Category: rants

In Troubled Times: This, Too, Shall Pass

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I first posted this in April 2023. It’s a good reminder.

I started a blog series, “In Troubled Times” after the 2016 presidential election. Folks I trusted said that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. That’s true now, too. You can read the first installment, “Becoming Allies,” here.

I came of age in the 1960s, demonstrating for civil rights and marching against the Vietnam War. I never burned my bra, but I volunteered for Planned Parenthood in the years before Roe v Wade. I am not bragging about my activist bona fides. I was one of many, and rarely in the forefront. However, I remember all too well the feelings of both elation and futility. The energy and inspiration of being surrounded by thousands of like minds, filling the streets of San Francisco, chanting and singing. We thought that if we could sing loudly enough and joyfully enough, we could change the minds and hearts of the nation’s leaders. And then came a day when many of us realized they were not about to listen to us. The war raged on, now captured on television in our living rooms.

That feeling of powerlessness was one of the driving forces behind my debut science fiction novel, Jaydium, by the way. My heroine is initially trapped on a dusty, barely-habitable planet at the back end of nowhere, and through a series of shifts through time and parallel dimensions, she ends up on an alien planet where she has the chance to change history by stopping a war. It’s about both re-engagement and the quest for peace (and I was tickled when Tom Easton of Analog praised the latter as unusual and laudable.) Writing it reflected my personal journey from withdrawal to participation.

I vividly remember how, in the late 1960s, my father, who was born in 1907 and lived through two world wars, pogroms, the McCarthy witch hunts, and more, would talk me down from desperation. When I was in a panic about the Cold War maneuver of the moment, he never dismissed my concerns; he was just coming from a broader perspective. And he was right. We got through those years without blowing the planet up.

Now I find myself in the position of being an elder—a crone, if you will. My earliest political memories date from the mid-1950s, including the terror of HUAC, the pervasive suspicions, racism, misogyny, and antisemitism that no one questioned. When I was a bit older, the anti-communist hysteria had faded somewhat (depending on where you lived), but not the rest. And always, in the years before oral contraception, sex meant fear of pregnancy. I knew girls in high school who got sent out of the country and returned the following year or so without their babies. Later, in the late 1960s/early 1970s but still before Roe v Wade, I volunteered at Planned Parenthood. And heard many stories. Looking back, I cannot believe how ignorant I was about so many other issues.

I do not mean to brag about my life experiences or to enter into a contest of which times were worse. Each generation faces its own trials, and each generation is convinced that theirs are world-ending, worst-ever scenarios. This is one of many reasons why we need generational memory (not to mention history books!)

Goethe wrote: “That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.” It’s horrible that we have to fight these battles over and over, playing eternal whack-a-mole with the agents of hatred. That’s why we need all the allies and moral ammunition we can get.

I am mindful of the old joke, “In my day, we walked to school. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow.” I see no benefit in comparing one disaster to another. For the person affected by a catastrophic event, whether it’s an attack on them as a member of a vulnerable group or a purely personal tragedy, loss is loss, fear is fear, and grief is grief. Instead of belittling someone else’s pain, we have the opportunity to use our own as a wellspring of compassion and understanding. The lesson from history is not that those times were more terrible than those we face today. It’s that they passed. Sure, you might say, they were taken over by new, awful things.

But sometimes, either by a cataclysmic change or the slow progress of justice, things get better. Not all things, not for everybody, and not all at once. Small victories add up to shifts in consciousness. One of my antidotes to despair is to complete the following sentence:

“I never thought I would live to see…”

  •  People walk on the Moon
  •  A Black person become President
  • Same-sex marriage become legal
  • A woman Vice President

Now fill in your own.

I believe that many of the crises looming over us are reactions to those victories. Two steps forward and one step back. But the movement of history is on our side. Rights once gained are not easily (permanently) revoked. Once marginalized groups are accepted as deserving of respect and dignity, it’s a lot harder to take that away.

Right now there are many attempts to take away human rights and dignity. And lives, often for trivial excuses. It seems we are living in a time when vicious, outrageous, hate-fueled behavior is on the ascendency.

These times, too, shall pass.

In the meantime, we are called upon to protect the vulnerable and minimize the harm inflicted on them.

It’s Not Just the Grifters in Government

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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In the wake of the dodgy crowd rampaging through the United States government, it is sometimes hard to remember that there are others – mostly corporate others – out to wreak havoc in our lives.

But there are and while we’re organizing in various ways to try to preserve the valuable parts of the United States, we need to remember to address these problems at the same time. Yeah, it’s all exhausting, but we really don’t have a choice.

If we don’t push back, we’re ceding the planet and its resources – resources that belong to all of us and that, if properly used, would provide us all a good life – to the kind of destructive forces who consider ordinary people to be NPCs (non-player characters in gaming).

But we’re real and we’re players and we cannot let them run the world. So here’s a list of some of the things to be concerned about in addition to the grifter, his pet broligarch, and the dodgy minions:

Tech Enshittification:

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, and while the use of it is expanding, the crux of it is that tech companies woo in users of various types by various means and then start making the product harder to use. So first it’s easy to get on Facebook and you see all your friends. Then it’s easy to advertise on Facebook, which annoys the other users but makes the business people happy, and then they screw over the business people and now nobody’s happy, but everyone’s stuck there.

Right now this is personal to me, because I’m going to have to buy a new phone since I can’t replace the battery (even though I was told I could when I bought it) and Microsoft is throwing AI garbage into Word and I have to figure out how to keep some version of Word so I can read and use all my files (thousands of them) without AI cooties.

I’m sure people can tell me all kinds of things I can do about both things, but all those things require a lot of extra work. I just want to be able to keep my perfectly good phone and easily get software that isn’t contaminated.

The truth is that all tech is full of crap these days and you have to spend excessive amounts of time paying attention to it instead of just having a nice tool you can use. It’s enough to make one nostalgic not just for Word Perfect and the early days of Google search, but for a fucking typewriter and an encyclopedia.

“AI”:

AI is either the greatest new thing – as long as it can suck up all the energy, water, and money it needs – or an existential threat, or something that is useful for a few things, but is not going to either save or destroy the world. I hold with the last of these, but people are still throwing lots of money at it. Check out Ed Zitron’s newsletter Where’s Your Ed At to see where that is going.

The Network State:

This is truly scary stuff. Some of the broligarchs want to build libertarian cities that don’t pay any taxes or provide any services within the the boundaries of various countries. I’m not sure how they expect to get utilities and other infrastructure, though I suspect they plan to steal it from the actual governments in place. It’s pretty clear these cities are only for the super-wealthy and that the rest of us would be admitted only as gig workers or worse.

I recommend Gil Duran’s newsletter The Nerd Reich for keeping up with these people. They tried to do something last year up in Sonoma County just north of the San Francisco Bay Area, but the first attempt failed. No doubt they’ll be back.

This is like the sovereign citizen movement – the people who proclaim a separate government and claim they don’t have to pay taxes – except that unlike the sovereign citizens, who are cranks, these people have real money.

Naomi Kritzer’s novel Liberty’s Daughter is a good example of what these people are planning. Continue reading “It’s Not Just the Grifters in Government”…

The War on Infrastructure

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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About a year and a half ago, I wrote on this blog about Deb Chachra’s fabulous book How Infrastructure Works.

One of the key messages I got from that book – outside of the fact that Prof. Chachra loves to tour power plants and dams – was that infrastructure makes modern life possible. We have hot and cold running water in our houses. A flick of a switch gives us power.

Flick another one and you’re online, having a video chat with your friend on the other side of the world.

At the moment I’m reading another book – Carl Zimmer’s Air-Borne – and while that’s a book that discusses germ theory and contagious disease (indoor air quality is another passion of mine and you’ll hear more about this book another time), it made me realize something else: so much of the infrastructure we rely on is incredibly new.

In discussing some experiments that required collecting air samples high in the atmosphere by airplane, he mentioned Charles Lindbergh’s flights in the 1930s when he was scouting out routes for commercial airlines. Because in the early 1930s, we didn’t yet have commercial air traffic across the oceans.

I’m sure if you were born in the 21st century, 1930 seems like the dark ages. But there are still people around on this planet who were alive back then. It’s not very long ago.

We’ve become very accustomed to a lot of this infrastructure – including flying from continent to continent – in a short period of time.

We really don’t want to lose it. As Prof. Chachra points out:

We’ve created these collective infrastructural systems that make our lives, as we know them, possible. Any future with limited, reduced, or even more frequently interrupted access to them is recognizably worse than our present, if not downright dystopian.

She was speaking about climate change, which is already taking a toll on our infrastructure. It’s also been eroded due to poor maintenance over the years. In Oakland, where I live, a lot of water pipes are over a hundred years old because it was just over a hundred years ago that the water system was firmly put in place.

And while a hundred years isn’t a long time to have a municipal water system, it is a long time to rely on the original pipes.

But now we’re facing a third attack on our infrastructure, one that is causing much more immediate damage than even climate change and neglect. I refer to the chainsaw destruction of the federal government by the broligarch in chief and his grifter in the White House. Continue reading “The War on Infrastructure”…

In Hopeful Times: Robert Reich on Optimism

personby Deborah J. Ross
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 At the beginning of Trump 1.0, I began a series entitled “In Troubled Times.” With the onset of the war in Ukraine (aka The War of Russian Aggression), I shifted to “In Times of War.” Today, Substackian Robert Reich offers reasons for cautious optimism. Let’s feed that hope!

This is a very brief summary. Click on the link to read the whole thing and to subscribe.

Friends, If you are experiencing rage and despair about what is happening in America and the world right now because of the Trump-Vance-Musk regime, you are hardly alone. A groundswell of opposition is growing — not as loud and boisterous as the resistance to Tump 1.0, but just as, if not more, committed to ending the scourge.
1.Boycotts are taking hold.
2. International resistance is rising.
3. Independent and alternative media are growing.
4. Musk’s popularity is plunging.
5. Musk’s Doge is losing credibility.
6. The federal courts are hitting back.
7. Demonstrations are on the rise.
8. Stock and bond markets are trembling.
9. Trump is overreaching — pretending to be “king” and abandoning Ukraine for Putin.
10. The Trump-Vance-Musk “shock and awe” plan is faltering.

In all these ways and for all of these reasons, the regime’s efforts to overwhelm us are failing.

Make no mistake: Trump, Vance, and Musk continue to be an indiscriminate wrecking ball that has already caused major destruction and will continue to weaken and isolate America. But their takeover has been slowed.

Their plan was based on doing so much, so fast that the rest of us would give in to negativity and despair. They want a dictatorship built on hopelessness and fear.

That may have been the case initially, but we can take courage from the green shoots of rebellion now appearing across America and the world.

As several of you have pointed out, successful resistance movements maintain hope and a positive vision of the future, no matter how dark the present.

Seeing things Jewishly

personby Gillian Polack
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So many strangers are telling me right now that I’m not Australian and that none of my relatives are Australian and… my mind keeps returning to what this means for the Arts in Australia. Certainly it’s much more difficult for anyone Jewish to earn money in the Arts here: there are some places I won’t even fill in the forms until I see that things have changed. I don’t have much physical capacity and when something is obviously a waste of my time, I do something else with that precious time. However… it struck me that I see the world through my upbringing. I talk about books from non-Jewish Australia a great deal, but my own view of the world is shaped by my family and their friends and the stories I was told as a child.

We all see the world from our own eyes. If someone were to ask me how I see the arts in Jewish Australia, I’d only give a partial answer, because there is so much stuff I forget. The first thing I think of, in fact, is what has impacted me and when and why. I thought, this week, then, I’d give you a little list. The list is little but it contains many words, because I annotated it. Welcome to the Arts in Australia seen Jewishly, through my life.

Let me begin with family and friends.

My mother’s family arrived in Australia before World War II or died in that war (save one person, who is not part of today’s story because he was not an artist, musician or writer). Mum’s immediate family was all here by 1918. It was a big family in Europe and is not the smallest family in Australia. Of all my mother’s cousins there are two who were well-known as writers. Very well-known, in fact.

Morris Lurie was Naomi’s brother. Naomi was so much a forever part of my life that even now she’s gone, I still think of one of Australia’s better known writers of plays through the fact that his sister was Naomi. Every time Naomi was in Melbourne, she’d shout “Sonya,” across the street to my mother, because they were very close. Mum hates loud voices and Naomi thought that Mum hating the noise and the laughter was hilarious.

I know about Morrie, and I collected his plays when I was a teenager. One of the lesser known facts of Gillian’s life is that, for twenty years, she collected plays. I still have my collection, but most of it needs a new home. I never met Morrie. He wasn’t much into meeting our side of the family. Even if we had met, I suspect we wouldn’t have had a lot in common. Naomi, on the other hand, was someone I would spend any amount of time with. She was my bridge to the Yiddish-speaking side of the family, and is the main reason why I don’t use that in my fiction: it’s her culture, not mine. My cultural self is from my father’s family. Loving Naomi, though, sent me to understand klezmer and Sholom Aleichem and so much else. I need to re-read Morrie’s plays. Maybe now I’m no longer a teenager I’ll like them more. Maybe not. I’ll see.

Arnold Zable is, as my mother explains, a family connection. His refugee cousin married Mum’s refugee cousin. Arnold is Victoria’s great storyteller. He also wrote an amazing book about the family left behind: Jewels and Ashes.

My father’s side of the family is so very musical. One of my father’s best friends was an extraordinarily well-known performer… but that’s another story. This is one of the days when stories lead to stories and those stories lead to more stories. Between family and friends, I grew up with music the way I grew up with rocks. Science and music and Doctor Who kept our family together for a very long while.

The most famous musician/composer/music critic in the family (she was never just one thing, nor was she a simple person) influenced me a great deal in my youth. Linda was my father’s first cousin, and spent time with me when I was very uncertain of where I fitted and who I was. She accompanied my sister on the piano when that sister was doing more advanced music. She told me some of the stories of her life, but never the really private ones.

Linda was Linda Phillips She described her own music as “light classics.” We played them on the piano at home… but never well. Her music was a lot more than ‘light classics’ as was Linda herself. Her daughter, Bettine, also wore her talents lightly. I knew that she had acted on stage with Barry Humphreys as an undergraduate, but I had no idea that she was a famous radio actor back when radio was the centre of so many people’s entertainment. They were both quiet about their achievements.

Here I need to explain that, not only were they modest and exceptionally fun to be with, but they were nothing close to my age. Linda was my father’s first cousin, to be sure, but she was born in the nineteenth century: she was sixty years older than me. Linda lived until the twenty-first century, and we lost Bettine to COVID. They were part of an enormous change in the Arts in Australia, beginning with Linda’s early career as a pianist over a century ago. I grew up with this, taking it for granted that there was a life in the Arts and a world and so much enjoyment… but seldom enough money to live on.

There is a third family musician, my own first cousin, Jon Snyder. His life is another story. He was in a very popular band (Captain Matchbox) and became a music teacher. His professional life began in the sixties, so the age differences are still there, but not as great. So many of the friends of my schooldays also became musicians, and three of them play in the same band, in Melbourne. That’s another story, however. I am no musician. I had some talent, but words were always more fun and, to be honest, I used to be tone deaf. I love music and the artists who create and perform it, though, because until I left home, it was part of my everyday. In fact, even when I left home, music crept up on me. I kept running into friends of Linda’s. They would send messages to Linda through me. Stories breed stories…

Also, this stopped being a list almost as early as it began being a list. I’ve only talked about a third of the writing side of the family. But this post is long enough. The rest can wait.

PS I have not at all forgotten the questions I promised to answer. There are only two questions, but the answers require a lot of thought. My everyday is a bit over the top at the moment. When things calm down, I will answer those questions. I promise.

On Keeping The Rules in Fiction

personby Madeleine Robins
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I have told some of this before, but I was thinking today about what happens when a writer changes the social rules* of the world they’re working in mid-work. Spoiler: it often doesn’t go well.

When I started writing my first Sarah Tolerance book, I drew, among other things, on a book I read when I was a teenager. The name and author of the book are lost to the mists of time: this was a period where I read voraciously, tearing through 5-6 books a week: classics, SF, fantasy, romantic suspense, Regency romances. I was a fairly uncritical reader: mostly I wanted the infusion of story. But even with the volume of story I was ingesting, some critical faculties were beginning to take shape. As you’ll note below, I read a lot of Austen.

So there was this nameless Regency romance. It is nameless and authorless because it irritated me so much that I threw it out when I finished it. Why did it piss me off so badly? It had a really fascinating setup, one that almost transcended the romance genre. Before the book starts, Our Heroine (hereinafter OH), has lived without marriage with a young man (I don’t remember if the decision not to marry was based on some Wollstonecraftian principle).*  At the time the book starts, the young man (who sounds like a monster to me) has died, and left OH (who has been cast off by her family after her disgrace) an income and a house–as long as she lives in the town where both she and the young man grew up. Where her shame is, of course, well known.

In the 19th century attitudes were still in the process of shifting from “marriage is about property” to “marriage is (sometimes) about love.” A woman’s marriageability was based on a number of factors: beauty was certainly one. Family property, and family lineage, were two other factors. Virginity was possibly the most important. A young woman who disposed of this crucial factor in her ability to make a good marriage was not only putting her own future in jeopardy, she was screwing up her family’s ability to wed fortune to fortune, or money to real estate, or Valued Lineage to Big Whomping Piles of Cash. Chastity had a dollar (or pound) sign attached. And no one thought it was odd or old-fashioned to think this way. It was okay to marry for love so long as the economics were in your favor; marrying below oneself for love (as Fanny Price’s mother did) had consequences. And sex without marriage could have near-fatal consequences for a well-bred girl. Continue reading “On Keeping The Rules in Fiction”…

Defiantly Acting Free

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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My partner and I are making our way through The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World …, a posthumous book of essays by David Graeber, with one of us reading it aloud while the other is cooking. Thursday night, Jim was reading an essay called “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets,” a piece about the late 20th and early 21st century global justice movement.

He read these words:

Direct action is a form of resistance that, in its structure, is meant to prefigure the genuinely free society one wishes to create. Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free. [emphasis added]

And I exclaimed “Yes” and would have thrust my fist in the air if I hadn’t been stirring a pot.

Now this is in part because I am inspired, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, by the likes of the Zen Monk Takuan Soho, who did not cower before the powerful or mistreat those who lacked power.

I want to move through the world as a free person, to treat all with respect so long as they do the same to me, and to stand up to bullies and Nazis. That this may be a perilous time for such an attitude does not keep it from resonating deeply with me.

I have a friend who refers to the rich and powerful as our “owners.” It drives me crazy, though I understand what she means and can even see some merit in the usage when I think of organizing unions of workers and tenants and others.

But I do not acknowledge that anyone has that kind of right over me. That certainly includes the broligarch in chief who is orchestrating the destruction of our government right now.

This is also driven by my feminism, because so much of what is going on right now is aimed at making women into second-class citizens again – people with limited rights but still bound by the law – and I am damned if I am willing to go along with that.

I didn’t think I was inferior back when the law treated me as such – I am old enough to remember when the minimum wage for women was lower than that for men, just as an example – and I have no intention of recognizing anyone’s right to reinstate that kind of misogynistic discrimination.

Some of it is rooted in the current of American Exceptionalism in which I was raised. In my childhood, it was not uncommon to hear a dispute on the playground that ended in the words “It’s a free country.” Continue reading “Defiantly Acting Free”…

In Troubled Times: How Stories Save Us

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I first posted this in August, 2021. Hold on to hope!

Stories can heal and transform us. They can also become beacons of hope.

Quite a few years ago, when I was going through a difficult personal time, I came across a book about the inherent healing power of telling our stories. No matter how scattered or flawed our lives may appear, as we tell our stories, we gain something. Patterns emerge from seeming chaos, and our lives begin to make sense. It may be dreadful, agonizing sense, but even tragedies have order and consequence. I found that over time, the way I told my story changed, reflecting my recovery process and new insight.

The mirror side of story-telling is story-listening. While a confidential diary or journal can be highly useful, having someone hear our words can be transformative, especially if all that person does is listening. Not judging, not analyzing, not wondering how to respond, just taking in our words, a silent partner on our journey. Often we feel less alone in retrospect, no matter how isolated and desperate we might have been at the time. Additionally, a compassionate listener invites us to be kinder with ourselves.

Perhaps this is how Twelve Step programs work, apart from any Higher Power mysticism or Steps: that by simply hearing our own voices relate our histories, and having the experience of being heard, we open the door to viewing ourselves through the lens of new possibilities.

Personal storytelling calls for discretion, of course. Although it may be true that “we are only as sick as our secrets,” casually (or not-so-casually) violating a confidence from someone else is not the same as choosing to include the listener in our own private lives. Some of us never learned healthy boundaries about what is safe to share, and when, and with whom. We, or others, can be harmed by indiscriminate broadcasting of embarrassing, illegal, or otherwise sensitive information. The kind of storytelling I’m talking about, on the other hand, is as much about the journey as it is the facts.

Stories can get us through dark times by giving us hope and inspiring empathy. Stories work by creating a bond between the narrator or central character and the listener/reader. Who wants to read a story about a person you care nothing about? And if that appealing character has a different history or journey, or learns something the reader never experienced, so much the better. We accompany them into darkness and out again.

Hopeful stories provide an antidote to fear-driven stories. We find allies in unexpected places. Who would have thought that scruffy old Strider would turn out to be Aragorn (not me, not the first time I read The Lord of the Rings)? They remind us that even in times when all seems bleak, the tide can and does turn. Spring follows winter’s desolation. We, too, can be saved. Or, more to the point, we too are capable of setting aside those fears and reaching out to those in need.

I have a treasure trove of stories I come back to again and again. They re-kindle hope in me but also when I tell them, they create a bridge of empathy, even with people who appear to be “on the other side” of arguments. One story I heard in an inter-faith workshop, from a Catholic woman who had worked with The Compassionate Listening Project in the Middle East. She said that she and her colleagues listened to people from different sides of the conflict there, and that as the speakers made their points and felt their experiences valued, their stances softened. Each side became more willing to look at mutually beneficial solutions and to acknowledge the suffering and aspirations of the other.

So stories of hope and positive change affect not only the storytellers but the listeners. A recent blog post on the website of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) put it this way:

Fortunately, research also shows that messages framed in terms of hope, especially when coupled with messages that include positive feedback, can counter fearmongering effectively. Hope-based messages can also help people change their minds about key issues. Why? Because when people have made up their minds about an issue, they are prone to only hear facts that support their position – especially if they are already stressed and the facts they hear are framed in terms of fear. But, when people hear messages framed in terms of hope and positive feedback, they are able to digest new information in ways that can ultimately lead to a shift in perspective.

As we move through troubled times, let’s do our best to create and tell – and re-tell as many times as necessary – those stories.

Different places, different troubles, same times

personby Gillian Polack
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On Sunday, I put up a Facebook post. The reaction to it was a lot more positive to the one I was expecting, so I’m sharing it here… with an update.

I’ve been trying to find words to say this all day. I’ve given up trying to find decent words and I hope that what I say is clear. This post may get me a lot of people arguing, but it’s important, so it’s public. Be kind, please. None of this stuff is easy, for anyone.

For the past little while, so many people around me have blamed everyone Jewish for even the smallest thing someone else Jewish or Israeli might have done. They’ve translated antisemitism into false flags and are full of spite and opinions. I don’t know if 75% of Jewish Australians are Zionist, because I don’t know what definition of Zionism those who claim it use and I’ve never been asked as part of a survey… and nor have most Jewish Australians I know. I know I don’t worship Satan. I certainly know I’ve not killed 30,000 children. That sort of thing. Life has been… rather difficult.

Lots of folks on the left demand a shibboleth, that I publicly denounce or deny this thing or that thing before they will talk to me. I’ve just accepted that I don’t get to talk with them, and I’m sorry, but saying “OK” and giving them what they demand is adding to the bigotry around by playing the games that let people determine good Jews and bad Jews and I try not to play those games.

You know about some of this because I speak about it when I can.

This week, it has taken a turn, or even a twist. Not an unexpected twist, but one that saddens me. The sort of bigotry I’ve just described is infectious, and this is the moment I can choose to not be part of spreading that infection to other Australians. (And the medical metaphor may alert some of you of what’s to come.)

Right now, Australia’s facing the case of two nurses who I, personally, never, ever want to meet. I am not going to make the same assumptions about Muslim Australians from the example of these two, that people make about Jews from whatever examples they use. I would like the hospital at Bankstown to look closely into things and, if there is a pattern of bigotry embedded, to do something about it. I would like both nurses to be tried, fairly, with all the evidence laid out. I will not ask any Muslim Australian (whether they’re a friend or complete stranger) to give a particular opinion on what the nurses said or did before I am willing to talk to them about anything.

Things are going to be very difficult for Muslim Australians for the next few weeks and not a single one of them needs my demands on top of everything else. They don’t need any of our demands. Any questions or needs should be sent, courteously, to whichever governing body is responsible for the specific thing you need to know. If it’s a religious opinion, ask religious experts. If it’s a medical opinion relating to Bankstown Hospital, then Bankstown Hospital would have the right people to talk to. Your local dentist or wifi expert is not responsible for what those nurses said and should not be put on the spot about it. The only organisations I want to hear from, myself, are the ones linked to the two nurses and who moderate the ethical behaviour within their communities and professions. Some of them have already spoken out. I can wait for the others.

Yes, as a Jew, I will try to avoid the hospital in question … because these sorts of attitudes often belong to a community in a location and because I’ve heard other rumours. I hope they’re only rumours. Even if they’re true, the vast, vast, vast majority of Muslim Australians wouldn’t even know those two nurses. Many of them don’t even come from similar backgrounds to the two nurses.

I will not let my personal fear turn me into someone who hates a bunch of other Australians just because they share a religion with two people I do not ever want to meet. My favourite local grocer is still my favourite grocer (and owned by a Muslim family) and my favourite local butcher is still the halal butcher in Mawson, just next door.

Update:

Organisations linked to the nurses are beginning to speak up. One public statement in particular is worrying. I looked into the organisation that issued the announcement, and the announcement appears to reflect their identity (and may make them part of the same community as the nurses, with some of the same views as the nurses), in which case, they would not like me at all. They still comprise only a tiny fraction of Muslim Australia and give absolutely no excuse for treating anyone else badly.

It does mean that there are places that anyone Jewish may have to be careful (more places, I mean) and this is bad, however, I will continue to check out all the statements, and continue to not judge anyone who has not done anything in need of judging. My friends are still my friends and I am deeply disappointed that I have far too much coffee and don’t need mincemeat and my pantry is full and therefore no excuse to go to Mawson and buy favourite things. I go for coffee and mincemeat and emerge with three bags of food I love.

I often talk about food when I’m distressed, and the nurses thing has riled up even more hate than other events and… I am still determined not to hate just because others have fallen into that hole.

I am the Red Queen

personby Gillian Polack
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I am so the Red Queen this week. I am running so very hard and would love to be able to feel that I’m on top of anything. I still can’t do long posts answering questions, but I have such good reason.  Six things have happened and any one of them would be enough to demand I re-order my day and drink much coffee.

Let me explain the things in random order. All of this has happened since Friday.

  1. I can see! Because I have unusually problematic eyes, new glasses are not so easy. I needed 3 pairs. Two pairs came last year and it took me about a week to get used to them. The third arrived on Friday and it took until today for my eyes to be able to interpret the world without dizziness. The new specs are very smart and I like them a lot, but, for me, buying glasses is always a bit of a gamble. If I have someone with me with good taste (as I had for the first two pairs) their good taste makes me look respectable. I cannot see things for myself, and for some reason, taking pictures of my in empty frames and then looking at the pictures on the screen just makes me want to walk away. I don’t know how I look, in other words, until I have the new glasses.
    Some of my friends hear the news and say, “New glasses!” They show me their reading glasses and tell me which chemist one can buy the best $10 pair at or that they were only $3.  Mine cost a lot, lot more than this. All three of mine together, in fact, added up to $1,000, which, given my eyesight, was a bargain. When I buy in Australia, I have to go to a specialist shop. It takes about two weeks once I’ve ordered, because the lenses have to be cut in Japan. Occasionally the optometrist loses my order (this happened last year, for the first two pairs) and I have to start from scratch. The new glasses are from France, and the same price as the Australian… but the glasses are lighter and easier to wear.
  2. My computer was dying.  On a bad day, it took eight hours to boot up. I have a new computer and it’s lovely. It arrived just before lunch yesterday and… I’m still sorting things out. Because I don’t like buying new computers, the technology changes a lot in between computers. I’m still adjusting to the new one. This may take a while.
  3. This is the week of my literary review. I sent 9,000 words to my supervisor and get comments on Thursday and then have to complete it. By Monday I also have to change a bunch of other things, and the Monday after (if I’ve got the dates right) then 65,000 words ought to be ready to go. In normal times, this is not a big deal. My normal self is seriously good at this kind of thinking and writing. This month is not normal times.
  4. My email didn’t transfer over properly from my old machine. All the saved categories mysteriously disappeared. Most of the deleted mail re-appeared. I found myself with well over 90,000 emails from just one account… and they included things that need to be done this week. I’m working on it.
  5. I have had a health blip recently. Since about November, in fact. On Sunday, my body announced that it may be deciding to recover from the blip, but it’s not certain. I feel a lot better than I have been. but I need to rest… a lot. Also, I lost 3 kg on Sunday, all inflammation deciding it didn’t like me (which is a good thing). It’s a bit too exciting. Blood tests are tomorrow, which is also a bit too exciting.
  6. I now know the shape of left wing antisemitism in Australia. I made a simple statement in public and received some very interesting and mostly vile responses and matched them to a bunch of previous knowledge. If anyone needs to understand the new antisemitism better, I can now explain it. That’s the good thing. The bad thing is that most of its purveyors want to tell Jews what we are and how we think and do not stop to listen. This is where the “All Jews murder children” stuff comes from, and I can now  explain how it begins in simply not listening, to not respecting, to bullying, to turning individuals invisible, to outright hate. If anyone wants to understand how the Left does this, ask me. I already knew about the right wing stuff, and have reached the stage where I can talk sensibly with many people on the right and we can come to a bit of an understanding given time and space. The irony is, of course, that I’m of the left.
    The reason I am the historian I am is because I refuse to dismiss all bigots out of hand. Most of them are really fine human beings who can’t see where their ideas and their hero-worshipping leads them. Right now, though, we’re at an odd point and it’s rather difficult to get past the hate and talk to the fine human being. This is the moment when violence is about to begin. This is also the moment when most people who are developing this problematic stuff are both moving into self-defensive mode and into a place where their ideas are consolidating into passionate beliefs. I’m seeing more theology of hate than I’ve seen in such a long time.
    I so miss being allowed to teach these things so that people can understand themselves and their friends and make their own decisions about which direction they’re going to travel in and why. Dumping people like me from teaching is, of course, a small factor in what’s happening. None of this is cheerful… but at least I understand more.

Is this enough cause to be late in the Treehouse and still not answering my readers’ questions?