Category: Life Experiences

World building and living in difficult times

personby Gillian Polack
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Some weeks the world is so full of pain that it’s difficult to write something small and sensible.

I used to deal with such things by inviting friends to dinner. I love cooking and chatting and it was the perfect solution. In Australia right now, it’s only the perfect solution for someone who is close within the Jewish community. I am not this person, although I sued to be. That’s another story.

So many of my friends say “Sorry, too busy,” or “Next time.” Add that to my illnesses arguing with each other (a squabbling family, with no respect for their physical host) and I need a different way through. My US friends are often dealing with much worse – Australia’s antisemitism might be pretty cruel, but as long as I don’t go out much, it’s safe, and Albo is not good news but compared with the US President, he’s goodness personified. I’m caught in a strange little bind.

A friend explained that this whole thing felt pretty much like the first two years of COVID. That was my breakthrough moment. My illnesses meant that I saw no-one during COVID unless they were delivering things. Compared with that first two years, I live in a whirligig and leave my flat once a week, sometimes twice! I have friends online. And, the biggest thing of all… my TV works. During COVID I watched all the Stargate TV. I muttered when the history was so badly off. I wanted to know what Daniel Jackson’s PhDs were in and how they gave him such an ill-balanced understanding of history.

One of my many bugbears with the show was that it would have been nice to have at least maybe one or two Jews in the ancient Middle East. Stargate helped me see where some bigots get their bigotry from. If all they know about ancient history was first presented to them by Stargate or something like it, then they do not see our world, but a fictional universe.

And I’m off-topic. I was going to talk about how that COVID suggestion led to me watching much Star Trek. When I can do all my regular work, I watch less. When isolation pushes me towards cliff edges, I watch more. I argue about the world building with myself, and use the stories to help understand why we got where we are.

I always used to do this, but I’d watch or read whatever it was my writing and history students needed to know and find ways through popular TV to get them to analyse. I so miss that. But locally, no-one wants me to teach or talk anymore. This means that the thing I do best – help people understand the cultural and social basis of their own decisions – is one of the things lost unto me because I’m too Jewish and not physically robust.

The other day I emerged from hiding a little and asked people if they had more sources for what’s happening in Israel/Gaza so that I could balance out what I was learning. The main critical sources I have access to are all from pro-Israel analysts. I can (and do) pull them apart and make sense of them, but I’ve not been able to find anything nearly as solid in the analysis of data from anywhere else. Instead of giving me more sources, so that I could balance when I knew and be fair in how I see things… I lost friends. I don’t know what they saw and why my request was so impossible (they didn’t tell me), but from my end I was using my teaching methods on myself. I asked for more sources so that I could compare language and belief, look for patterns of speech, check where terms come from and how they’re used, and, above everything, when people claim this or that, drill down and find the source of the numbers and the origins of the claims, and pull them to pieces and balance them with views from other places and in other languages. Add to this checking the path ideas travel, for instance, find a translation of an article in Al Jazeera in Arabic and then compare it with the English version.

From my perspetive, anyone who makes claims about happenings at the other side of the world without doing this is doing what writers do when we world build lazily. When we world build lazily, we draw on our preconceptions of a place and time or a type of book and build up from there. This is why there is a shortage of ancient Jews in Stargate. And it’s why I’ve been accused (personally) of genocide and other things.

I can deal with the illnesses, even though they have entirely changed my everyday. I cannot deal nearly as well with people who are bright, yet will not question and try to understand how things happen, and who blame me for their own lack of thought.

I could have just said at the start of this post, “Oh, how I miss teaching!” but the reason I miss teaching is fairly important. These things are, I admit, difficult. My Richard III class at the Australian National University was both loved and hated . I got hold of such a range of primary sources for the last 3 years of his life, and the whole course comprised of students learning about the nature of the sources and pulling them apart, and then crating their own arguments on whether Richard was good, bad, a demon, a human being… whatever they wanted… as long as they could convince the rest of the class. It was an extension class, so the only result they had was their fellow students’ approval. The class felt that there wasn’t enough class time, so adjourned to coffee or dinner nearby and argued for two more hours. This is the polar opposite of conversations that cannot ever happen.

Maybe I need to return to watching TV.

On Drinking Vessels

personby Gillian Polack
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Today I’m thinking about how we allocate meaning to objects. This is not a great theoretical thing. Specifically, I’m thinking that most writers I know will say “My character needs a drink” and allocate something to drink from. That something fits the world of their novel. If the character (let’s call them ‘Fred’) drinks ale, they may use a tankard. If Fred drinks wine, then a wine glass. Whatever they drink from tends to reflect the society they’re in. If Fred is on a space station, drinking something terribly celebratory and ancient, then Fred might gingerly unwrap the ancient wineglass, stop to admire it and to consider their five times great-grandmother who owned it in the 1950s and sip ordinary wine from it. The wine takes on attributes because of the vessel it’s drunk from.

From the author’s view, then, mostly it’s easy. What is Fred’s culture? When and where does Fred live? What important information does the drinking vessel communicate? Does the reader need to know that Fred’s wine drinking habit goes back nearly two hundred years, or does he just need to assuage his thirst? We write – in an ideal world – what we need the reader to see.

When I see a vessel as historical because it’s in a museum display case, I do what the reader does. I will check the card describing its origin and where it was found and then insert myself into its history. I am the reader. The person who wrote that card (‘Sheila’) gives it the context a writer does. Before Sheila, that glass had a quite different life. If Sheila chooses it to illuminate life in the Middle Ages and the glass is from the twentieth century (like Fred’s) then we have a clear and present misinterpretation. Even if the date and place are entirely correct, however, we’re liable to misinterpret. (and this next bit is a description of an actual exhibit in a very real museum) For instance, what if Sheila includes the glass as an example of daily life in an exhibition about the people of a specific city from the Middle Ages to about 1700? Obviously, she’s telling us that the epople in the city used glasses like this. And if the exhibition only showed Christian spiritual objects for the most part, she’s insinuating that religious Christianity is the main drive of life in that city.

But what if, historically, that glass was owned by someone Jewish? That focus on Christian religious iconography and that small space for everyday life implies otherwise unless she notes on the card “Most of this exhibition plays no part in the religious life of 20% of the inhabitants of those town. This glass was owned by one of those 20%.” That card might still be drowned out by the many rooms of religious art, but at least that one object points out that, just because most people thought this thing doesn’t mean that everyone did. It also helps people see that we attribute meaning to an object. That glass might be on my mother’s dinner table or lost in space, but ti’s still capable of being drunk from by quite different people. We allocate meaning. When we’re bigots, we allocate meanings that exclude or that even hate.

What does this mean for novels? Fred’s glass might belong somewhere different entirely. We only know what the novelist tells us. And if it’s an historical novel set in a place with a significant Muslim or Jewish community (say, a particular part of London, right now) and there is no indication of that in any of 200 noels by 150 writers, then when we read about Fred, we leave out actual people from actual places and times.

When most of the people who talk about Jews without checking our history, who talk over Jews, who tells us the world would be better if we were invisible, read novels, their view that Jews don’t have a history and should not have voices is confirmed. If someone Jewish then walks down the street and the reader sees them, they’re seen as exotic. That wine glass has helped remind the reader that Jews are exotic and alien.

If Fred is a woman and we use the world built by the people who wrote the 1960s (original) version of Star Trek, then the glass would be held by someone very feminine and with little agency. Even the most senior woman on the Enterprise is scripted as having little agency. That glass reminds us that she’s not permitted to serve herself wine, nor to break the glass and use the sharp shards to save the lives of everyone on board the ship.

In our lives, objects are not neutral. We assign meaning to them. Story matters, because story gives us that meaning. If 200 books with a setting where Jews lived do not contain Jewish characters then it’s worth looking for books that do. When women lack agency and plot points don’t hinge on them, find books where women matter. This applies to so many of us. We all tend to accept that novels and TV and film are about certain types of people only, that gender and size, and skin colour, and shape, and religion, and class, and agency, and even shoe size are all pretty standard.

However, that wine glass in that exhibition is never culturally neutral. Nor is our reading. When we ourselves walk down that street, we carry all this with us. We use it to navigate how we talk to people and what we talk about and how we judge them and what place in our lives we assign to them. Right now, Judaism is part of my awareness partly because I’m assigned to being outside the lives of many people I once knew, because one does seldom invites Jews to dinner or to walk in the park right now. My relationship to that wine glass has, then, been shattered entirely. My once-friends’ relationship with the glass has also been changed: no-one Jewish drinks out of any glass at their dinners.

Every single one of my novels asks about what baggage we carry in some way. For example, Poison and Light and The Time of the Ghosts are about women doing exciting things. Both novels contain Jews living lives with meaning. The Art of Effective Dreaming is about how we carry such knowledge and how we can change it if we want to. Langue[dot]doc 1305 questions where our interpretations of the world come from. The problem with writing such books is that a glass can never just be a glass in my mind. I need to know more about every place and every time, and I don’t need one bit of information about that glass.. I need to start off with a dozen. Then I can choose the one I need for that character at that point in time in that novel. My example of how that operates is in The Time of the Ghosts. Three women drink three cups of coffee. Each coffee reflects who the character is, and even the cups they drink from are quite different. One carries the cultural baggage of not questioning where things come from and accepting stereotypes, while the other two celebrate who they are.

Changing Tides

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m having a week where my attention span is very short. I keep turning to the news, and then I play solitaire, and a half hour later I remember I need to cook. An hour after that, I realise that I haven’t written my post for the Treehouse, or started a paper I promised, or filled in five forms. Some of this is due to today being the anniversary of the taking of the hostages if you follow the Jewish calendar. Some of it is due to it being Simchat Torah. Most of it is due to the hostages being released. Antisemitism took a brief pause around me, with just the die-hards blaming all Jews for all the things. We’re in new territory internationally and locally for so many reasons. We’re in old territory, too, because the Australian marches are continuing, regardless of what they do to the Australian Jewish community (create places we can’t go on those days, turn people who were friends into activists who now think we’re scum) or to Muslim Australians. Hate continues and stupidity continues, even as other things change. So I am easily distracted and lose my workday to puzzlement.

In far, far better news, I spent my evenings at the National Irish SF convention (Octocon) over the weekend. It was wonderful. I gave a talk on western European tricksters and how to identify them one night, and had the best discussion with fellow SF fans and writers the next. That discussion sorted out the cultural background of two of my families in the current novel, down to why the Irish part of their ancestry left Ireland, where they left from, and how this meant they are totally loyal to Aussie Rules football, even in NSW where it’s not the main footie code. This discussion reinforced the claim I often make, that the best way of building family history for a character is to talk to people in and from the country they come from. I’ve already done a bunch of work in Ireland for other projects, and these kind people and that discussion gave me the equivalent of two months’ work. This doesn’t deal with the time I waste elsewhere, but it means the novel can progress when my backlog is sorted.

For the next part of my backlog I have a piece to write about Jewish werewolves for the kind people of Patreon.

This is the first week in two years where more people around me are kind than are name-calling. It’s as if someone has turned on the light and I can see the world again.

Age and Resistance

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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“Be realistic. Demand the impossible.”

According to Rob Hopkins, whose book How to Fall in Love With the Future is my current morning read, that’s something people said on the barricades in Paris in 1968.

Since he quoted it in English, it must have spread far beyond Paris .(I’m sure even Parisian students in the Sixties would use French for their slogans on account of they are, in fact, French, and French people care about their language, even the radicals.)

It certainly reminds me of my experiences back in those days that we label the Sixties even though they extended into the 1970s. And it’s yet another reminder that much of what underlies progressive work in the United States (and other places, but I know the U.S. stuff) today is built on what we did back in the 1960s.

Part of the reason I’m writing about this is that I’m really, really tired of the “OK Boomer” nonsense on social media, a phenomenon that is inaccurate and ageist and shows a true lack of knowledge about recent history (which makes me worry about the lack of knowledge of history going back more than my lifetime).

But this is not a “kid’s today” post accompanied by headshaking and tut-tutting. From my perspective, the kids of today are great, and I suspect a lot of the generational name-calling is produced by bots and provocateurs.

It’s just that a lot of what the extremists running our country right now condemn as “woke” and “DEI” grew out of work we did toward making the United States a better place, and I’m damned if I want to let them destroy it.

I’m talking about the Civil Rights Movement, which actually started quite a long time before the 1960s (there’s some fascinating history of the legal strategies that led up to Brown v. Board starting in about 1920, just as an example) though a lot of things came to fruition then – some laws on equal opportunity and voting rights with teeth in them, plus some significant activism with groups like SNCC and the Black Panthers.

I’m talking about second wave feminism, which also owed quite a bit to the suffragists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I’m talking about Stonewall and the gay rights activism that developed from that.

I’m even talking about hippies and the Summer of Love and Woodstock. Continue reading “Age and Resistance”…

To a Good and Sweet Year (a reflection)

personby Gillian Polack
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First and most importantly, I want to wish you all a good and sweet year. Tonight (Monday at dusk), you see, is my new year. It’s the year 5786.

I’ll be relieved when 5785 is over. It was full of silences and antisemitism. The people who retained me as a friend and as a co-worker also kept me going and helped me find safer paths to travel. I have also made new friends, many who are walking the same fragile road as me. Some of my old friends were silent and will hopefully re-emerge in my life when the hate dissipates (I can hope this because I’ve seen it happen before), some accuse me of things they know I am not guilty of: most just stepped away quietly, without explaining or caring. I am branded as someone to hate. So are most Jews. Ruptured (the book I spoke about last week) is still the best description of how this affects the lives of Jewish Australian women. It’s also broken some of the silences. I have several friends back. They don’t hate, but they had no idea what to ask me or how to ask me or even how to talk everyday, without the filter of hate that too much of Australia accepts. This is the real reason I hope to get some friends back. As more people find words without having to broach difficult subjects, they will realise that I’m still here and that I miss them.

I’ve walked away from some people, myself. Those who accuse and blame. Those who don’t see everyone as human and are part of jeering mobs. Those who agree with the public rhetoric of hate. It’s far, far easier to talk to left-leaning Palestinian activists than to these people. I hate walking away from them: I believe that understanding is the best way out of this shambolic time. Finding solutions that meet the needs of more than one group of people. Dumping slogans. This was what I and my friend did in the women’s movement, over twenty years ago, but too many of those I worked with lean into the slogans right now, which means… they’re not finding ways of making society functional for all of us, they’re sowing distrust and spreading hate.

There is good news. I’m not nearly as alone as I could have been. People are, fundamentally, good. I don’t get a lot of the income from writing I did, due to closing doors, and I only get to give talks or workshops maybe three times in a year, and I don’t get to teach at all (I so miss teaching!) but I can go to professional meetings (in fact technically I’m at one right now, as I write, but it’s a break time) and give academic papers and even keep friends in fandom.

I write for a shifted audience: some of my readers from always, but more Jewish readers. I’m also writing more Jewishly, because I am still that child who, when someone says “You’re a failure” I respond by being the person who annoys them. In this case, being Jewish is the failure-aspect, so I write more Jewishness into my fiction. And my history. I’ve spent all the time since I finished the doctorate sorting out how I got Jewish history badly wrong because I, too, was listening to formulae. I’ve finished the book on it and am looking for publishers. And I get to talk about it (sometimes): I just gave a talk to my local Jewish community on the food culture and the history of Jews in Northern France in the Middle Ages. I only made one of my Rashi jokes, which I felt disconsolate about at the time, but they want me back, so I will be able to make more.

I finished a PhD and wrote a book in 5785. I dealt with far too many bigoted idiots and I analysed the words they used and discovered the sources of their rhetoric. I learned how to de-prickle a prickly pear from a Palestinian activist and we talked about the (Jewish – they gave me references!) origins of the Medjool date. Learning that it’s possible to refrain from bigotry when one is being attacked and is displaced and when life is terrifying insecure gave me back some of my trust.

This activist is looking for the same thing I am: ways of talking and finding solutions. Those who shout and scream in Australia are not the people they trust. I’ve heard them (time and time again) talk about how the marchers in the West have made things worse. This does not make me happy. Good people causing more hurt is not something that will ever make me happy.

What will 5786 be like? It’s a transition year. We’re in a time of enormous cultural shift, worldwide. Enormous cultural shift inevitably brings the enormous idiots out of the woodwork. They’re a sign, really, that we’re moving into something different.

For me, I’m hoping issues with publishers will be solved and that the delayed books start to appear. I want to finish the book that was on hold because world events meant they needed new directions. And I want to finish that vampire novel. In a perfect year, I get to do more teaching, I get more of my public voice back, and I can take up the offer a friend made to get me to Melbourne libraries safely.

Every time I was in Melbourne this last year, the library day didn’t happen because of protesters outside it. This also happened the year before last. I would probably be safe, friends who marched informed me. They weren’t at the receiving end of the hate, however, and they’re not Jewish.

That’s one of the oddities about being Jewish. Historically, hate spewed at us can begin with words but it often leads to death. The Holocaust was the extreme version, but I am 7/8 a descendant of refugees from well before then, and I have no European family left at all. My family origins are from all over Europe and yet the one thing I’m guaranteed when I travel to anywhere in Europe is that I will not meet relatives. I do not think that marchers will kill me. They might hurt me, though, or shout at me, or push me around. All these things have been done to people I know. It’s not all the marchers. Most of them don’t know about the violence committed 50 metres away. I’m developing ways of identifying the ones who, in the 60s, might have been among the group who sent the letter bomb that crippled a cousin, or in the 70s, sent evil white powders to small Jewish organisations in regional Australia.

We don’t talk about Australia as an antisemitic country, but it has always had that streak. I’ve experienced trickles of hate since primary school, and then those trickles become a stream and right now that stream is flooding its banks, growing into a river of muck. None of this is new. What is new is the realisation that most of those who hate could have avoided hating.

What do I plan for 5786? To fight hate, as I always have. And to fight hating idiots, useful or otherwise. I shall avoid those who judge me for being Jewish or for not thinking exactly as they think, and enjoy the company of everyone who looks at those around them and see human beings. I shall write, and make bad jokes, and deal with my frail body.

This is one thing I discovered in 5785: it is possible to create a good year from a bad one with enough work and enough capacity to deal with the bad. 5786 will be a good and sweet year. For anyone who wants to understand why this is such a daring statement, read Ruptured. Having something I can point to and say, “Read this” reduces difficult moments and some of the misunderstandings and gives that much more energy that I can spend on making that year happen.

May you all have a good and sweet year… even if it takes some work.

Reprint: Blaming Health Problems on Personal Choice

personby Deborah J. Ross
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How federal officials talk about health is shifting in troubling ways – and that change makes me worried for my autistic child

Blaming poor health outcomes on lifestyle choices can obscure public health issues.
Anadolu via Getty Images

Megan Donelson, University of Dayton

The Make America Healthy Again movement has generated a lot of discussion about public health. But the language MAHA proponents use to describe health and disease has also raised concerns among the disability and chronic illness communities.

I’m a researcher studying the rhetoric of health and medicine – and, specifically, the rhetoric of risk. This means I analyze the language used by public officials, institutions, health care providers and other groups in discussing health risks to decode the underlying beliefs and assumptions that can affect both policy and public sentiment about health issues.

As a scholar of rhetoric and the mother of an autistic child, in the language of MAHA I hear a disregard for the humanity of people with disabilities and a shift from supporting them to blaming them for their needs.

Such language goes all the way up to the MAHA movement’s highest-level leader, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It is clearly evident in the report on children’s health published in May 2025 by the MAHA Commission, which was established by President Donald Trump and is led by Kennedy, as well as in the MAHA Commission’s follow-up draft recommendations, leaked on Aug. 15, 2025.

Like many people, I worry that the MAHA Commission’s rhetoric may signal a coming shift in how the federal government views the needs of people with disabilities – and its responsibilities for meeting them.

Personal choice in health

One key concept for understanding the MAHA movement’s rhetoric, introduced by a prominent sociologist named Ulrich Beck, is what sociologists now call individualization of risk. Beck argued that modern societies and governments frame almost all health risks as being about personal choice and responsibility. That approach obscures how policies made by large institutions – such as governments, for example – constrain the choices that people are able to make.

In other words, governments and other institutions tend to focus on the choices that individuals make to intentionally deflect from their own responsibility for the other risk factors. The consequence, in many cases, is that the institution is off the hook for any responsibility for negative outcomes.

Beck, writing in 1986, pointed to nuclear plants in the Soviet Union as an example. People who lived near them reported health issues that they suspected were caused by radiation. But the government denied the existence of any evidence linking their woes to radiation exposure, implying that lifestyle choices were to blame. Some scholars have identified a similar dynamic in the U.S. today, where the government emphasizes personal responsibility while downplaying the effects of public policy on health outcomes.

A shift in responsibility

Such a shift in responsibility is evident in how MAHA proponents, including Kennedy, discuss chronic illness and disabilities – in particular, autism.

In its May 2025 report on children’s health, the MAHA Commission describes the administration’s views on chronic diseases in children. The report notes that the increased prevalence in “obesity, diabetes, neurodevelopmental disorders, cancer, mental health, autoimmune disorders and allergies” are “preventable trends.” It also frames the “major drivers” of these trends as “the food children are eating, the chemicals they are exposed to, the medications they are taking, and various changes to their lifestyle and behavior, particularly those related to physical activity, sleep and the use of technology.”

A father and a boy with autism play with toys at a table.
Extensive research shows that genetics accounts for most of the risk of developing autism, but the MAHA Commission report discussed only lifestyle and environmental factors.
Dusan Stankovic/E+ via Getty Images

Notably, it makes no mention of systemic problems, such as limited access to nutritious food, poor air quality and lack of access to health care, despite strong evidence for the enormous contributions these factors make to children’s health. And regarding neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism, it makes no mention of genetics, even though decades of research has found that genetics accounts for most of the risk of developing autism.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with studying the environmental factors that might contribute to autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders. In fact, many researchers believe that autism is caused by complex interactions between genes and environmental factors. But here’s where Beck’s concept of individualization becomes revealing: While the government is clearly not responsible for the genetic causes of chronic diseases, this narrow focus on lifestyle and environmental factors implies that autism can be prevented if these factors are altered or eliminated.

While this may sound like great news, there are a couple of problems. First, it’s simply not true. Second, the Trump administration and Kennedy have canceled tens of millions of dollars in research funding for autism – including on environmental causes – replacing it with an initiative with an unclear review process. This is an unusual move if the goal is to identify and mitigate environmental risk factors And finally, the government could use this claim to justify removing federally funded support systems that are essential for the well-being of autistic people and their families – and instead focus all its efforts on eliminating processed foods, toxins and vaccines.

People with autism and their families are already carrying a tremendous financial burden, even with the current sources of available support. Cuts to Medicaid and other funding could transfer the responsibility for therapies and other needs to individual families, leaving many of them to struggle with paying their medical bills. But it could also threaten the existence of an entire network of health care providers that people with disabilities rely on.

Even more worrisome is the implication that autism is a kind of damage caused by the environment rather than one of many normal variations in human neurological diversity – framing people with autism as a problem that society must solve.

How language encodes value judgments

Such logic sets off alarm bells for anyone familiar with the history of eugenics, a movement that began with the idea of improving America by making its people healthier and quickly evolved to make judgments about who is and is not fit to participate in society.

Kennedy’s explanation for the rise in autism diagnoses contradicts decades of research by independent researchers as well as assessments by the CDC.

Kennedy has espoused this view of autism throughout his career, even recently claiming that people with autism “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem.”

Even if organic foods and a toxin-free household were the answer to reducing the prevalence of autism, the leaked MAHA Commission strategy report steers clear of recommending government regulation in industries such as food and agriculture, which would be needed to make these options affordable and widely available.

Instead, MAHA’s supposed interventions would remain lifestyle choices – and expensive ones, at that – left for individual families to make for themselves.

Just asking questions

Kennedy and other MAHA proponents also employ another powerful rhetorical tactic: raising questions about topics that have already reached a scientific consensus. This tactic frames such questions as pursuits of truth, but their purpose is actually to create doubt. This tactic, too, is evident in the MAHA Commission’s reports.

This practice of “just asking questions” while ignoring already established answers is widely referred to as “sealioning.” The tactic, named for a notorious sea lion in an online comic called Wondermark, is considered a form of harassment. Like much of the rhetoric of the anti-vaccine movement, it
serves to undermine public trust in science and medicine. This is partly due to a widespread misunderstanding of scientific research – for example, understanding that scientific disagreement does not necessarily indicate that science as a process is flawed.

MAHA rhetoric thus continues a troubling trend in the anti-vaccine movement of calling all of science and Western medicine into question in order to further a specific agenda, regardless of the risks to public health.

The MAHA Commission’s goals are almost universally appealing – healthier food, healthier kids and a healthier environment for all Americans. But analyzing what is implied, minimized or left out entirely can illuminate a much more complex political and social agenda.The Conversation

Megan Donelson, Lecturer in Health Rhetorics, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Welcoming in the New Year

personby Gillian Polack
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I had plans for today. Mainly I intended to tell you about books, including the ones I’m reading now. A confluence of circumstances undermined that. That’s my words masking the fact that I’m living one of the books I was going to tell you about. Do not live a book, it’s not nearly as much fun as novels suggest.

The book I’m living is a group of essays, Ruptured, edited by Lee Hofman and Tamar Paluch. Thirty-six Australians write about their lives in Australia since October 7. In every essay there’s something that also belongs in my life, even though most of them come from very different abckgrounds to me. We’re all Jewish. We’re all women. We’re all Australian. Most of us are in the Arts. And we are so very different.

How am I living this book right now?

There’s always a rise in antisemitism just before big Jewish festivals. At least there is in Australia. And by ‘always’ I mean the last decade. October 7 put the rise on strange drugs and made it bigger and nastier, but it’s been happening for a while. And Rosh Hashanah has always been difficult in other respects. There was the year I wasn’t even allowed to take a single day off for it, even though the union had negotiated for moments exactly like that. The Federal public service let me know back then, in 1989, that being Jewish was not acceptable and that microaggressions would be the norm and punishment for wanting to take a day off for my new year was acceptable. I was on flextime back then. I had heaps of hours on my flextime, but had not even been allowed to take two hours off using those hours, in the morning. I did what every Gillian should do at moments like these. I brought a great deal of honeycake into work and everyone kept dropping by my desk to be fed. I worked the fewest hours I could, with the latest start and the longest lunch. I was on the computer maybe for 10 minutes, to sign in and out and check that I wasn’t missing anything urgent (I wasn’t going to let my sulk actually hurt anyone) and … I made my point. I was allowed to take Yom Kippur off, when it arrived. These days I am not allowed in places to begin with and feel like a child who has been sent to their room and can hear the other children play. I am lucky. I’m not banned from some things – in fact, I’m a welcome friend. This means I lose Rosh Hashanah this year for some things, but still get Yom Kippur and even Sukkot. Ironically, I first discovered this problem when someone destroyed my Yom Kippur a couple of years ago. I am alert this time of year these days. Always.

This year is better and worse. I have friends watching out for me. I’m not alone. Some years I have been very alone. The worse is that the public ferment is already worse and is going to get worse still.

The amount of work I have to do is immense, but VICFA (the organisation running a conference just before) has made sure that everything will be done several hours before Rosh Hashanah begins. And I have deadlines galore, but I’m used to that. This early in third term in Australia and the rest of the country does a lot of work in September and October so that things can be finished for the big shutdown from December. Rosh Hashanah was not planned with Christmas in mind, nor the Australian summer.

Why does this feel as if I’m in Ruptured? The essays show women having to do everything to the schedules and needs of the non-Jewish community, while fielding antisemitism, and having to be Jewish and do family stuff and remember that ordinary life still exists.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about what this means for Gaza. In fact, I just typed a very long paragraph on the politics and my concern about following slogans rather than seeking the human needs that the slogans are supposed to address. But even saying what I have just said may enough – in this ungentle year – to provoke anger and threats if the right person reads it. Free speech is not part of my new year. Not free speech for me, anyhow. I’m too Jewish. And that is something every woman who wrote an essay documented. A silencing. Even if our opinions are similar to the person speaking, we can’t speak safely unless we use the right words. And the right words are terrifying. My secret historical linguist (historical linguistics is a part of being an ethnohistorian, but I’m not a specialist in the field) analyses how words are shifting and… the new meanings of some of the words and phrases we’re told we must use imply that Jews are evil, by nature, and that a country with no Jews is an improved country. My secret historical linguist wants someone other than me to do a really, really good study into changing political language and protest language in 2025. I want to be proven wrong.

This new year, when I dip apple in honey and say “To a Good and Sweet Year” I will mean it fervently, for all of us.

Some Thoughts on Cooperatives

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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In our book club meeting last week, we got off for awhile on a tangent about cooperation and competition and human nature. This was in part because we were discussing a book on Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons, which is a form of cooperation.

Now I’m a big fan of the cooperative approach from way back – I organized food co-ops, lived in housing co-ops, and am currently a member of at least three credit unions. And I also think competition tends to be overrated, especially since it so often leads to cheating and overemphasis on the winner of some contest.

On the other hand, competition is a good way to block monopolies and to give us the diversity of enterprises we need.

But here’s the thing about cooperation that really hit me: we don’t just use it to do good.

As my Aikido friend Ross Robertson once observed when we were discussing the subject, one of the first things human beings cooperated to do was war.

Now it’s likely that they cooperated to raise kids and feed each other first, but war does go back quite a way in human history. It’s not new.

And while an army usually has forced cooperation, it can still be seen as a cooperative enterprise, with the competition side coming out in fighting with others.

I mean, mobs can also be a form of cooperation. Social groups cooperate to keep others out.

We are social beings, and standing up against the group is difficult, even when we’re right. So while I’d like to think that true cooperation isn’t done for evil purposes, the truth is that people cooperate for both good and bad reasons.

Which, to get back to Ostrom and the commons and various kinds of co-ops, is one reason why it’s important to create solid and workable structures for such enterprises. Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Cooperatives”…

Some Thoughts From a Wedding

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Last weekend at a wedding, my partner leaned toward me and, with tears in his eyes, said, “We are seeing the future.”

And it’s a good future. Or, as some of us old folks like to say, “The kids are all right.”

Earlier at the wedding, I found myself thinking, “Fuck those people who want to destroy all this.” Because this wedding was the antithesis of all the horrific violence that is being done to our country (and in the name of our country) right now.

This was a wedding for our times. It was a queer wedding. The people in attendance were quite diverse — a mix of genders, races, ethnicities, ages, backgrounds, and home locations.

The couple – one woman, one nonbinary person – met at the orientation for the graduate program in public health at U.C. Berkeley in 2021. I mean, these are folks who chose to study public health during a pandemic, so you know already they are people who are out to make good trouble in the world.

As a rule, I’m a bit skeptical about marriage. I’ve spent most of my life single and while I’m now in a committed relationship, we aren’t planning to get married for reasons that range from philosophical to practical.

But I do like celebrations and I also like the people who got married, who are neighbors of ours. Their joy in each other is wonderful.

The wedding ceremony reflected that individual joy, the political awareness of the complexity of the times, and the vital importance of ritual in our lives, not to mention the joy that comes from gathering. Continue reading “Some Thoughts From a Wedding”…

Reprint: Traumatic bereavement and how to help the survivors

personby Deborah J. Ross
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When grief involves trauma − a social worker explains how to support survivors of the recent floods and other devastating losses

Rain falls over a makeshift memorial for flood victims along the Guadalupe River on July 13, 2025, in Kerrville, Texas.
AP Photo/Eric Gay

Liza Barros-Lane, University of Houston-Downtown

The July 4, 2025, floods in Kerr County, Texas, swept away children and entire families, leaving horror in their wake. Days later, flash floods struck Ruidoso, New Mexico, killing three people, including two young children.

These are not just devastating losses. When death is sudden, violent, or when a body is never recovered, grief gets tangled up with trauma.

In these situations, people don’t only grieve the death. They struggle with the terror of how it happened, the unanswered questions and the shock etched into their bodies.

I’m a social work professor, grief researcher and the founder of The Young Widowhood Project, a research initiative aimed at expanding scholarship and public understanding of premature spousal loss.

I was widowed when I was 36. In July 2020, my husband, Brent, went missing after testing a small, flat-bottomed fishing boat called a Jon boat. His body was recovered two days later, but I never saw his remains.

Both my personal loss and professional work have shown me how trauma changes the grieving process and what kind of support actually helps.

To understand how trauma can complicate grief, it’s important to first understand how people typically respond to loss.

Grief isn’t a set of stages

Many people still think of grief through the lens of psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, popularized in the early 1970s: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

But in fact, this model was originally designed for people facing their own deaths, not for mourners. In the absence of accessible grief research in the 1960s, it became a leading framework for understanding the grieving process – even though it wasn’t meant for that.

Despite this misapplication, the stages model has shaped cultural expectations: namely, that grief ends once people reach the “acceptance” stage. But research doesn’t support this idea. Trying to force grief into this model can cause real harm, leaving mourners feeling they’re grieving “wrong.”

In reality, mourning is often lifelong. Most people go through an acute period of overwhelming pain right after the loss. This is usually followed by integrated grief, where the pain softens but the loss is still part of everyday life, returning in waves.

Although grief is unique to each person and relationship, researchers have found that mourners often strive to a) make sense of the death; b) adjust to a world without their loved one; c) form an ongoing connection with their deceased loved one in new ways; and d) figure out who they are without their loved one.

It’s difficult and at times disorienting work, but most people find ways to carry their grief and keep living.

A grandmother embraces a young woman in front of a wall of flowers.
Julia Mora embraces her granddaughter, Isla Meyer, during a vigil for Texas flood victims on July 11, 2025.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
When grief and trauma collide

However, some losses carry an extra layer of pain, confusion and trauma.

Sudden, unexpected, accidental, violent or deeply tragic deaths – like those experienced during the recent floods – can lead to what researchers call traumatic bereavement: grief that is disrupted by the traumatic nature of the death.

People experiencing traumatic bereavement often endure a longer and more intense acute grief period. They may be haunted by disturbing images, nightmares or relentless thoughts about how their loved one died or suffered. Many wrestle with dread, spiritual disorientation and a shattered sense of safety in the world.

Some of these deaths are also considered “ambiguous” – unclear or unconfirmed loss – such as when a body is never recovered or is too damaged to view. Without physical confirmation, mourners often feel stuck in disbelief and helplessness.

This was true in my case. Not seeing my husband’s body left a part of me suspended between knowing and not knowing. I knew he had died but couldn’t fully believe it, no matter how much I lived with the reality of his absence. For a long time, I caught myself repeating these words every morning: “Brent is dead. Brent is dead.”

In many cases, these reactions aren’t short term. Many people affected by traumatic loss remain overwhelmed and sometimes physically and emotionally impaired for years. Symptoms may taper over time, but they rarely disappear entirely.

Supporting mourners

Traumatic bereavement can feel unbearable. Many mourners struggle with intense, long-lasting reactions that can leave them feeling helpless, altered or even unrecognizable to themselves. They may appear withdrawn, forgetful or emotionally drained because their systems are overwhelmed. Coping can look messy or self-destructive, but these are often survival strategies, not conscious choices. I’ve also seen how those same struggles become more survivable when mourners don’t have to carry them alone. If you’re supporting someone through traumatic loss, here are three ways to help.

  • Make space for the horror. Listen without flinching. Acknowledge the full weight of what happened and how terrifying and unjust the loss was. This means saying things like, “This should never have happened,” or “What you went through is beyond words.” It means staying present when the mourner speaks about what haunts them. Let them know they don’t have to carry this alone. You may feel the urge to say something hopeful such as, “At least the body was recovered,” but there is no silver lining in these cases. Instead, say: “There’s nothing I can say to fix this, but I’m not going anywhere.”
  • Help them find others who can understand. Trauma can be isolating. Mourners often feel uniquely overwhelmed or confused. Support groups, peer companions and therapists trained in treating grief and trauma can offer the kind of recognition and validation that even the most devoted friend may not be able to provide.
  • Take care of yourself, too. Being present for someone in deep grief takes energy, especially if you were personally affected by the loss. Stay connected to replenishing people, practices and routines. If you don’t, you may begin to experience trauma, too. Taking care of yourself will help you remain grounded so that you can show up.

I believe supporting someone through traumatic bereavement is one of the most meaningful things you can do. You don’t need perfect words or a plan. What sustains them won’t be advice or solutions, but your simple, powerful act of staying.The Conversation

Liza Barros-Lane, Assistant Professor of Social Work, University of Houston-Downtown

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: Traumatic bereavement and how to help the survivors”…