Harder Than Hard Ever Was

The floor was hard.
Never had there ever been anything harder.
She traced a scuff mark
with her finger,
her hand so small -
pudgy-fingered and soft.
There has never been anything ever so soft,
except maybe her heart,
which was tender and young
And had never known pain.
Not really.
She drew her knees up
to her chest,
where her tender heart beat,
and made herself small
As small as small as could  be
and never was she ever so small,
not when her Mama told her
how big she was,
how glorious was her spirit.
Don't hide, Mama said,
so she made herself as big as big could be.
But not now,
now was a time of small
and unknown pain,
and fear as big as the sky.
Now was the time of
a cold hard tile,
an ungiving tile,
scuffed,
empty,
Harder than ever hard was.
Harder than ever was pharoah's heart.
Harder than waiting
for Mama to come.

7000 Pairs of Shoes

I remember once
standing in a museum
at the edge of pain -
that deep well of dark
that hides so well,
and has tattered edges
that threaten to crumble -
all metaphorically, of course -

a mountain of suitcases,

all that was left of some
ghosts of Auschwitz or Dachau;
Treblinka, perhaps,
or some other abyss
of unallegorical
non-metaphorical pain.

A reminder,
a quiet chant:
Never Again.

So you'll excuse me, I pray,
my reaction today
from all of those shoes
laid out so neatly,
in all those very straight lines:
empty,
lifeless,
as lifeless as luggage,
an abyss of pain.

A reminder
silent accusation:
The journey continues.
The march must go on.
Not one more shoe
Not ever again.

Never again is Now.

Upon the Use of "Thoughts and Prayers" as an effective defense against guns

This was a post I wrote on Facebook, back in June of last year:

Dear God! We are a nation under siege. When is enough enough? How many more people must die or be maimed by gun violence?!

The answer is NOT to put more guns on the streets! Don't quote the 2nd amendment to me - it calls for a well-regulated militia. These terrorists - the white men who believe they are acting for God or race or political bent - who carry semi-automatic rifles that can strafe a plaza - or a baseball field or a church or a business or (pick a place, any place) - and mow down human beings to show their might and power and hatred - these terrorists can pick up their guns and bullets without a care! It is more difficult to get a driver's license than a gun license.

Dear God - when will enough be enough?

Someone I don't know commented on it - "The criminals will get their guns one way or another," implying this was a good reason why gun control won't work and shouldn't be pursued.

Here's the thing - of course criminals will always get their guns! I'M NOT WORRIED ABOUT THE FUCKING CRIMINALS!

- I'm worried about the white supremacist skinhead who can legally buy a gun.

- I'm worried about the nice parents down the block who buy a gun to protect their family whose child ends up dead because said child found the gun - or MY child getting killed by their gun because he was over playing at their house and someone found the gun

- I'm worried about the mentally ill person who can readily buy a gun.

- I'm worried about the guy who’s pissed off at his wife or his girlfriend or boss or co-worker or the world who decides to do something about it

Of course the criminals will get their guns. We have law enforcement to deal with that; it's by no means perfect or even relatively effective. But gun control laws were never meant to deal with that issue!

Good God people! We created this battlefield all by ourselves. This blood is on our hands. Somehow, we deified the NRA and the 2nd amendment, and we build altars to their godhood daily. And you know - it's all of us. We are all culpable in this nloody passion play.

We wring our hands and offer thoughts and prayers as if that were enough. We shake our heads in sorrow, in anger, in bewilderment - and then we go on with our lives, until the next time, and the next time, and the time after that. Because there will always be a next time. And we will be just as culpable and just as sad and bewildered and angry.

Here are some cold hard facts, gleaned from the Center for Disease Control

• On an average day, 93 Americans will be killed with guns
• Those 93 deaths daily? Seven of them will be kids or teens.
• Nearly 12,000 people will die. victims of gun homicide, annually
• For every one person killed by a gun, two more will be injured
• Every month, 50 women will be shot by their intimate partner
• When a gun is present in a situation of domestic violence, the risk of the woman being killed increases fivefold
• The American gun homicide rate is 25 times higher, on average, than other high income countries. The US makes up 42% of the population of that group, but accounts for 82% of the gun deaths.

What will it take?

We thought Columbine would do it, didn’t we? I could have sworn we did. So I went searching, to find out how many mass shootings there had been since that deadly, horrifying kick-you-in-the-gut-and-take-your-breath-away massacre at Columbine High School in April, 1999. Funny thing - my research took me back to 1984 (a prescient year, to be sure; I could have gone further - I chose to stop there). That was the year a man walked into a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California and opened fire, killing 21 and wounding 19.

Between San Ysidro (1984) and Columbine (1999), there were nine other mass shootings - a total of 11 shootings in all at that time. The total number of dead numbered 112. One hundred twelve lives snuffed out, and one hundred fifty-nine wounded - physically. God only knows the countless others whose wounds are not visible to the eye. Angry men. Hurt and damaged boys. Empty people who wanted to punish, who wanted to hurt, who wanted to kill. Who wanted to die. They grabbed a gun - a rifle, a shotgun, a handgun, a semiautomatic rifle - and sprayed bullets and pain and death all around them.

Columbine hit us like a wave of frigid water. It shocked us all. It sickened us all. We wept with all of the families whose worlds were destroyed that day in April. And we swore it would never happen again. Didn't we? Of course we did! We had to have. I mean, this wasn't some gangland war on the mean streets of some city. This wasn't some pissed off guy with a chip on his shoulder who shot up his girlfriend's office in an effort to show her just how much he loved her and what lengths he'd go to make her stay.

This wasn't supposed to happen - not here! This was middle class suburbia, mostly white America. This was a couple of kids! White kids, who, seemingly out of nowhere, walked into their school and opened fire on classmates and teachers alike. It wasn't until later that we found out they had an arsenal of guns at their fingertips, all legally owned by their parents. It wasn't until later that we learned they were Outsiders, bullied and marginalized and unstable.

So we learned. We learned from the harshest teacher, this most brutal lesson. We learned, and so we declared it wouldn't happen again.

Until it did. Three months later, in Atlanta. Two months after that, in Fort Hood. And two more months. And then the next month. Again and again. Over and over. The killings never stopped. People who'd been fired, or passed over, or left - they took it out on the people they worked with or loved or hated or feared. Who the fuck knows?

From Columbine to Virginia Tech - the next of the "big" ones, the shootings that really shook us up. that seem to have a more permanent status in our heads (except, of course, if your world was rocked by one of the "minor" shootings, the ones that faded more quickly from public view) - from April, 1999 - April 2007: 13 mass shootings. Ninety-seven dead, seventy-four walking wounded.

We learned. We learned how to use social media to notify students and faculty that there was a potential madman on the loose. It would have been nice to learn how to keep guns out of the hands of the madmen. Almost a year later (with only one other mass shooting and eight dead along the way), Northern Illinois University was hit by its own disgruntled student. Again, we activated the notification system, keeping those kids not in the lecture hall on lockdown and safe. We lost only five souls that day. It could have been so much worse.

But we learned. And it won't happen again. We won't let it happen again.

Binghamton, NY: April 2009, 13 dead, 4 wounded

Fort Hood, TX: November 2009, 13 dead, 32 wounded

Huntsville, AL: February 2010, 3 dead, 3 wounded

Manchester, CT: August 2010, 8 dead, 2 wounded

Tucson, AZ: August 2011, 6 dead, 11 wounded

Seal Beach, CA: October 2011, 8 dead, 1 wounded

Oakland, CA: April 2012, 7 dead, 3 wounded

Aurora, CO: July 2012 - another one of the "big names" in mass killings. This was the madman who shot up the midnight showing of a Batman movie, killing 12 and wounding 58.

Oak Creak, WI: 6 killed, 3 wounded in a Sikh temple where people were at worship

Minneapolis, MN: September 2012, 6 killed, 2 wounded

Brookfield, WI: October 2012, 3 killed, 4 wounded

Newton, CT: December 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School. This brought a nation to its knees. Stories of courage beyond what anyone could have imagined. The faces of those sweet, sweet kids, getting ready for the holidays. The teachers and administrators who did all that they could, and then did more. The parents whose children died. In all, 27 people - adults and kids - died. Were murdered.

And we declared we had had enough. We declared that this madness would end. We shouted "never again!" to anyone who would listen, and to many who wouldn't. We were done learning these lessons. We got it. Surely Congress would listen now! Surely Congress would no longer bow to the pressure of the NRA and other pro-gun lobbyists, not with all we had been through. Right?

Between Sandy Hook and the Charleston Church shooting almost exactly three years later, there were five gun mass murders, a mere 36 deaths. I mean, really - they should barely count, right?

Except they do count. As do the 13 other mass shootings that happened between then and yesterday, June 14, 2017. On that day, we saw two mass shootings, a continent apart. One in Virginia in, in the shadow of the capitol -where thank God no one was killed! - and San Francisco, where three were killed and two wounded.

In all, from what I thought would be five or six notorious cases of brutality and murder (because who can keep all of that death front and center? Life refuses to stop, or even slow down long enough to process these atrocities in their moments, and after a while, they seem to melt and fuse into one another, because how different are they, when it comes right down to it?) turned into 56 separate incidents of some guy (ok; there were two women who made it on the list; still...), some guy, some kid, some bruised and battered and broken person took out a gun and opened fire to assuage some inner demon.

From 1984 - 2017, 404 people have been killed in a mass shooting. I can't even start on those who've been killed individually. In Chicago alone, there were 762 homicides in 2016; 90% were a result of gun violence. Overall, there were 4,368 shootings here last year. When I wrote this last June, we were almost at 1,000 murders, and we hadn't even hit summer yet, when the temperature and the assault rates rise almost exponentially.

Let me remind you where all of this started: I don't give a flying fuck about criminals and their gins. In almost every single case of these mass shootings, the guns these mass murderers used were purchased legally, owned legally. Could very well have been concealed legally. In the blink of an eye, these sick individuals to their guns and ended the lives of so many.

The blink of an eye.

Do you really think that arming everybody would have stopped these murders? Even in those cases where the Authorities (whomever They may be) had an inkling that something might not be quite right in the head with these murderers, everyone was caught off guard. And no, I don't want to debate how many may have been saved in the seconds that someone on the battlefield may have had a gun, may have had the presence of mind to whip it out in the next blink of an eye, may have known how to use said gun, may have hit their target (the gunman) and not some other innocent who happened to be standing in the way (or close enough to it).

Arming everyone to the teeth is a recipe for disaster. 

We here in America seem to be the jumpy, hair-trigger gun-toting murder capital o the world. Remember that statistic, way up there? The American gun homicide rate is 25 times higher than other high income nations. Last year, the rate of death by gun violence in the US (per 100,000) was 10.2; in the UK, it was .2, 1.1 in Germany, 2.3 in Canada, 2.8 in France (according to a CBS news story).

It's the guns. It's the ease of access to the guns. It's the people who can get the guns, in all their angry, crazy, messed up lives. It's the inconsistencies from state to state. It's the loopholes and work-arounds that make what little control we have immaterial. It's the fucking NRA and their chokehold on Congress. It's the lobbyists and spineless politicians who put money before constituents. It's greed. It's short-sightedness and expediency. It's poverty and lack of education and gangs and ignorance and stupidity and arrogance.

It's death. Ugly, painful, nasty, brutish murder by bullet, and it knows no race, no socio-economic bracket, no gender, no religion, no political party. WE have created this battlefield. WE have condoned this culture. OUR hands are bloody. We cannot point a finger if we do not include ourselves, because we wring our hands and weep and keep these nameless, faceless victims and their families in our thoughts and prayers, and then we go on and live our lives, shifting a bit uncomfortably when we listen to the news, and we shake our heads when we hear about the latest atrocity, and we raise our voices, demanding change.

And nothing really seems to have changed.

I thought we might be finished, when I wrote this essay last year. Not really; I knew there would be more. And there have been. This, gleaned from a Mother Jones article:

·       The massacre in Las Vegas in October – 58 dead, 546 wounded

·       Edgewood  Business Park, MD, 17 days after Las Vegas – 3 dead, 3 wounded

·       A Walmart in suburban Denver, November – 3 dead

·       The massacre at the Texas First Baptist Church, on a beautiful Sunday morning in November, about a month before Christmas – 26 dead, 20 wounded.

·       Rancho Tehama, CA also November – 5 dead, 10 wounded

·       The Pennsylvania Car Wash, January this year (I guess we took a little holiday break from the mass killings) – 4 dead, 1 wounded

·       Stoneman Douglas High School, a Valentine’s Day massacre – 17 dead, 14+ wounded

Since writing last August, we add another 116 murders to the earlier number of 404, which took us through August 2017. Five hundred and twenty – 520 - murders. I’m sure I missed some. Their blood soaks into the ground that rises up in horror. Have we had enough yet? There is a religious tradition – not mine, but the sentiment works here – that the children shall lead us. And they are. Thank God they are! They are organizing and speaking out and demanding that this blood bath end. Now.

Have we had enough, yet> Are we willing to follow our children’s lead, and march with them, organize with them, raise our voices with them? Are we willing to demand that this end now, once and for all?

The Talmud tells us that to take a life is to kill the world entire (Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5 in Sanhedrin 37a. The Quran echoes the sentiment in verse 32 of the fifth Sura: whoever kills a person… it is as though he had killed all men. A few centuries later, John Donne, an Anglican cleric in the 16^th Centuury wrote Any man's death diminishes me.

I fear I have almost disappeared under the weight of all this death.

Havdallah with a gun - yet another revision, for yet another massacre

I wrote this after Sandy Hook, and I had hoped, because of the sheer horror of that massacre, we would be mobilized to do something, to force our politicians to pass sane and safe gun laws. I was wrong. I've had to revise this a number of times.

We stand in this place, all of us together. We can change this. We must.  We cannot afford another death, another injury. We cannot allow another madman to loose his anger and insanity on us.

Havdallah with a gun

In praise of blood--

a pulse beat furrow

that runs royal blue to garnet,
to brown and black, but for the

space of a breath,

it is rich and sweet

and runs like wine,

like water, like life

in its pulse beat furrows,

until it pools in the cracks 

and fissures of pavement--

rubble now, rent, once

a playground

a building,
the brick and bones
of commerce

or worship

or home.

In praise of the scent of

oil and steel, the plastic

and ozone stench

that I imagine,

like musk 

and spice

that catches, in a draft

on the wind 

and carries with it--

singing and sharp--

the corruption of death.

In praise of a spark

that singular moment

of explosion, contained 

in that flash,

that spreads like 

light, that brings no warmth, 

and nothingness follows in its wake

and it offers a psalm 

of metal striking metal

that swallows sound

a single flameless spark

disappearing into the 

weighted scent of oil 

and blood.

A benediction, a 

prayer, for a 

life, for a

death, for

a gun.

If not now

Who would have strength
to stand, truth to power -
a tightrope walk
against the wind,
with no net below
except for the hand of God?

Who would walk the road
less traveled, the one of
rocky crags and razor wire?
That curves into a
perilous wood and
still look up with hope?

Who would sing the song
of dissonance when it
is easier - far easier!
to slip into the stream
and be carried
by its current?

Who would dare
to demand justice,
show mercy,
offer comfort
shout defiantly -
who would love
in the face
of hate?

Puah stood, and Shifra
by her side, choosing life
and the cry of babes over
one man's harsh decree.
And Miriam, the one of
timbrel and drum
she danced across a river
and sang a song
of freedom's call.

Who will stand
now, if not for me?
who will rise
now and march
now and sing a song
of freedom's call
now? Who,
if not for me?

Once more, and
yet again
if not now
When?

I Am Not Speechless

Yesterday, someone drew a swastika on the sign-box outside of Klau Library on the Cincinnati campus of the Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, the principle rabbinic and cantorial training arm of the Reform Jewish Movement.

It was the ugly work of some hateful, anti-Semitic person, someone ignorant and filled with fear who is lashing out in a misguided attempt to feel more in control, more powerful. I imagine this person to be a brutish skinhead – but I know it could have been anyone.

I've seen the picture of this desecration in post after post on Facebook, and almost every single post comes with the comment, “I am speechless; I have no words.” Many comments link the vandalism to the rhetoric of our president-elect and the climate they feel he brings to his upcoming administration – one that gives free reign to Neo-Nazism and intolerance. Defiantly, they ask where he stands in the face of this horror.

But me? I’m not speechless. I am outraged and sickened and saddened. But not speechless.

I was not speechless when residents of sleepy little Ridgefield, CT, found the same hateful scrawl of a swastika on a local playground just before Thanksgiving 2016.

I was not speechless several years ago when a friend’s doorbell rang around 10 pm and, when her husband opened the door, he found a pile of pennies laid out in the shape of a swastika.

I was not speechless when another friend shared that her middle school-aged daughter was being tormented by some boys who called out daily: "Jew! Jew!" They threw pennies at her feet and yelled at her to pick them up; onlookers only laughed. The incident even repeated during registration, in front of parents, administrators, and the principal himself. No one did a thing.

I was not speechless when my own black and Jewish son was bullied and teased, sometimes mercilessly, in grade school. The bullies were the kids, but the collaborators were the teachers and administrators, who remained silent in the face of their ignorance and hatred.

I wasn't speechless when, while driving some staffers out to the field for community organizing back in the 1980s, one of them regaled us with the tale of how he had "jewed down" a street vendor to get a better price on some frippery or other.

I was not speechless when, at age 18, I walked into my synagogue one Sunday morning and found three huge swastikas spray painted on the walls – ugly black spiders against a backdrop of white.

I wasn't speechless when my mother and I spied a bumper sticker on a car that whizzed by us on the highway in 1973, the height of the gas crunch. The bumper sticker read "Burn Jews, not gas."

I was not speechless after any of these incidents, over all these decades, and I am not speechless now.

I am outraged and sickened and saddened by the continuing antis-Semitism that goes mostly unnoticed by most of the world. There are a few news stories that reference this latest crime of hate and reference the Jewish community – as if we were a different community entirely, not part of the same community as everyone else. As if we’re all still consigned to a shtetl away from the rest of the world, not quite as human as the rest of the human race.

Many well-meaning people will shake their heads and say "Terrible!" And then they will go on with their lives, perhaps wondering how in the world this could have happened in their neck of the woods. They thought they lived somewhere good, somewhere where things like this just didn't happen. But still, they think, it didn’t happen to them; it happened to those people over there, to that other group. And life goes on.

There’s more, you know. I was not speechless when a madman terrorist strafed a club in Turkey just this past weekend, or when another madman drove a truck into a crowded square in Germany. I wasn't silent when France, when Miami, when Sandy Hook, when Boko Haram, when Rwanda, when Somalia, when Bosnia, when the Boston Marathon, when Charlie Hebdo, when the Towers, when Oklahoma…

The list, it seems, in infinite. Each tragedy teaches us, as I have taught my son, "Never again!" Never again must we let such hatred and murder and violence occur – and then we shake our heads and act stunned and speechless, every time, the next time it happens. Again.

In the words of the late Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”

I am not speechless. I cannot be speechless. My voice alone may be small, but if we all speak together, as one voice, we will shake the rafters of heaven itself, and we can create a world where no one is terrorized by hate, a world where “Never again” is finally true

16 Elul 5773: Change

When I was in graduate school, I took a seminar in Early Modern French history (hey-- I was fascinated by the subject, but then again, I'm a wonk of the first order). I wrote a critical analysis on Voltaire's use of the words "public" and "public opinion" in both his writings on politics and those regarding theatre (again-- I am a wonk...). What I found was that, in all matters pertaining to theater and culture, Voltaire was a true proletariat, encouraging The Public to weigh in on matters small and large, as was their God-given right.

He cautioned a very different tale when talking about the political arena. Here, The Public were just this side of cretinous boob: small-minded, uninformed, knuckle-dragging inferiors, who should leave governing and politics and law to their betters, who'd had the very good sense to be born into the noble classes.

Same man. Same word. Couldn't be a more different approach, result, outlook if he'd tried (and trust me, he didn't) (he was really okay with inconsistency).

Call me the Voltaire of change.

I am all for social change. World shattering, life altering stuff-- housing is a right, not a privilege. So is food, and access to medical care, living in a safe place, drinking safe water. I left graduate school to work for ACORN back in the eighties, long before it was made into a dirty word by the Tea Baggers. We fought for change. Lived it, organized for it. We took a page from Saul Alinsky and made it into a thing of real and awesome beauty.

When I worked for United Way and helped run corporate giving campaigns, I moved people to action, urging them to give, to get involved, to change the world. And I let them all know that every time they did something, they were, in fact, changing the world. 

I'm all for changing the world. It needs to be changed. 

I'm all for changing you. Not in that icky, co-dependent way of changing you to fit my expectations, but, you know, it's probably not a bad idea for you to, you know, take a look at yourself and do some minor repair work.

It's the changing me piece that I have issues with.

Believe me-- it's not that I think I'm perfect. I so know that I am not. I know all the cute little slogans: if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten. If nothing changes, nothing changes. You know what they call someone who does the same thing again and again expecting different results? I'm sure there are more, but I'm typing quickly (it is amazing how fast 24 hours can go by when you've committed to blogging something new every day). You get the picture.

Change is hard.

Change is hard, for me, when I look at it as something I have to do. It is exhausting and daunting and overwhelming and so frikking difficult. And who knows what will happen on the other side? Who knows how the world will look or who I'll be or how I will fit? It's not hard. It's a scary impossibility.

But (there's always a "but"). But I don't need to look at it like that. I don't have to change. How about: I get to change. I am allowed to change, being given the opportunity to do something differently. I don't have to do the same things again and again, and then spend the next slice of eternity kicking myself (or worse) because nothing happened. Nothing was different. Wherever I go, there I am. 

I remember what it was like, who I was. I remember the breathless agony of my life, living in a tiny universe of one, where nothing changed, ever. Where I was lost and alone and broken. All the time, world without end, amen. I remember, when nothing changed and the world stood still, that despair was my stock in trade and hope was a dirty, dangerous secret. I remember when my only prayer was (a much more earthy version of) "Screw you, God!" 

I may or may not have had to change. What I will never forget is that I get to change. Every day. Every day, I have the ability to do something different. To shift my perspective and bend the light and move. Breathe. Change. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's all good. I will get the chance to do something different, to practice change tomorrow.