This week I don\u2019t want to write at length. I\u2019m still dealing with a bunch of nasty stuff done in Australia on Friday night. It struck me, though, that most readers of this blog are also dealing with bad things. We are not having an easy time of it, any of us.<\/p>\n
What I would love to know is how we all handle things.<\/p>\n
My best approach (and the most difficult) is to think everything through and understand. Twenty years ago I could take that understanding and share it with activists I knew and we\u2019d find ways fo helping people and moving past the logjam that the impossible creates. Right now, most of those people aren\u2019t talking to me because I\u2019m too Jewish, but I still delve deeply and understand, and when someone asks, I can help them reach the stage where they can identify the hate and the slogans and the dark alliances and make their own decisions for their lives. I really miss teaching \u2013 I don\u2019t get to explore ideas with many people and certainly don\u2019t get simple solutions. This was once the best approach, but now makes me feel helpless. Also, I find it exhausting. It\u2019s especially exhausting when friends tell me \u201cThe group I marched with was not at all antisemitic. You are imagining things.\u201d Perfectly good people can march alongside vile bigots and as long as the bigots are polite in their presence and the good people accept the rhetoic unquestioningly or don\u2019t know the dowhistles then those good people do not know what is being done in their name.<\/p>\n
Solitaire is not the best way to deal, I have discovered. I start playing when things get too much and then cannot stop.<\/p>\n
Cooking was a great support (because I love cooking) when there were friends around who could eat my food, but, between COVID and our charming new present, not many people eat my coking and so all I have is too much food and\u2026 my freezer is full.<\/p>\n
Last time there was a wave of antisemitism (the Molotov cocktail years) I did a lot of walking and enormous amounts of dancing. They were so good for me. I cannot walk far these days and I can only dace for maybe 2 minutes. I am so proud that I can now dance for two minutes, it\u2019s like life returning. I needed 2 hours of dancing back then, to give me a break from everything. I would lose myself in the music and my feet would replace my brain in ruling my life and over time, my body forgot the burdens it carried and life was wonderful. If my illnesses would go into abeyance, I would dance again, but, right now, dancing has a Jew has its own aches. Walking doesn\u2019t. I will work on improving my walking.<\/p>\n
Superhero movies and TV and K-drama help a lot. They\u2019re not my everyday and I can take a break from my everyday when I\u2019m watching them. Crime dramas and sad stories of sorrow\u2026 less good. A couple of friends suggested I watch things to do with the Holocaust, or one of the documentaries about October 7. If I want to sleepwalk, I promise, I will watch those things.<\/p>\n
These are a few of the things I\u2019ve tried.<\/p>\n
We all live different lives and we all have different approaches to turning the impossible into something we can handle everyday. The impossible for someone in the US is quite different to the impossible for someone in Australia. I\u2019d love to know some of your ways of dealing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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