Post 727 - March 6, 2025

Within a few days of Hamas’ brutal attack against the Israelis on October 7, 2023, posters printed with the faces of victims began to appear on lampposts and on the windows of empty buildings around our neighborhood.

A year and a half later, the fliers are still up in many places, but now they’ve been torn and written on. Sharpie scrawls announce, “murdered,” or “home safe,” across the innocent-looking faces. Some have just been vandalized by pro-Palestinian supporters.

I noticed many of them while I was out walking yesterday. The only reason I saw them, though, is because I went actively looking for them. If I hadn’t done that, I would have passed by them without taking them in. They’ve been up so long that they’ve become hard to see. They’re now just part of our urban landscape.

Hamas still holds fifty-nine people in captivity. Of those, the Israel Defense Forces believe about thirty-four have perished. That leaves twenty-four or twenty-five living people languishing God-knows-where.

We don’t hold onto outrage for very long. We react, get all fired up about something, then move on.

When Israel counter-attacked huge protest marches erupted against the destruction they were wreaking against the Palestinians in Gaza. I couldn’t walk through the city without seeing people holding up signs and chanting.

As time went on, those events began to become rarer. By the end, the last few I saw were comprised solely of well-meaning young White University women wearing keffiyehs. They seemed oblivious to the status of women in the community they were so ardently supporting. I haven’t even seen any of them out lately.

At the moment, Israel and Hamas are in a very shaky, temporary ceasefire. Israel has just halted all humanitarian aid into Gaza until Hamas accepts the terms of their deal. The President tweeted that if Hamas doesn’t agree to accept the terms of the agreement, “you are DEAD.” (His capitalization.) That was yesterday. Egypt and Qatar have accused Israel of violating international law by using access to food as a weapon.

In short, it’s a powder keg. There are no easy answers. Hamas will not concede power because they believe if they do, the remaining Palestinians will be wiped from the face of the earth. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough evidence out there to prove them wrong. Israel, for their part, won’t agree to anything until Hamas relinquishes all power. As long as Hamas exists, Israel feels it is in danger as it is Hamas’ stated objective to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

Two days before the President was inaugurated into his first term on January 18, 2017, half a million people marched in Washington D.C. against him. Far more people protested that day than attended his swearing-in ceremony on the 20th. The Women’s March that day promised to usher in a new era of sustained resistance.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t keep it up. After that one march, we kind of gave up.

In 2020 when COVID hit, our attention was further diverted. Then, two months after that, George Floyd was brutally killed in Minneapolis and a whole new wave of activism began. That, too, eventually petered out.

Legacy media’s reporting of the news these days is, I am finding, becoming increasingly alarming, given their basic acceptance of Republican behavior that should, instead, be questioned, and more often than not, condemned.

Words matter. Here’s a headline from a piece in today’s New York Times. “Where Being Gay is Punishable by Death, Aid Cuts are ‘Heartbreaking’ “ The article is about the LGBTQ population of Uganda whose assistance has been cut off by the Republicans. Heartbreaking? The aid cuts amount to little more than an opportunity for Uganda’s oppressive regime to exterminate their entire LGBTQ community. How about “Aid Cuts are a Certain Sentence of Execution.”

“As T%$&p Goes After Universities, Students are Feeling the Pain.” The Republicans have drafted a proposal to shutter the entire Department of Education. They have all institutions of higher learning firmly in their targets. Feeling the pain? For the love of all that is holy, can the New York Times not find any stronger language than that? Our basic freedoms are being systematically stripped away.

Jennifer Rubin wrote something for The Contrarian this morning with the title, “T$%^p’s Economic Trainwreck.” Here is the first paragraph: “After two days of watching the markets tank, President in Name Only Donald Trump’s lackeys began to talk about a “compromise” on his wrongheaded, disastrous rollout of steep across-the-board tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada, and China. This is a common Trump stunt: Make a boneheaded move, watch the fierce blowback, make a meaningless deal, and declare victory.”

That’s the kind of language that keeps the outrage alive.

None of what’s happening in our government should be normalized. We should never have to read anything with phrases like, “In typical T%$^p fashion,” or “In his usual style.” Words like typical and usual allow his actions to be dismissed and glossed over. We can’t let him off the hook for any of this. None of this is normal.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada addressed the President and the American people clearly and forcibly about the effect the “boneheaded’ imposition of tariffs will have on us all. He didn’t say boneheaded, Jennifer Rubin did. He didn’t, however, in his speech, normalize any of the Republican-supported nonsense currently emanating from Washington.

During the President’s address to Congress the other night, one lone Democrat, Congressman Al Green from Texas, stood up to the President while the rest just chose to sit there silently. Some had signs they raised when a particularly egregious lie was told. They didn’t break ranks.

Despite a history of similar Republican outbursts in the past, the majority party has forwarded a resolution to censure Representative Green.

I don’t know that just sitting there in silence was the best thing the Democrats could have done. Leaving the chamber en masse may have given the Republicans all the excuse they needed to lock the door behind them forever, so that might not have been a good option either.

We can’t allow ourselves to become inured to any of this. We are only a few weeks into this Administration, and we are already no longer surprised by anything they are doing.

There is an action group called Rise and Resist. You’ve probably seen some of their banners in front of the President’s Tower on Fifth Avenue and in other places around the city. They use big white letters against a black background for maximum clarity.

Their website has a calendar of upcoming marches and actions scheduled to take place all over the city in every borough. There are some pro-Palestinian events included. To celebrate International Women’s Day on Saturday, there will be a march that starts in Washington Square Park and moves up to Union Square Park. The more of us who begin to participate, the more powerful these acts will become.

Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro are now trying to get the President to pardon Derek Chauvin, the police officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he suffocated to death, of all federal charges against him. Shapiro is a Right-Wing conservative journalist from the Daily Wire, who, at the time of Floyd’s death, bitterly condemned Chauvin. Shapiro said Chauvin should be punished as a bad apple in an otherwise noble force. He was bitterly opposed to anyone who claimed the crime was racially motivated or, in any way, commonplace.

That has changed. Shapiro now thinks that Chauvin’s trial was a farce. He’s said, “[Chauvin’s] conviction represents the defining achievement of the Woke movement in American politics. The country cannot turn the page on that dark, divisive, and racist era without righting this terrible wrong.”

Maybe I’ll see you all on Saturday down in Washington Square Park. The march starts at 11:00 am. If not there, then maybe at another one in the future. There’s plenty out there that needs our voices. Rise and Resist. Check their calendar.

I think Michael and I may still have the signs we made for the Washington event in 2020. We put them into storage just in case we might need them again.

As it happens, we were right. We need them again.