Month: October 2024

I’m late!

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m late with everything this week. Part of this is because the year is always crazy busy when the last term of everything educational in Australia collides with Jewish holidays. This year is worse because most people are ignoring the Jewish side of things or make snide remarks about Jews. I’m lucky that so far it’s only been snide remarks and veiled bigotry. These remarks become time consuming. They may be harmless, but given the current environment they could also be hiding dangerous bigotry. it’s not entirely safe to be Jewish most places right now. I need to check those remarks out. It’s the sensible thing to do. Earlier this year they led me to a bunch of evidence that one of our major political parties is strongly antisemitic. I keep checking this out, because I really don’t want to believe it and this week I discovered again, that not only am I right, they’re putting forward candidates who don’t hide these views. My local elections (the equivalent of state and council combined) are this Saturday, and I have factored this into how I vote. The party have gone, over the last few years, from having candidates near or at the top of my ballot to being buried deep inside the “Please don’t elect this person” part of it.
Also, I tested my capacity to dance yesterday. I did better than I expected, but I’ve been paying for it ever since. I go back to folk dancing next year, all going well. My teacher wanted me to go back properly now, but there will be issues with joints if I do that. Also, I would be dancing on the Jewish anniversary of the day of the Nova massacre, in a class that has put Israeli folk dances on hold. That would be a lot to handle, I think.
Add all this to work stuff and health stuff and I’m in Red Queen month and running very hard to just keep up.

I hope these are sufficient reasons for being a day and a half late!

The Best Job for the Future

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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In the modern world there’s an obsession with figuring out what field of study or job path is the “safest” or “best” from the perspective of guaranteeing a young person a good livelihood for life.

I am old enough to still be amused by the way the 1967 movie The Graduate addressed that question: “Plastics.”

Given that we now live in a world overrun with plastic, perhaps it wasn’t far wrong.

For the past couple of decades or so the answer has been something related to digital tech. That one is so strong that about the only argument against it comes from the tech bros themselves –  they claim their so-called AI will make all jobs obsolete. (It won’t.)

But the next big thing isn’t going to be in tech (though some people working in it will use some high end computing). And it’s not going back to plastics and other byproducts of the fossil fuel years.

And I doubt it’s even going back to earlier times when what most people did was grow the food so all could eat, though there are some apocalyptic stories these days that set that up.

No, the next big thing – the one that will give people guaranteed work for their lifetime – is obvious from watching the weather news.

Disasters. Continue reading “The Best Job for the Future”…

Three Stories

personby Madeleine Robins
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Note: This was published here about three years ago. I’m reposting it because we cannot underestimate the stakes in the election that is coming up. Not just the Presidential election, but everything up and down the ballot.

There are, I suppose, as many different stories about why and how a woman gets an abortion as there are women.

Here’s one: In the bad old days before Roe, my mother once drove a friend from New York City to a parking lot in New Jersey, where her friend got into a waiting car. Five hours later the car returned, her friend got out (sheet white and trembling, but okay), got in my mother’s car, and they drove back to the city. She went on with her life, with what residual emotion from the experience I don’t know; I do know my mother was deeply shaken by her small part in it.

And another: I remember several girls in college who got pregnant, before and after Roe. After Roe some things were the same: the secrecy, the collections taken up to help defray the cost, the sympathetic pampering when the girl returned to the dorm. But some things were very different: before Roe there was a well of secret knowledge–all I knew was that someone knew someone who knew a real doctor… and the rest of the process was shrouded in mystery, not as dire or scary as my mother’s friend’s experience, but sufficiently clandestine. After Roe, if memory serves, you had to cross the state line to reach a state where the procedure was legal. But there were official resources on campus which could explain and expedite the process. Still expensive, still vaguely clandestine, but without the gloss of criminality which made a bad situation terrifying.

And one more: mine. Continue reading “Three Stories”…

Meditating on the Writing of Postcards

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Like many other people in the United States, I’ve been writing postcards to voters in other states as a way of doing something about the election. I’ll vote, of course, and I’m sending a little money here and there as well.

Given the number of postcards I can reasonably write and the amount of money I can afford to send, not to mention the value of my single vote, all those things only matter if a lot of other people do them as well.

But the stress of “the most important election of our lives” is weighing on me. I don’t call people, because I despise getting such calls and cannot bear to do that to others. Postcards I can do without having to talk to a stranger who doesn’t really want to talk with me.

In general, while I worry a lot and always vote – the last time I skipped an election was a runoff between a dishonest Democrat who was going to win anyway and a well-intentioned good-government Republican whose ideas on how to run a city were disastrous – I am not excited about electoral politics. I prefer to put my energy for change into building something that might grow into better systems. Co-ops, for example.

I came to that after being active in the antiwar movement back in the day when I realized that I preferred making things to protesting them. Not that I haven’t done a lot of protesting as well – it’s kind of like voting: you gotta do it from time to time.

Anyway, I’m trying to do my small part to fend off fascism – and yes, there is a right and wrong side in this election and not just in the presidential race. I don’t think the United States survives as a nation if we don’t stop this latest effort to create an authoritarian state.

And though I can think of reasonable arguments for the dismantling of the United States, it would be hell to live through that period and while I’m old, I’m not so old that I won’t have to.

Also, I’m pretty much in favor of getting a sane base in place and trying to fix the country’s problems from there. See above, where I mentioned I preferred building things to protests.

I mean, we already had a civil war over how the country should be governed. As someone who has read a bit of history, I contend that we wouldn’t be in this mess if we hadn’t abandoned Reconstruction after that nasty war. The Civil War Amendments to the Constitution gave us a way to build the country we ought to be, but we haven’t used them as well as we should. Continue reading “Meditating on the Writing of Postcards”…

Do Not Murder In My Name: The Rush to Execution

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Today it feels appropriate to repost my essay on my opposition to the death penalty as a family member of a murder victim. This is from 2020.

 

Now, in the waning days of 2020, the criminal in the White House has pushed through a string of murders. I realize I have used inflammatory language, but nothing less conveys the intensity of my outrage and revulsion. Simply put, someone who initiates and demands the ending of a human life is a criminal. The deliberate, calculated, cold-blooded taking of a human life is murder.

 

From the BBC: 

As President Donald Trump’s days in the White House wane, his administration is racing through a string of federal executions.

Five executions are scheduled before President-elect Joe Biden’s 20 January inauguration – breaking with an 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions amid a presidential transition.

And if all five take place, Mr Trump will be the country’s most prolific execution president in more than a century, overseeing the executions of 13 death row inmates since July of this year.

The five executions began this week, starting with convicted killer 40-year-old Brandon Bernard who was put to death at a penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. The execution of 56-year-old Alfred Bourgeois will take place on the evening of 11 December.

I am the family member of a murder victim, and I speak from personal experience of the impulse to revenge the taking of my mother’s life. I also know that this is a natural expression of grief, and that with healing, it passes. To me it is essential that those left behind be given the support and time to process that loss and to re-engage with their lives. To focus on killing someone else freezes us in retaliation mode.

Over the years, I have spoken out against the death penalty, telling my story to groups as diverse as city councils, law students, death penalty abolition activists, and state legislators. In 2012, I was invited to participate in an international conference put on by Murder Victim Families For Human Rights. Then I met others like me, who had lost a single family member to violence, those whose loved ones had been executed or were on death row, and those who experienced both. Every single person who had experienced both was Black. There is no escaping the racial injustice in the way the death penalty is applied (or the way crimes are investigated and prosecuted). Yet the most moving part of that weekend was listening with an open heart to mothers weeping for their executed sons — and realizing their grief and loss was no less than mine. 

If you, who are reading this, take away nothing else, remember this: every person who is put to death is or has been loved by someone, and is grieved by someone, and missed like an aching hole in the heart by someone.

In 2019, I penned a blog for Death Penalty Focus, called “When we focus on revenge instead of healing, we never heal.” You can read it below.

Continue reading “Do Not Murder In My Name: The Rush to Execution”…