On Living, Loving and Dying

A Very Personal Opinion Piece

Writing over the past weeks has been hard. Juggling between finding ways to help dissipate the despair of people around me, along with heavily researched pieces on what to do to protect oneself, and choices going forward.

For me, too, there are decisions to be made. How to communicate if they shut down all the avenues I use¹. How much to lock down. What, in terms of resistance, am I willing and unwilling to undertake?

Some decisions are easy, but I’ve learned that sometimes decisions are made for you.

When I was a little kid, both my dentist and my chiropractor were survivors. The term “survivor” had a very specific meaning back then. It exclusively referred to people with tattooed numbers on their forearm, and whose address for several years was a place like “Auschwitz”, “Dachau” or “Bergen-Belson”.

I was a curious child, and over the years, they both told me stories of their experiences, how they survived, and how they faced life after the camps. The decision to be imprisoned was not that of my dentist or my chiropractor.

Will they come after people like me, who write, and advise, and “know things”? Not initially, but eventually. Members of the intelligentsia never do well under fascist regimes.

Am I worried? Nope.

Will I crawl in a hole, delete my online presence, stop going to meetings, and hide? Not a chance.

Why?

First, because I am incredibly lucky in that over the course of my life, I have loved, and I have been loved. Often the people and dogs I love (and have loved) have loved me back. There is nothing better than love. Be it platonic, romantic, or any other kind, it is sustaining and all-encompassing, and the most wonderful thing in the world.

Second, because I know about coming close to dying. When one survives that, it changes them. Makes one want to live every day to its fullest. ALL any of us are given at midnight is 24 hours. Yes, one day you won’t have the full 24 hours, but until that point, you can use the time for productive undertakings, or you can dissipate.

Sure, there are days when I just can’t for one reason or another, but most days, I push through. Mostly because I live by a code.

I’ve written this before: my maternal grandfather was a twice-ordained rabbi. I lived with him and my grandmother for a couple years when I was young. He instilled in me that I must leave the world a better place the day I die. It is the guiding principle by which I live.

My maternal grandmother set an example worth following. She came to this country around the turn of the century as a girl. She learned English, was graduated from college, and earned a master’s in social work. While performing all the duties of a rabbi’s wife, she found time to get arrested twice in the 19-teens as a suffragette. She worked on the Lower East Side with Margaret Sanger in the 1920’s on her birth control initiative, the American Birth Control League, which was the predecessor of Planned Parenthood. In the 1940’s, she became a camp counselor so that she could teach girls about birth control, with the dual goal of getting her daughter out of NYC to try and avoid polio. It’s a lot to aspire to live up to.

I was also influenced by other relatives who did many things related to making the world a better place.

And so…

I am not naive. I understand the darkness that is coming. I feel some incongruity about it all. I write in the office in my house. This has been my home office since the 1980’s. There are lots of books, several computers, carpet that really should be replaced, bright blue walls, lots of light, and a multi-feature printer to which I want to take a hammer. My office is cool in the summer, and warm in the winter. From the moment I read Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan in high school, I wanted to find “my spot”, and the chair at my desk is it.

And yet.

They started today with transgendered people. They will go after immigrants on 20 January. They will move on to women and girls of childbearing age. They have learned a lot by leveraging lawsuits under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)². Their EOs will be stronger this round, and we will need to give money until it hurts to the lawyers that leverage the APA on the behalf of truth and light. I will not be surprised to see military in the streets. They will come for people I know, and eventually they will come for me.

During the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011, Twitter was the technology used for coordination (like fax machines in Eastern Europe in the late 80’s). Twitter was used because messages could be sent in bursts so short it was hard for the users to be tracked. Also, it worked with intermittent, iffy, internet service. I followed a lot of people involved in the uprisings then, on Twitter. Hung on every character they sent. Until they were disappeared.

I have friends who have lived in war zones. I have friends who previously lived under martial law. I have heard their stories, and I understand.

I do not feel despair about what is coming. Some resignation, sure, but not despair. I will not stop writing. I will continue my political activities (more than you might suspect).

Before the pandemic, I used to take groups of people to the US Constitution Center in Philadelphia³. After watching Freedom Rising, and touring the exhibits, I would take them to the big glass window (out on the patio if it was open) and point down the mall to Independence Hall, explain what happened there, and say that in addition to the Founding Fathers, many men, women and children, all guilty of treason against the crown, fought and sometimes died, so that today, we can breathe free. That was the promise of America. Why my grandparents, and so many other people, braved an ocean to get here.

I am unwilling to give up on that promise. I will fight for it. To my last breath. For all of our children and grandchildren, the light will follow the darkness.

End rant.

1. For me: emails (multiple), smartphone, Signal, Substack, Facebook, BlueSky.

2. 5 U.S.C. 706

3. The picture of me on this blog is a candid of me loving on James Madison in Signers’ Hall at the US Constitution Center. He’s my favourite Founding Father.