Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/galleryeditor/page/17/)
After the murder of a man from India by a hate-oriented racist in Kansas…
Everyone has consumed the harvest, everyone is going mad. The concepts of “fake news” and “alternative facts” are not merely propaganda, but a description of a metaphysical infection in which we all, regardless of our politics and whether we wish to or not, are consuming the contaminated “rye” as our daily bread. For we cannot help but consume the news in a way that feels all consuming, in a way that is also consuming us.
The antiwar movement is a great subject for today, of course, partly because liberal hawkishness is on the rise again and partly because a president with a monumental ego (or poorly hidden feeling of insecurity) is at the helm.
Above all, I am so mad. Yeah, I’m mad at all those people who voted for Trump and even madder at the ones who didn’t vote at all. I’m mad at everyone who thinks the sum total of their contribution to the political well-being of this country is voting every two or four years. I’m mad at our corporate-political system and how easily distracted people are. I’m steaming mad, but mostly at myself.
Ahead of tomorrow’s meeting between President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, we can look to Israel as an alarming roadmap for where the Trump administration would like to take the United States. The two leaders, who share a similar worldview, will likely compare notes on building walls and banning people due to nationality and religion, and discuss their hawkish policies on Iran, expanding illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land, and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
While I have been heartened to see articles in the New York Times and elsewhere about religious leaders issuing statements against Trump’s executive orders, the continued barrage of blows from the new administration has made the tactical state of the “resistance” seem like hand wringing in the face of a pugilist. It begs the question of how to escalate the response of faith communities to a level of greater efficacy.
I was not watching much television at the high point of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but I should have suspected something when some of my good friends, TV watchers and veterans of the Women’s Liberation Movement, mourned its passing in 1977 and perhaps even more, the early cancellation of the spin-off, Rhoda, a seemingly Jewish career woman’s saga, a year later.
Just as bad, however, was Spicer’s pivot. American Jews, he suggested, have no right to be offended by the Holocaust statement for a simple, single, and seemingly unrelated reason: Israel.
As the group stood on the sidewalk across from the governor’s mansion, a Native man was snatched from the sidewalk by the police. “There were other clergy there who had made a conscious decision to get arrested, but the police instead chose to arrest this man who wasn’t doing anything simply because he looked Native,” Mickiewicz said.
The clergy negotiated with the police, saying they would disperse if the police let him go. The police did end up releasing him and the protesters dispersed.
“It was dirty,” Hotchkiss said about the trade, but it’s also the oldest trick in the book. Oppressed human beings have always been used as pawns in the game to gain more territory and power.