it does a pretty good job. Given the stress and discomfort I’ve been feeling recently, this felt different. I went to my computer to do a little research and was met with a lot of predictable interpretations centering on love and an enduring connection between this realm and the one where Bama and Papa, (as well as my maternal grandmother, Mima, who opted not to attend the house party) reside. That felt too simple, too impersonal, to inaccurate in conversation with what’s been going on in my mind. And then I came across another potential reason: intergenerational trauma. And I thought, if intergenerational trauma can return to haunt us while we sleep, what about transgenerational trauma?

I’ve read a bit about inter- and transgenerational traumas, mostly while I was hosting a feminist podcast that loosely hinged on women’s health. As I understand it, its focus is centered around this idea that we carry traumas that we experience within us and that, through procreation and fetal development, we pass these traumas on to our children and they, in turn, pass them along to theirs. I’ve been lucky that most of my life happened during a period of time when being Jewish in America didn’t feel especially unsafe. It wasn’t the same for my grandparents who were both born in the United States in the 1920s, and were alive through Hitler’s rise to power. I regret that I never talked to them about how they felt during that time – being Jewish in American while whatever family remained in Europe was exterminated. I wonder what kind of trauma is inflicted on those who happened to be somewhere else. Did they experience something akin to survivors guilt? What was the flow of information like? And how did they go on living every day with this threat looming over them?

The stories I remember them sharing were more centered around their successes in the face of antisemitism. Like how Bama and Papa bought a house in a town that actively tried not to sell to Jewish families, so much so that a realtor refused to show them the home Bama had her heart set on once she realized they were Jewish. They came out on top and ultimately raised four kids in that house; my siblings and I grew up a short 4 blocks away. I remember Bama telling the story in conspiratorial terms, as if she snuck into the house under the cover of night and never left, everyone who didn’t want her there be damned. At the same time there were, of course, the somewhat darker comments over the years. They mostly came in response to a high-profile Jewish person doing something that played into antisemitic tropes. Think Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. Papa’s response, which I’ve heard multiple times throughout my life was a short, simple sentence that spoke volumes: this is not good for the Jews. He was always aware of the precariousness of Jewish safety, that when the tides turn and things become perilous, it tends to not go well for us.

So here I am, in the year 2022. Save a few instances here and there, I’ve never felt particularly vulnerable being Jewish. The town that I grew up in – a town that only a few decades before my birth actively kept Jewish families out – was so heavily Jewish by the time I was born that I was convinced Jewish people were everywhere, rather than the truth which is that my parents raised us in a Jewish enclave. (Needless to say, college was a bit of a culture shock.) These past few years, and specifically the past few weeks, have been a culture shock all their own. The jolt of learning what my grandparents knew in their bones, what I intellectually understood but never truly felt: that Jewish safety is not guaranteed, that our privilege, while it undoubtedly exists, can be revoked at any time. That our belonging here is conditional.

The election in 2016, and the ensuing rise of white nationalists like Richard Spencer (who’s on Bumble now and claims to have moderate politics?) was certainly eye opening. Seeing footage of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and hearing them chant “Jews will not replace us” was not something I ever expected to happen in my lifetime. But even then, it felt like that level of hatred existed only in small pockets and that the loud majority of people – and certainly those in power – found that march, those views, abhorrent. It felt like everyone was shocked, and from the shock would come action. Yet here we are, over 5 years later, and it’s worse than ever. Open antisemitism, something that had been relegated to the corners of the internet, has been on display in the most public places. It’s been on highway overpasses, blasted over the internet by celebrities and spoken in coded, and not so coded, language on the campaign trail. It exists on both the left and the right. I feels as if this veil I have been hiding behind my entire life has lifted and I feel in my very being this thing I had been denying lived within me. Almost like a cellular knowledge that this was possible and that it was coming. I think maybe by visiting me while I slept my grandparents were telling me that, yes, this is a burden we share but that I am not alone in the fear and pain that I feel. They are feelings that have been passed down through the generations since the beginning of time.

You can’t come from a long line of the hunted unscathed.

I write this because being a part of any marginalized group in America is tough; it feels especially tough now. There are complicated feelings we’re all having about what’s happening, what this means for our safety and what our next steps can and should be. My feelings and fears as a Jewish American are different from those being experienced by my friends who are members of different, also targeted, minority groups. I don’t know what the results of this election will mean for our future and I’m fucking terrified, for all of us. And I just wanted you to know.

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The Unemployment Chronicles: Chapter 1

27 Sep

I’ve often said that what I do for work is the least interesting thing about me. Now, almost two weeks after my company severely downsized, catapulting me into unemployment, I’m left wondering how true that really is. Funny thing about working full-time is you spend so many of your waking hours working towards someone else’s goals that you lose sight of what it is that you want. And then when that job goes POOF, along with the barely enough paycheck, you’re left picking through the rubble, trying to find the you that you were when the whole thing started.

When I first found out I was being liberated from my paycheck, I tried to focus on the possibilities time would give me. I could get back to the person I was before the pandemic started. I liked her, she was fun and productive and adventurous. Being her was somewhat effortless but getting back to her, that’s proven to be a bit more of a challenge. It’s like that corporate train with its steady paycheck and paid vacation is an addiction. It got me thinking about how I could progress in that world even as I saw my favorite parts of myself going dormant. As if money – humanity’s arbitrary and uncontrolled measure of value – is somehow enough to displace our joy. If you really think about it though it makes sense. Our jobs are how we relate to one another and how we make our money provides the means through which others make sense of who we are as people and what roll we play within society as a whole. Our jobs are also how people determine our usefulness to them and their own potential career advancement. Honestly, sometimes it feels as though our entire lives are just very, very long networking events. And, in my personal opinion, there is very little joy to be found in a networking event. Like spending all your free time scrolling through LinkedIn, only in person. Yuck.

I’m not entirely certain what the point of this piece is. Maybe it’s to tell people,

****HEY, GUESS WHAT, I NO LONGER HAVE A JOB****

in one fell swoop so I can avoid the awkward conversations I have with people when I tell them in person that I don’t have a job. We have been so conditioned to blame individual actors for every little thing as opposed to looking at institutional failures. The result is that when I inform people I don’t have a job, though it is through no fault of my own, I end up feeling like a deadbeat loser with no future.

RIP

Anyway, it’s like a rollercoaster. Sometimes I feel pretty lucky that I have this time to get back to myself and really think about what I want to spend my time doing. In the evening, when I think about what the next day might have in store for me and I get the chance to truly focus inwards, I consider a lot of different paths I could take.

  • I could train for another half (or full!) marathon
  • I could write a book
  • I could go back to school and get my PhD
  • I could try and get a job in radio
  • I could get in my car and just, drive, aimlessly, with no real goals or ambitions (Is this a parallel for my life? Perhaps.)
  • I could throw my phone into the ocean

And then in the morning when I wake up, the hours stretching ahead of me and I’m presented with yet another bureaucratic hoop to jump through to qualify for a whopping $504 a week (pre tax!) from New York Unemployment, it all seems a little daunting. I don’t know. I guess all those times as a little girl when I answered the question

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” (Answer: a marine biologist, duh)

I never truly realized what it meant to grow up. To live, to build community, to earn your way, to find joy. So here I am asking myself that same old question: what do I want to be now that I’m grown?

Answer: Honestly, I want to be a lady who lunches. Imagine living a life that allows you to have long, fancy meals with your friends in the middle of the damn day. And when you’re not having lunch you’re doing other things. Going on a road trip, perhaps. Searching for turtles in a lake. Noodling around in some night market somewhere, looking for a snack. Hey, a girl can dream.

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I’m just a mouse, alone in a bucket

1 Jun

I keep thinking about this time about 15 years ago when we had a mouse in our apartment. What were we, a few twenty-somethings without the heart to hurt a mouse, to do? My best friend’s boyfriend, staying with us at the time, decided to take matters into his own hands. He put a bucket in the sink, built a little weighted plank with one half of the board resting on the countertop and the other half hanging over the middle of the bucket and placed a small snack on the end of it. Sure enough, our mouse pal – too enamored of the small bit of food at the end of this board to nowhere to realize the danger – marched his little mouse behind across the board and tumbled (uninjured) into the bucket. The sides were too high and too slick for the mouse to escape. I’m sure the poor thing was terrified. Lucky for the mouse, we were benevolent overlords and took it to safety in Prospect Park, located a little more than a mile away. In hindsight, there’s a not-so-tiny chance that it got eaten by a hawk or an owl inside that 526-acre plot of land in the middle of Brooklyn, but better that natural end, I think, than the one humans would have imposed upon it.

I’ve been thinking about that mouse a lot recently. Not because two of my good friends have been battling with their own unwanted furry visitors, and not to reflect on the complete ridiculousness of the fact that our simplistic, makeshift trap actually worked. I’ve been thinking about that mouse because recently I’ve felt a lot like it. Stuck at the bottom of a bucket, alone, every avenue of escape just as steep and as slick as the one before. Right now, and likely in the forever before now, we’ve all, knowingly unknowingly, been that mouse.

Maybe that’s a bad example but I’m having a really hard time putting anything into words these days. Let me try this. One of my friends recently introduced me as someone with a lot of rage. She meant is as a compliment and I took it as such. I’ve always been quick to anger; anger is something I can work with. I can redirect it towards productivity, I can use it as motivation to speak out about something, hold someone to account for their bad behavior. Somehow anger makes me feel like I have some utility in this world full of so many difficult, horrible, inhuman, unjust things. Recently, all that anger has been replaced by a deep, aching sadness. Every horrific thing that happens piles onto the thing that came before, compounding it. The thing that makes it so hard to deal with is that all of this horror, if not completely preventable, is at least mitigable. This pandemic didn’t have to be so deadly. Those children in Texas, those adults in Buffalo, did not have to be massacred. George Floyd didn’t have to be murdered by the state. It certainly shouldn’t have taken a video captured by a teenager, a video that showed a man in the worst and last moments of his life, to hold his murderers accountable. At he very least, that video should have caused the entire system to burn.

I recognize that I’m late to this party and that people have been saying this for years, decades, centuries. But, I’m going to go down this road anyway. I’ve always had some vague understanding that everything was a scam, everything interconnected, everything orchestrated for a singular purpose. Since George Floyd was murdered, it’s as if the top blew off the whole thing. All of these incidents throughout history that felt somewhat maybe related are in fact all deeply intertwined with one another, so tangled up in a ball that it’s hard to distinguish one thread from another. And this was all intentional. I’ve written a lot about the American Dream being a load of horse shit. That lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps is actually not possible unless the person in question happens to be very, very strong and also a contortionist. Even then I struggle to imagine how it would look. The purpose of this false narrative, the false telling of human capability within our current system, is to leave us all feeling as though we, alone, are in control of our own fates, our own futures. That any success we have is due to our own hard work and any failure is due to a moral shortcoming. In the story of the American Dream (which, let’s be honest, was imagined to empower white people, specifically white men, and disempower everyone else) there is no role for society or community. There is no acknowledgment that the people who are in power were born into power and generations of their families will stay in power until their greed destroys everything we have.

I’m sorry to sound so gloom and doom. I just don’t know how else to view it anymore. We were all born into a system of brainwashing and, over time, it becomes increasingly more difficult to discern the difference between truth and fiction. This, too, was all be design. Call the press liberal elitists even while they parrot police union talking points. Spend decades arresting and incarcerating Black and Latino men for drug offenses, then make marijuana legal, doing nothing to mitigate the lifelong effects of inhuman imprisonment. Oh, and for funsies, how about we let white people reap all the benefits and use the new tax stream to give more money to the police state. Just last week, the President of the United States, supposedly the most powerful man in the world, said this:

Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?

I know he is using the word “we” which normally would be interpreted as meaning the collective, but in our context, this “we” is every one of us, individually. You and I are not doing enough to stop this carnage. Never mind that I (and maybe you, too) are against guns, that we vote to put anti-gun politicians into power, that we march and scream until we’re red in the face. You and I? We need to do more. That’s how it can be guaranteed that nothing will ever change, that the same people will continue to hold all the power and more and more money will land in their bank accounts. We have some people who think there are rules and decency and others who see the current state for what it is, what it has been, and are wringing every last bit of power and money out of it. Then there’s the rest of us, stuck somewhere in the middle.

I’ve been crying a lot, down here at the bottom of my bucket. I tear up when I see kids playing outside of a school, thinking about all the kids who have been killed by gunfire. I can’t watch shows about the environment anymore, because all my mind focuses on is how corporate greed is destroying everything and we’re powerless to stop it. It’s hard to see old or immunocompromised people moving through the world without thinking about how we failed them in this response to the pandemic, how we continue to fail them every single damn day. It’s impossible to walk past a police officer without tumbling down a rabbit hole of how much money we give these fuckers to keep people down, money that could be so much better used to prop them up. I could continue. I don’t think I need to.

It’s a rough go for all us mice in all our buckets. I don’t know. I wish I had a little uplifting thing to put at the end of this, but I’m plumb out of uplifting things. Maybe next time.

Rebekah’s (New) Pandemic Diary, Entry #3: Who’s in Charge Here?

11 Aug
Photo by LED Supermarket on Pexels.com

I keep thinking back to this conversation I had one morning back in 2007 in the now defunct Has Beans coffee on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn. I was talking to my friend Ben Curry – may he be arguing for eternity with his intellectual equals – about lightbulbs, of all things. I had just updated all of mine to be energy efficient. He laughed at me, telling me that individual action was pointless in the face of corporate and governmental failure. I was appalled. I cited the hundreds of cups I forewent by religiously bringing my own reusable thermos day after day; the energy saved by riding my bike or taking public transit into Manhattan for work; the plastic bags that didn’t end up in the ocean and stuck in trees because I toted around canvas. I simply couldn’t compute that being schooled in the importance of the 3 R’s – reduce, reuse, recycle – could have all been a sham. I dug my heels in. He smirked at me and shot back the quick stats he always seemed to have effortless access to. I shrugged my shoulders in a “let’s agree to disagree” kind of way – he was always hard pressed to let something go – and we continued on to discuss, and argue about, other topics. Of all the conversations we had over the years this particular one stuck with me. I find myself thinking about it more and more as we bumble through this pandemic and race towards a complete environmental collapse. And I keep asking myself, who is in charge here?

We have spent our entire lives, all of us, being indoctrinated with this ideal of individual freedom and responsibility. I know I’ve talk about this a bunch over the years – about the lies of the American Dream, the limits of individualism. I recognize that it’s a dangerous narrative, one that hides the realities of structural inequalities and tells us that if we work hard enough then we too can ride a giant phallus into space. What I didn’t do was think about the true depths of this narrative. We isolate our “heroes” and our “failures.” We talk about how people get themselves trapped in poverty and how others earn themselves millions. The fact of the matter is that none of this is done alone, none of it happens in a vacuum. There are always other people helping us or holding us back.

Bear with me for a second because I’m going to take a sharp turn.

I was recently thinking about this movie, Dark Waters, starring Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway and Bill Pullman (I’ve loved him since Newsies!), among others. The premise, based on a true story, is that a tenacious lawyer (Ruffalo, obviously) takes on DuPont for poisoning an entire town in West Virginia. I liked this movie, actually. I’m a sucker for over the top, based-on-a-true-story legal dramas where the good guys win and the evil corporate empire is forced to pay tons of money to the powerless people they have victimized for decades (even though, relatively speaking, what they pay out is pocket change). But the more I think about it the more it occurs to me: we celebrate this lawyer, Ruffalo’s Robert Bilott, for fighting this battle for over 20 years, but we celebrate him as if he did it alone. The reality is, though, that he couldn’t have done this without support, without help and without the willingness of the community – a community who had been victimized for decades – to fight with him. It might seem like these people, dying of cancer and whatever else they got from DuPont, had nothing to lose but the reality is that almost no one has nothing to lose, no matter how sick they are.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this because I think our habit of individualizing everything – be it a success or a failure – is what mires us in our current situation and makes us incapable of addressing the environment or ending this pandemic or any other manner of totally doable things that we simply cannot seem to accomplish (gun reform, anyone?). The Earth is dying not because you bought a bikini from Shein, took a long shower or (god forbid!) used a plastic bag at the store. The Earth is dying because while people are pointing their fingers at the role individuals play corporations have a free pass to do whatever the fuck they want if it keeps prices low and stock holders happy. We can’t get out of this pandemic not because of a bunch of assholes who refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks (although that certainly is not helping), but because of a complete governmental failure from the day this arrived on our shores until now, 17 months later.

Remember when states were bidding against each other for PPE and then the federal government swooped in and took it all? Remember when we were told this was “just the flu?” Individual actions my ass. I recognize, of course, that there are some individuals who wield more power than others, but their power comes with a force of many. They do not act alone. No one acting alone is this powerful.

Sorry to come back to this space all pissed off after a 7 month long hiatus. It’s good to be here. It’s good to think again. Good to get this loop out of my head and onto the page. But I guess if you made it this far, I’d like to just quickly boil this whole tirade down to one thing:

Ben was right, my eco bulbs won’t stop the world from burning. And, in an argument I’m sure he would make while fully vaccinated and wearing a mask, those actions, although ethically correct, won’t save everyone. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still do them, but we should be honest about where the real power lies. Until we stop blaming (or lauding) individuals, we’re fucked.

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Rebekah’s (New) Pandemic Diary, Entry #2: The Case of the Money Tree

19 Jan
Photo by Rachel Claire on Pexels.com

Wow. It has been a year and we are only 19 days in. In other news…

My plants are dying. Not all of them, of course, but we have had a few high-profile casualties in the house recently. First, there was the small aloe and the burro’s tail that succumbed to some sort of powdery mildew that, try as I might, I couldn’t cure them of. They didn’t actually perish, as much as we had to do a pre-emptive disposal to save other plants from their same ill fate. (RIP, pals.) Then, we had a jumper. A high-shelf Dracaena trifasciata, or snake plant that, unbeknownst to us due to its altitudinal location, was running low on soil. A little bit of water and – TIMBER! – the larger portion of the plant disconnected from its roots and tumbled dramatically to the ground, it’s beautiful, stiff leaves lying there, all of the plant’s hard work over the previous months undone as a result of caretaker oversight. And finally, the Money Tree. Holding on by the tiniest of threads. Part of me feels like maybe I should part with it, seeing as how sparse its leaves are, but the other part of me feels immense guilt giving up on the poor thing. After all, it’s my fault it is faring so poorly. It’s current state due to some sort of err in water, sunlight or nutrients. It seems only right that I stick it out and try to bring it back from the brink, right?

The answer to that question might seem simple to you. Of course I should stick it out. I can’t just give up on a plant because it isn’t as beautiful and full as it once was. I can’t throw it out – abandoned like so many plants before it, doomed to rot in a dumpster. You might go so far as to remind me of the aloe (not the powdery mildew one, but it’s parent plant) that I rescued from beside a mailbox, barely alive. The aloe which now is so large that one can hardly see the pot in which it lives. The aloe that I am certain would take over the entire house if it got the chance. That aloe would have perished had I not seen through to its potential and carted it home. The Money Tree, however, is a more complicated case. Because, and I know this might sound crazy to you, I have long feared that the Money Tree is cursed.

The origin of the Money Tree goes back quite some time, to the summer of 2016. It was before the ill-fated election and the horrors that followed; before I packed up my bags and moved myself to New Orleans for the better part of a year. It was while I was still toiling away on the weekends at a bar too lucrative to quit, but too soul-crushing not to. I was, I will now say, at an impasse. An impasse that in true Rebekah fashion could only be dealt with by embarking on a weeks or months long change of locale. The Money Tree was a gift from my bar back which, on its face, seems like a really nice thing until I tell you that he was legitimately the worst bar back I have ever worked with. He wasn’t a bad dude, per se. But he did used to split during a busy night, take the train into Manhattan to do who knows what and then return, fully expecting to be paid in full. In hindsight, this was more an issue of poor management, something this guy was just taking full advantage of, but still. It grinded my gears. Which, also in true Rebekah fashion, I made a point of telling him.

So imagine my surprise when one day, after I told him how rude it was for him to take a 45 minute cigarette break when he was supposed to be restocking liquor and changing the overflowing trashcan so we could continue serving drinks uninterrupted, he appeared in the bar with a brand new bodega-bought Money Tree, complete with a small bow. It was for me. Ever a sucker for plants I accepted, making a point of telling him, with a slight smile, that no amount of Money Trees would erase his reputation as the shittiest bar back of all times. He had won me over, at least a small bit. I took the Money Tree home, gave it a new pot, and we co-habitated (minus the time it was watered by roommates in my absence) for the next 4 1/2 years.

This Money Tree flourished! It grew so healthy and strong I was forced to upgrade its pot, affording it ever more room. All the while, I was stymied by all manner of things. Life, the administration, myself, this god damn pandemic. Always a money saver, I found myself in a precarious financial situation. My time in New Orleans, however mentally restorative, was not exactly economically sound. Month by month I depleted the money I had put away ever so slowly since college and in June of 2017 I returned to New York City, months later than planned, vowing to never work a night shift again and, maybe, to get out of bartending all together. The former was relatively easy, though financially precarious. The latter took a damn pandemic. This past November, I got a new job. And wouldn’t you know it, coinciding with my acceptance of this new position, the Money Tree, previously unstoppable in its expanse, began dropping leaves. My fortune reflecting its misfortune, and vice versa. I look at it now, struggling to hang on, growing new, puny branches in an effort to exhibit some hope in an otherwise arid existence. And so I wonder, was this Money Tree the embodiment of my misfortune all along?

So I ask again, what am I to do with it? Can it be rehabilitated? Will its premature disposal tie me to it for all of eternity? Or am I putting too much meaning onto this gift that was, perhaps, simply meant as a friendly gesture from a misguided kid? Am I thinking too deeply into it? Most likely. So in the meantime, I gave it some water and angled it more towards the light in hopes that we can achieve prosperity together – it in the form of leaves and me, well, in the hope that we all have brighter days ahead. Tomorrow morning, barring another violent insurrection, we will have a peaceful transition of power and it is then that we can truly get to work. Perhaps this change in fortune will be the final death knell of my Money Tree, or maybe it will turn things around as well, day by pain staking day.

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Rebekah’s (New) Pandemic Diary, Entry #1 – The Salt on My Windows

3 Jan

This is entry one of, I hope, many. None of them planned. They will each represent where I am at in a given moment with the goal of sharing my feelings, rather than suffering in them alone. I hope you start documenting, too. Whether to share, or for just yourself. I am always open to read your thoughts so comment or feel free to email them to franklyrebekah@gmail.com. They will be safe with me.

If reading this is too much for you, please skip. The last thing I want to do is make anyone feel more overwhelmed than you undoubtedly already do. I am just hopeful that by sharing my honest feelings, some people feeling similarly will feel a little less alone. And, in turn, so will I.

And with that, let us begin.

It is Sunday, January 3rd and I have hardly left my house since the New Year. The sky has largely been overcast and honestly, walking outside and knowing that we are still in the crush of this feels like too much to bear. It feels better to stay inside, pacing back and forth between the two rooms of my apartment, petting my cats and pretending that when the calendar went from 2020 to 2021 everything magically changed. Since I’ve been inside here quite a bit, I am going to tell you a little bit about my house so it feels as though you are here with me, hanging out. (Thinking about that makes me a little sad – because I miss you – but also smile, because wouldn’t it be so magical if you could just….come over?)

I am sitting at the table in my kitchen, sometimes glancing to the side and out some windows which, I have been noticing over the past few days, are dirty with the salt that was kicked up after the recent snowstorm. It gives the impression that it is always raining – the salt stains are reminiscent of the raindrops that accumulate during a light spring rain, or the proof left over from a summer storm. I can look at it and think about how dreary it is – the overcast sky, some windows that look like they’re always in the midst of some inclement weather – or I can focus on hope, on rain as a rejuvenating force. It really depends on where my mind is at whether I land on despair or promise. What doesn’t change is that a few times I day I meander over to the front door, flip the lock and swing it open to see if it is rain on the window after all, and that the salt is just distorting reality. Sometimes it is.

I then let my eyes wander to my side of the glass, to the plants that clamber and grow towards the light of the sun, however uncommon its appearance has been recently. For them, the pandemic never happened. They continue to grow, undeterred. One of them even has a flower, a red, waxy kind of thing that won’t die until a new one has grown to take its place. I find a lot of comfort in its longevity and predictability – I know a flower’s time is nearing its end when a new stalk starts springing up, eager to inherit the spotlight. Then I get treated with a new splash of red, holding space until the next one appears.

It makes me think of last spring; back when this thing was just starting to truly alter our reality, back when we didn’t know what the next months would hold. We were full of fear for what our city was enduring but also, in my case at least, a bit of hope – hope that the rest of the country would take our plight as an example and do what they could to avoid our fate. We now know that didn’t happen, not even close. But back then, on those first warm days, Eric and I washed the windows to let the light pour in. I stood, rag and cleaning solution in hand, face covered, and cleaned all the grime from the previous year. It’s amazing how much filth can gather, how it can trick the eye. We think we are looking through something crystal clear but it is somehow distorted – it is our eyes and our brains that let us see beyond all that. I remember feeling as though I had cleansed my little corner of the world only to see my work undone over time by countless cars and street cleaners. The hours spent inside gazing longingly out the windows eventually turned into gazing at the glass itself. And noticing, for the first time ever, these salt deposits that probably spend winter perched on the windows every year. I can’t wait to wash it off.

And now, sharing this with you, I feel anticipation for the warm weather and the hopefulness of spring – however far away that might feel right now. I’m excited for our little potted maple tree to grow new leaves that, ultimately, will get burned by the sun. I am reminded that I want to buy an umbrella for our small “patio,” to provide the tree, and myself, some respite from the unyielding light. I hope that our rosemary bush, finally established, will last through the winter – I choose to ignore the climate implications of this. And I so badly wish that when the crocuses and tulips start pushing through the dirt in early spring, that we too enter into a season of rebirth, rather than the unnecessary sickness, pain and death that continued with the arrival of spring last year.

But for now, I am going to force myself outside for some fresh air. These windows will be here when I get back.

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Are You Mad At Me?

1 Nov

Oh, hello everyone. How have you been? Feeling the crushing anxiety of the upcoming election? Did you cast your vote yet? If not, do you have a plan to do so? Are you worried that the hope you have allowed to creep in over recent days and weeks might be dashed yet again by the electoral college? That perhaps this President will get another 4 years, only this time with even less of the popular vote? Are you tired of being stuck inside, protecting yourself and others from a virus that seems entirely uncontrollable? Are you sick of wearing a mask but also, now that the temperature is dropping, feeling slightly thankful that what was once so oppressive during the summer months is a much more welcome face hat? Are you worried about your economic future? What will become of you in the coming months and years? Have you been noticing more wrinkles and grey hairs? But also…

Are you mad at me?

At the beginning of this pandemic I felt connected, albeit virtually. I was on the phone hours every day. Zooming, FaceTiming, Netflix Parties, regular audio-only phone calls. Constant contact. But then as the days turned to weeks, the weeks to months, these daily conversations became fewer and farther between. Part of it is that we have all settled into some sort of pattern. We have become accustomed to working from home or, in my case, working sporadically from behind a thick piece of plexiglass. We have gotten used to only seeing other members of our household – many of whom have four legs – and feeling wracked with guilt if we venture out to hang with family and friends, regardless of the safety precautions we take. (Truly, those early days of Heavy Internet Shame on anyone who dared leave the house really did a number.) And now the weather is dropping which means no safe backyard bar hangs with friends; no appropriately spaced blankets set out on a patch of grass in the park. Almost 8 months into this isolation. I am tired. I am sick of the phone. I want to give you a hug. But also…

Are you mad at me?

I have found myself texting people less and less often. The calling has become even more infrequent. It’s not that I am upset with anyone or that I love them any less, but for some reason it just feels like a lot to reach out and text, it feels even harder to call. How do we cover all the time that has lapsed? How do we talk about the world and what has happened? How do each of us have space in the midst of this emotionally and psychologically exhausting period to open ourselves up to hold other people’s experiences? I want to help you hold your pain and your worries, but have my own anxieties left me with the extra room? I worry that right now, in the midst of all of this, I cannot be the friend I have always prided myself in being. The one who is always there, who can always listen, who maybe interrupts a little too often (I’m working on it!) but tries to give advice and to understand the gravity of what you are going through. I feel as though right now, I am not a great version of myself and I don’t want you to know me this way. Is that okay? Are we okay? But also…

Are you mad at me?

This worry has been creeping into my mind more and more often. The friends who I text or respond to online who just….don’t reply. I take it personally. I feel as though I have done something wrong. Like somehow I neglected to show up for an important moment or said something unintentionally cruel. The reality is that I also have let texts slip by, have become a little less communicative. And I am sorry for that. I am sorry for how that might have made you feel. I am sorry if you felt I loved you less; cared about you or your family less; was thinking about you less. None of that is true. I am just anxious and sad and lonely and fearful of the coming winter. Probably the same as you. I am afraid of being a less supportive version of myself, less fun, more tearful. I want to go places being the best version of myself and right now that version simply doesn’t exist. And that is really hard.

I hope that’s okay. I hope you’re not mad.

In two days maybe we’ll have a road map for relief. Maybe. Maybe. But until then…

I love you.

(But also….?

….if you are mad at me please tell me so I can fix it.)

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Fuck You, Donald.

6 Oct

I have found myself dealing with a fair amount of anger over these past few years. An anger that has grown stronger, in equal parts productive and self-defeating. I have felt anger for and at myself, yes, but for and at others as well. I have felt at times ready for the battle that wages on in every corner and at others wanting to hide inside my apartment, coloring, reading, drinking wine, literally anything to distract me from reality. And then I find myself angry that there is no way to actually distract, there is no reset button, no unplugging, no avoidance. And then, very, very early Friday morning a small reprieve. Finally, some comeuppance: Trump tested positive for the coronavirus. I felt a small surge of glee, that finally, finally, this man who has led us maskless into the fire got burned by a pandemic he himself claimed was no big deal, a deadly pandemic that “affects virtually nobody.” And then the old anger seeped back in. Anger that this man, this absolute piece of shit, had the power to make me rejoice in the pain and suffering of another human being. That has never been who I am, but now? I am hoping the change isn’t permanent.

I am not someone who particularly believes in karma. I don’t think that doing good things means that good things will automatically happen to you just as I don’t think that doing bad things mean that bad things will automatically happen to you. Case in point: our stupid fucking President who has been a terrible human being for his entire life and has mostly gotten his way. I try to do good things not for what it might give back to me down the line, not for the ways in which I might be repaid later, but because doing good things, regardless of how you do or do not benefit from them, is just part of being a member of a community. It is what adds to the overall well-being of yourself and those around you. And one of the good things that we can do is to wear a mask during a goddamn pandemic. At the very least, wearing a mask shows that you have respect for the health and well-being of those around you. At the most, it could save lives.

Let me rewind for a second. Back in February of 2016 I was sitting on the ground in a park in Austin, Texas with a friend of mine, watching her dog run around when an alert came in on my phone. Antonin Scalia had died. A modicum of hope for the future of our society crept in. Surely Obama would be able to appoint a new justice and every single Supreme Court decision wouldn’t feel like we were teetering on the edge of some group or another losing a good portion of their basic rights. (Oh, what a fool I was!) I remember that feeling of relief being immediately followed by a feeling of guilt: how could I be happy about the death of another human being, regardless of how I reviled his damaging interpretation of the Constitution and the law? As I thought deeper into it, it wasn’t his death that I was happy about. It was his leaving the Supreme Court and the huge opportunities for advancement that presented for all kinds of marginalized people. To think one man could so use his power to disenfranchise millions and convince himself that he, somehow, was upholding some sort of Constitutional, if not moral, right? To think that people are so unimaginative that they would whole-heartedly believe that the rights we were granted (or not granted, depending) upon the establishment of our nation would be largely unchanged over the course of hundreds of years? That the words of men long since deceased should be upheld and largely unchallenged? It’s maddening. Antonin Scalia was a terrible justice and maybe a terrible man. I don’t know, I never met him. But his death was a loss to his friends and family and it felt wrong to me to celebrate the pain they were undoubtedly experiencing. I felt sad for their loss and even though I saw his death as a potential gain for the court and, subsequently, our rights, I did not see his death as good. He could have left the court due to health reasons and still been alive. His simply living didn’t strike me as a threat. Death is a horribly permanent thing.

Now let us travel back to current day. To this President, this man. When he was diagnosed with coronavirus, I felt a certain amount of relief and happiness. Like now maybe, just maybe, he would take this thing that has killed 209,000+ Americans seriously. Maybe his base would start to realize the err of their ways; that if their great leader could catch this virus then anyone can. (And again, what a fool I was!) And then he went to the hospital and I felt a whole mess of emotions. Fear for our political future; questions of the accuracy of the information we were getting; curiosity about the information we undoubtedly weren’t getting; worry about the steps of governance should he be incapacitated in some way; concern about the stunts he and his Administration might play to stay in power. I never hoped he would die.

Well, until now.

There is a part of me that wants him to live so that he can face justice for all that he has done. I want people to bring murder charges against him for the wrongful deaths of their loved ones. I want civil suits to make up for loss of income, loss of business, loss of home. I want criminal cases for…well, everything. But a big part of me knows he will never pay for his crimes, regardless of what cases the Southern District of New York tries to bring, because you know it’ll be them. He will ride it all out with his pal Bill Barr by his side, either from the White House or, hopefully, from outside of it. But in the past few days something in me has shifted. I have realized something that many others realized far earlier. But, what? What is different? What has changed? Over the past few months I have watched as Trump has overseen the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of them attributable to his intentionally shitty handling of the pandemic. He has enacted policies and made countless statements that are in clear opposition to public health advice and I believe that thousands upon thousands of sick or dead Americans can be directly linked back to those lies. Not that “false information,” mind you, the fucking lies. Even then I felt ugly in my soul for hoping for his demise. (I did not at any point, however, begrudge anyone else wishing for his death because I totally get it. He’s very clearly a monster.) At this point, this mother fucker, this viral time-bomb, has left Walter Reed Hospital and, maskfree (!), entered the White House and the orbits of hundreds of people and their families. And I am not even talking about aides and government officials, although of course them too. I mean the cooks, the janitorial staff, the Secret Service agents. All of the people who are simply doing their jobs and whose lives the President has decided he can threaten. Because he is doing exactly that – he is threatening people’s lives with a deadly infectious disease because he doesn’t want to appear weak to his base. He is not causing death by incorrect action, or inaction, he is causing death by breathing on or around people. It feels to me that the only way we will truly be safe from his carnage is if he is dead and gone. Let his family and his closest allies and advisors pay for the crimes he committed, crimes they enabled him to carry out. That’s okay with me. This man is a menace and a murderer. He must be stopped.

I never thought I would say such a thing but I would not only not be sad if he died, I would be actively happy. I would raise a drink and toast whomever was near. I would hope that he was alone and afraid, that his loved ones, if he actually has any, could say goodbye to him via Zoom. As an American citizen, as someone who cares about her community, this is the very least I can do.

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