Hearts are Breaking, but We Are Still Here

Join me for a moment, because this is serious.

Join me for a moment because this is serious.

The heaviness of the world, of pain, violence, and suffering weighs on us in different ways. Sometimes it’s like a tsunami that comes and swallows our entire village.

All week, I’ve wondered what to say to you here in this Lagoon. Anything? Videos? Quotes? History? An anecdote about my Austrian grandfather’s strong insistence on not supporting religious causes or charities, because after witnessing and surviving the holocaust, after fleeing his homeland as a teen, he believed all religious groupings resulted in bad things.

Or should I share good books? My BF’s latest coloring book for distraction? My past travels? A story? Pictures of cute sloths dressed as princesses? Or maybe just a moment of silence?

Is one to ignore the world far away? The world on the screen of the news, on our phones? War is not beautiful. Should we continue with regular days? Grocery shopping? Watching Love is Blind? Sharing details on our new book releases? Essays or other offerings?

I considered critiquing our relationship with technology in this time of war and TikTok. I considered screaming.

I cried this morning.

My close girlfriends feel despair. They’re conflicted, confused, angry, and sad.

A stranger recently asked me, “Are you Jewish?” An out of the blue question. He gave me the creeps.

On the corner of my daughter’s school this week, many grown men in purple shirts were demonstrating with signs saying something about the 12 Tribes of Israel. They had a band, a drummer, a speaker, and microphones. They were passing out flyers to the kids, but I couldn’t tell what they were getting at, or which ideas they were trying to spread. It was too loud and the print on their signs was too small. I picked up my daughter and drove away.

Last Sunday, a brawl between Floridian Palestinians and Israelis broke out in front of my favorite foot massage place.

A teacher stabbed in France. Bombs, bombs, bombs in Gaza.

Just now, I tried to record a video for you, a personal message, but it made me cry again. So I’m back to just writing, letting the letters flow from my hands.

Maybe you can consider this a poem.

Maybe you think this is overly dramatic.

Maybe you cried this morning too.

My friend deleted her Instagram because the images from Israel and Gaza were too much.

My other friend’s classmate was found dead in her peaceful, kibbutz home.

A journalist killed.

X number of X nationality dead.

I remember when Senator John McCain sang, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of a Beach Boys song on TV in South Carolina.

I think about the movie Hearts and Minds, about the scene in the film of a woman standing amidst the rubble of her bombed home. She says:

“Everything just collapses under the bombs. Everything just caved in. It’s like a bird and its nest. The way things are with the house in a rubble. The bird comes home and finds no nest. Where am I to sit or find something to eat? Even a bird needs a nest it can go back to.”

A still shot from Hearts and Minds

If I am crying all the way over here, safe in my Florida home, how do they feel over there? Threats. Machine guns. Shouting men. Rubble. Dust thick with ash, buildings, and the dead.

I think of the young people dancing, then screaming. They could be any of us.

I try not to look at images of wounded children, but my other friend tells me, NO. You must look. You must realize what is happening.

And I think of an Arabic-speaking woman I saw screaming on TV. She cries, “They have no conscience. They know nothing. They slaughtered us. They destroyed our houses. God will destroy their houses. Allah Akbar.” I actually find this clip online and watch it again, but realize I don’t know where she is from, or what conflict she’s referring to. It could be so many different ones.

I think of the barber in Shoah, cutting hair in a concentration camp.

The Jewish hair is in the holocaust museum in Washington, DC, I remember it too, under soft pot lights, behind glass, with sad music playing.

Hitler indirectly caused my own birth.

I remember shelves full of rows and rows of dusty Tutsi skulls, in a church alone on a hill, with only myself and a young Hutu translator, surrounded by quiet fields in Nyamata during my 2004 trip to Rwanda. I cried then too, in the car as we drove to the next genocide site.

I remember how my step-grandmother wouldn’t put her menorah in the window of her home in Richmond, Virginia, even in the 2000s because she didn’t want her neighbors to know she was still a practicing Jew. She still didn’t feel safe. She knew many still hated her “kind” and her kin.

When the bombs of the first Iraq war fell, I was little, in second or third grade. I’d seen the TV footage, but no one explained to me where the war was, so I thought it was here and there. I just knew it was us vs them. At night, I lay in my bed in the dark, and wondered if the bombs would drop on our house. I hugged my small body against the wall of my bedroom and worried myself to sleep.

Be Kind to Our Language

“Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books…. Every story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean… Watching television is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture… Saying it can’t happen here is the first step toward disaster.” — Timothy Snyder, from On Tyranny

I condemn the militarization of nations, of groups, of religions, of land.

I condemn antisemitism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, sexism, and transphobia.

I do not want us to be divided. I want us to be safe and loved.

Thank you.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for being here. I’m going to go eat some ice cream now.

I am praying for peace.

And Now You

Please share anything you wish with me today. However you’re feeling, if you need someone to talk to, to whisper a secret to, to release a fear, or to tell me something in public or private. I won’t judge you. I won’t argue with you. This is a safe space. Leave a comment, or send me a private email.

Peace. ☮️ 💜🕊️

XXXOOO

P.S. — I’m also sharing a short film I made in my student years called In the Year of the War Doc. I made it with the intention of fair use and in the spirit of artistic collage and critique, it perhaps violates someone’s copyright. I’m not sure. Hence, I’ll keep it for a limited audience. It shows the clips and anonymous war quotes I’ve mentioned in today’s newsletter.