Betsy Robinson

 

 

On walkers and canes they shuffled, in wheelchairs pushed by their children and grandchildren they rode, flanking a multitude of Boomers who'd made a lifestyle of youth and piloted the protesters on motorized scooters. "People get ready . . ." sang the young people who had used their smart phones to organize the buses and convoys. From all over the country they flooded the streets of DC, finally so tightly packed against the reinforced spear-topped White House fences that the old people crashed through.

 

But neither broken hips nor the Orange Man brigades could quell the swell of outraged pensioners at a missed payment of their hard-earned Social Security.

 

They hobbled, they limped, they slow-motion surged from the Ellipse onto the White House lawn and into the Kennedy Rose Garden which no longer had flowers since the woman the Orange Man doesn't sleep with replaced them with concrete. They filled the East Lawn, the West Lawn, and the South Lawn, where several elderly women were heard to exclaim, "I found a rotten Easter egg."

 

"I don't suppose we could eat them," replied another, miffed at the cost of her breakfast since the inauguration.

 

David Hogg, the new vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and former Parkland School gun control activist, rolled his meemaw to the quickly erected podium and lowered the microphone to her chin.

 

"I have one thing to say," she bellowed over the electronic squeal.

 

"All right, all right there, young lady," came a gruff but hopeful voice over an invisible sound system.

 

"Bernie Sanders!" laughed David Hogg's meemaw. "Take it away, Bernie!"

 

And as David carefully rolled his grandmother down the portable ramp that had been hastily but expertly invented for quick assembly by a gaggle of MIT students who understood the future and wanted to do their part, Bernie took the stage.

 

"Welcome! Welcome to everyone! We are the richest country in the world. You have all worked hard for your retirement income! And finally, finally, it seems we have an issue that brings us all together.

 

"Just for a moment here, let's hear from you. Tell us where you came from, and if you don't mind, your political affiliation.

 

"You there, yes you in the lovely blue muumuu with the nice pageboy hairdo—reminds me of my mom in Brooklyn, always did her hair nice. Yes, tell us, where are you from and anything else you care to share."

 

"My name's Estelle. I'm from Michigan, and I voted for Trump—"

 

As the boos erupted, Bernie raised his hands like Moses. "Everybody, everybody is welcome here. Excuse me, excuse me one moment, Estelle, I think we need to establish our commonality." And instantly a respectful calm was restored.

 

"It is a big country," continued Bernie, "and people come with all different issues. But here and now—this is a place to come together for our common good, so there will be no booing." And as a mumble of apology undulated through the crowd, "All right, Estelle, go on. Tell us what brought you."

 

"I was a librarian for 50 years—"

 

"Wonderful, wonderful," mumbled Bernie. "Never mess with librarians. Go on, Estelle."

 

"I'm ashamed of my vote. You'd think I'd have realized—"

 

All around her, old people cooed and comforted with several on either side of her caressing her arms.

 

"Thank you, thank you," whimpered Estelle, her limpid blue eyes filling with tears behind her thick lenses. "I never made a lot of money, but I never spent a lot either. I was smart, so I thought with my Social Security I'd be all right. But now— Now—" Unable to go on, she collapsed in tears.

 

"All right, all right, we understand, Estelle. We're so glad you're here. Who's next?"

 

A tall bald Black man way in the back raised his hand, and Bernie shouted for him to speak.

 

"I'm from Tennessee and I only voted for Trump because of RFK, Jr., but now I realize that a guy with an oil and gas family trust fund don't know nothing about living on Social Security. I heard he mixed it up with anti-social obscurity due to malnutrition and food deserts."

 

"Yes! Yes!" bellowed the crowd.

 

"Next," said Bernie, pointing. "You there in the wheelchair with the oxygen tank. Can we get some help here? Somebody hand her a microphone."

 

"Thank you, thank you," gasped the woman. "I appreciate— I've got COPD—"

 

"Take your time, take your time, dear," comforted Bernie. "We're here for the long haul. Give her some space, people."

 

The woman coughed, cleared her throat, and then spoke in a voice that belied her medical appliances: "My name is Maria. I'm a Mexican American, a citizen of this country for 60 years, and I'm living in a nursing home in Southern California—"

 

"Bless you," mumbled Bernie.

 

"Bless you, bless you," echoed the crowd.

 

"I thought the wildfires would do me in, but thank God they didn't touch us."

 

"Thank God," said Bernie.

 

"Thank God, thank God," echoed the crowd.

 

"I'm so glad you made it," said Bernie soberly. "What brings you here today, Maria?"

 

"Well, this may sound silly—"

 

"Nothing is silly," said Bernie. "Take your time. Tell us."

 

"Well, I was brought up to believe the Golden Rule. All my life I tried to do the right thing. I paid my taxes, helped my neighbors, and volunteered at my children's school. Two of them served in the military and died in Iraq."

 

"I'm so sorry," said Bernie. "Thank you for their service."

 

"Thank you, thank you," echoed the crowd.

 

"And the other one, well he died of AIDS in 1982."

 

"Aw, gee," said Bernie, wiping his brow and shaking his head with sorrow, and a wave of sympathy rolled through the assembly.

 

"I was about as mad as a mother can be at Reagan for never even mentioning the crisis. But at least he didn't try to make it worse.

 

"But this—" she gestured toward the White House, "This is much worse. I'm a Christian, and like I said, I believe in the Golden Rule, but also there's the 'eye for an eye,' which the Orange Man said is his favorite Bible passage. So I think it's time we did unto this regime as they have done unto us."

 

A murmur of confused delight began to reverberate across the White House lawn, spreading quickly back to Pennsylvania Avenue, then to 17th and 15th Streets on the west and east and as far as H Street and Constitution Avenue on the north and south as Maria's voice resounded through the sound system.

 

"What are you saying, Maria?" queried Bernie, a slight smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

 

"Shut them down!" boomed Maria in a voice that came from a place beyond her oxygen-deprived lungs. "No tax payments, no food deliveries, I call on all White House service personnel to walk out now! No cleaning people, no butlers, no maids. Walk out! Walk out!"

 

And miraculously, an explosion of uniformed workers—cooks in aprons, chauffeurs in hats, doormen, even many office workers in business clothes—hearing Maria's cry, exploded out of the White House.

 

"No traffic, no commerce, no communication! Many of us are already sitting, so we don't even have to move."

 

"You mean …?" said Bernie, now with a full-face grin.

 

"Yes!" declared Maria. "A sit-in. Nobody move for as long as it takes. My grandson, Jesus, brought me here, and he and his friends from colleges around the country brought tents and supplies—"

 

And as if ascending out of an ocean, battalions of young men and women rose with backpacks and duffle bags bursting with food, medications, books and magazines, and even solar-powered appliances for cooking, entertainment, and medical sterilization.

 

And as the 70 million pensioners and their supporters heaved themselves to the ground, at a window somewhere in the White House private residence, a big bloated blob of a man with tiny hands and a decompensating brain, peeked out the window and muttered, "Wow, what a crowd size. They love me. They really really love me."

 

 

 

A Facebook post reported:

 

The New York Times published a list of about 200 terms that the Trump administration reportedly prohibits or avoids. The list includes words such as activists, anti-racism, belonging, breastfeeding, climate crisis, community diversity, disability, discrimination, equality, feminism, gender, immigrants, LGBT, mental health, minorities, oppression, orientation, pregnant, racial justice, racism, sex, transgender, and victims.

 

The NYT stressed that the published list is likely incomplete, as more internal memos exist than those obtained by the newspaper.

 

(For a complete list that is free to read, see Diane Ravitch's blog.)

 

A couple of commenters thought that no matter what MAGA censors, they can't change reality, and therefore this word ban was "bonkers, stupid, and ineffective."

 

My response:

 

The ban is neither bonkers nor stupid. It is a very effective way to control what we, the people, believe. The censorship is calculated carefully to accomplish a whitewashing of communication and therefore people's mindsets. This is what dictatorships do. This is what the Nazis did. This is an endeavor that is tried and proven effective.

 

In the 1940s, my mother was one of the first female copywriters in a NYC advertising firm, and she used to say if you can get people to believe advertising, you can control what they think.

 

Not taking this stuff seriously and not understanding its effectiveness is how Democrats have been repeatedly defeated. We have a kind of arrogance that is self-sabotaging: we like to believe we think independently and therefore cannot be controlled by the language around us. But this simply is not true.

 

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff's book Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004) became wildly popular during the rise of Trump, helping warring families bridge political gaps by teaching them how to reframe their thoughts and find common values. Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, as anti-Semitic speech exploded, Lakoff wrote on Facebook:

 

"All thought is carried out by neural circuitry—it does not float in air. Language neurally activates thought. Language can thus change brains, both for the better and the worse. Hate speech changes the brains of those hated for the worse. It creates toxic stress, fear and distrust—all physical, all in one's neural circuitry active every day.

 

"This internal harm can be even more severe than an attack with a fist. It imposes on the freedom to think and therefore to act free of fear, threats, and distrust.

 

"It imposes on one's ability to think and act like a fully free citizen for a long time.

 

"Hate speech can also change the brains of those with mild prejudice, moving it towards hate and threatening action. When hate is physically in your brain, then you think hate and feel hate, you are moved to act to carry out what you physically, in your neural system, think and feel.

 

"That is why hate speech in not 'mere' speech."

 

And so it follows, if you ban, for lack of a better term, "inclusive speech"—speech that invites thoughts of equity, acceptance, and empathy—you will gradually transform the culture to be accepting of a dictatorship.

 

This stuff is serious. Wake Up!

Forty-four minutes past midnight on February 7, 1951, I came into the world at the now-nonexistent Woman's Hospital, 39 blocks north of where I live in Manhattan.

 

When I was very young, my mother told me I was a mistake, quickly followed by the explanation that they'd have had me eventually, just not when I made my appearance. Even then I knew that "at another time" would not have been me. But oddly, I was not hurt by this. It was information that is even more important to me now than it was then.

 

Abortion, which I firmly support, was not an option and even though my sudden presence caused problems ("Good Trouble?"), I'm glad I made it through. And I'm absolutely positive that by the end of her life, my mother, who became my best friend for her last 10 years, felt the same.

 

Today I am 74. Way older than my father when he exited; six years older than my mother when she lifted off; and way way older than I thought I'd ever be.* And I'm grateful to be here, doing this life, trying my best to finish what I started so many lifetimes ago.

 

I may fail. As I said, my timing has never been great. But I'll go down acting and meditating … for the well-being and transformation of me, my ancestors, and for all who populate this precious world we all share.

__________________

 

* Because it is my birthday, I'm giving you a present if you are a person (like I was and sometimes still am) who is afraid of your own thoughts because of the edict that "Thoughts create reality."

 

If my thoughts created reality, I would be dead.

 

Thoughts create your experience of reality, but it is thoughts married to actions + fate/luck/karma that create what happens in this land of karma and matter.**

 

If you merely think and never act, you will have a passive existence. You can be born into wealth and experience life as drudgery. You can meditate your behind off, but not affect the karmic chaos in which we are all, by default, participants.

 

If you think you are hopeless and unworthy of life, and you eat/drink/drug/etc. yourself to death, you have acted on your thoughts and it is your actions that have proven the validity of your thoughts. This is called "confirmation bias."

 

If you have lousy thoughts like I had growing up and still do, but you DO NOT ACT on them—e.g., you don't kill yourself but instead live as healthily as you can; you do not seek revenge due to spiraling hurt and rage after somebody does you wrong, but instead you just feel and process those feelings; and if, no matter how ineffective you believe you are, when you see a destructive raging fire, you attempt to extinguish it—you essentially starve into transformation the beliefs behind the thoughts.

 

What's key is discernment which requires knowing WHAT you think and then choosing to act or not act on it. In fact, the whole business of condemning and being ashamed of our own thoughts lies wholly in the ego.

 

Lift up! Expand! Send your roots deep down to the core of Mother Earth. BE here. Discernment is only possible from a whole and therefore higher Self. And when the Self identifies an ego problem, then the ego gets embarrassed, and transformation happens. And as you transform, you have the potential for great joy and, eventually, amusement at your own lousy thoughts. So quit being afraid of your thoughts!

 

_______________

 

**Many of us have heard stories about enlightened beings manifesting stuff—food for the hungry, etc. By definition, enlightened beings live at One with everything (as opposed to split and in their ego), which means their steady vibration is quite different from that of most people. Their vibration is One with the Creator/the act of Creation/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Hence, their actions are those of the Creator. Hence, manifestation.

 

Unless you are an enlightened being, to worry about manifesting stuff by merely thinking about it, or to believe you can magically heal the world by doing nothing is, to put it bluntly, the magical thinking of a young ego.

 

Whatever your tradition is, think of a Great Being whose counsel you believe in. All Great Beings encouraged action.

A central practice of meditation is repetition of a mantra—in my case, the Sanskrit phrase "Om Namah Shivaya" which means "I bow to my higher Self."

 

A central practice of Trump and his supporters is repetition of lies.

 

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in a live Facebook talk, strongly suggested that those of us who are interested in truth relentlessly repeat that the pardoning of the Jan. 6th criminals (notice, I call them "criminals" rather than the sanitized "insurrectionists") is wrong. She referenced the success of the election result deniers through constant public repetition of the lie that it was not a fair result (notice how I do not repeat their lie, but use the words "fair result"). She said we can learn from them by using the same tactic to relentlessly refute any justification for pardoning criminals who broke into the Capitol, beat, bloodied, and tased police officers, called for the murder of the Vice President and Speaker of the House, and smeared their shit (notice "shit") all over the Capitol rotunda.

 

She encouraged us to write to lawmakers, write editorials, and do it repeatedly.*

 

The words we choose to repeat matter!

 

Why?

 

Because constant repetition, whether in meditation or in spreading beliefs, causes erosion. In meditation, if I can repeat my mantra for 35 minutes every morning, no matter how many times I go off the rails into mind chatter, there is a gradual erosion of that chatter.

 

The practice itself—of meditation or phrase repetition—causes erosion of whatever exists already. Practice is repetition.

 

Therefore, I repeat: WORDS MATTER.

 

WHAT WE REPEAT MATTERS.

 

We have to start noticing what we are publicly repeating. If we desire truth, we must choose to phrase things using truth.

 

___________

* The day after Heather Cox Richardson's talk, because I have no Republican representatives to plague, I sent the following to our newly minted, unanimously confirmed, Secretary of State. Feel free to copy. The address is: https://register.state.gov/contactus/contactusform

Or even better, write an original message to a Republican who represents you.

 

Dear Secretary Rubio:

 

Congratulations on your appointment as Secretary of State. I've read your remarks about this and you sound rational. Therefore, I would like to plead to your better angels to:

 

1. Remember how you got here and mitigate the brutal plans to eliminate immigrants. Yes, they should come here legally, but the point is we are a country of laws and your boss's promises to ignore everything from the Constitutional right of citizenship for people born here to draconian deportations are inhumane and go against everything this country was founded on.

 

2. Your boss's pardon of January 6th insurrectionists is untenable. Speak up! How can you possibly represent this country diplomatically when criminals are freed and encouraged by the government?

 

I wish you the best in your new job. Please act as a bulwark against the oligarchy that is threatening to end democracy in our beautiful nation.

 

Sincerely,

Betsy Robinson

 

Perhaps my biggest ego quality is arrogance. I know it and it is hard to incinerate. I approached this morning's meditation feeling some despair. I asked for help—from a Siddha guru in spirit and the one who is presently alive.

 

It felt good to ask for help from what for me is a "higher power." (Side note: I just finished a thrilling thriller called Assassinations Anonymous by Rob Hart about a killer who is attending a 12-step program to stop killing. It is an ingenious way of dramatizing what it takes to change, and in 12-step programs, that requires requesting help from a higher power which can be anything you feel is bigger than you are. For me, that is my gurus.)

 

I felt their presence, but it wasn't helping much. Still my arrogance was spinning. Then Gordon Parks, the late photojournalist who I wrote about last February, came in in the form of a great light that pierced my heart so deeply I cried.

 

I felt small and contracted after that. When I tried to straighten, I felt nausea in my stomach. I guess I have to fully experience my arrogance as a process of letting it go.

 

Arrogance is a very different thing from determination. Gordon Parks lived his life with enormous determination but zero arrogance.

 

 

 

 

What a wonderful journal of thoughts and observations by Amy Tan, who also is a fabulous illustrator. The Backyard Bird Chronicles is beautifully written and published (thick paper, suitable for color plates) and $35, which is cheap for a book with this kind of art. (I read a library copy.)

 

Finally I get this birder thing. Amy Tan chronicles not only the "bird community" in her lush backyard, but her own mind chatter—and she is self-revealing in that way that I'm guessing most people will relate to: all of our judgments and worries, etc. The entries range from informative to funny to sad and even heart-breaking (it is a rough world in the wild, even in the well-tended world of backyard birdfeeders) to inventive (a wonderful "live commentary" of "The Windowsill Wars" for bird food). And I so admire her care for all living creatures—from the birds to the live mealworms she feeds them. She roots for life but has the ability or tolerance to watch death.

 

I live in NYC, right off Central Park, and for most of my decades here I had dogs (my last girl died a couple of years ago), so I was well acquainted with the human "bird community" in Central Park's woodland area, The Ramble. [If this sounds familiar, it is because the well-publicized horrific racist incident with one of the long-time birders, Christian Cooper, was in the north end of the area.] Historically, the birders are not fond of the dog people who chronically break the leash laws in the Ramble. And the dog people, who are there year round no matter the weather, are not that fond of the birders who tend to travel in massive aggressive herds, moving like a seasonal invasive species oblivious to anything or anyone on the ground who is not a bird. There are obnoxious birder guides who show off by blasting their bird calls through the serenity to impress the people who've paid to go on their tours. In short, there is obnoxious behavior on both sides of this birder/dog people history. But after reading Amy Tan's book, I finally get it: the birds are just like us—complicated, scrappy, territorial, with bullies and submissives, predators and prey. Maybe I'll even take my binoculars there myself now that I'm solo. (N.B. The solo birders are no problem—some became my friends over the years. Christian Cooper was not a herd-group birder, and the woman who falsely accused him was a newbie dog person—Ramble etiquette is, when caught off leash, to say "Sorry" and leash up—no big deal.)

 

At the beginning of the book, Amy Tan writes about how she was taught to "become the bird" by her drawing instructor, and she does—struggling to understand how they recognize individuals and why they do what they do and if they can change their habits . . . which brings me to:

 

Some thoughts on energetic and telepathic communication that Amy Tan never mentions:

 

In my years of watching birders in the Ramble so obsessed with peering through binoculars and camera lenses, I often had a fantasy. Or an idea for a cartoon: what if somehow what they saw were birds staring back at them through tiny binoculars?

 

The thought amused me and still does, and, often while reading this book, I found myself envisioning this.

 

Amy Tan is mostly focused on common human senses of sight and sound in her musing about why birds react the way they do—even wondering why they are fine when she's looking at them naked-eyed through her glass doors, but the instant she picks up her binoculars, they take off. She posits that it is because she looks scary.

 

This brings me to a New York City anecdote:

 Read More 

Yesterday a friend told me that people feel pressured to "take a side" in war. Maybe in life too. The side I pick is FREEDOM and EQUALITY.

 

I pick that in this country. I pick that in the world. It's not that complicated.

 

If freedom and equality are my side, then everybody's pain matters. I can wish for wars to end and everybody to have equal rights. I can acknowledge the pain of people who have been attacked, killed, butchered, raped, burned, and abducted while enjoying a music festival, and I can acknowledge the pain of innocents who are being slaughtered by an army directed by a tyrant who cares only about maintaining power. I can call for the release of innocents on both sides from horrific actions.

 

If freedom and equality are my side, I can acknowledge the history of my own country and also live here, knowing that I have a right to my home, even though others were butchered in a genocide that gave me the land on which my home stands. I can choose personal actions to see that everybody's pain is acknowledged and everybody matters and that past wrongs are not perpetuated or repeated.

 

If freedom and equality are my side, I can hold painful contradictions and refuse to give in to catch phrases that condemn everybody of one race or ethnicity.

 

It's not that hard.

 

Our bodies are maps—not of regions but of history. And not only of our own history, but of the history of our ancestors. So when I learn history, I'm learning and feeling it in my body.

 

I'm reading The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, the personal research and story of author Rebecca Clarren about her Jewish ancestors and how they came to settle in South Dakota—specifically land that had been stolen from the Lakota, and to this day, still legally belongs to them (the Black Hills), because they refused a monetary settlement from the U.S. government. This is a region where Trump held a rally, and his supporters yelled at the Lakota protestors to "go back to where they came from"—ignorant to the truth that they were standing on Lakota land.

 

To me, this is beyond the pale.

 

Did you ever wonder where the expression "beyond the pale" comes from?

 

The Pale was a region—or more accurately, a reservation or ghetto that Jews were relegated to by the Russian empire.

 

In the bad old days of a dysfunctional relationship with my late mother, she often yelled at me, "This is beyond the pale!"—her judgment about everything from the way I thought and the things I didn't care about to the way I was in the world. This changed after I banned her from calling me and refused to see her, except when I initiated it. The ban lasted for a year, during which she got some behavioral therapy that taught her not to criticize me; she didn't need to understand why. So she practiced it, and we became best friends.

 

But just now, reading about the history carried in her and my own DNA—a history relegating us and life itself to a narrow body of land called the Pale, a region outside of which you would be killed, and even within it, you were subject to chronic terrorist attacks, called Pogroms, from the Cossacks when they would butcher, rape, and burn everybody in a town, I understand the fear that must have constricted my mother and that was behind judgments whose deepest wish was to keep me alive.

 

No wonder that as I read this book, my body feels battered and exhausted.

Last night was the second time in my life that I've gone to a synagogue. I'm an Ashkenazi Jew ethnically, but was not raised in any religion. I liked the music and the welcoming atmosphere, but the language was foreign and any references to "God saving us" don't resonate with me.

 

Nevertheless!

 

I'm really glad I went because following the service, there was an enlightening discussion with two representatives of an organization called Standing Together: an Israeli Jew named Alon-Lee Green and an Israeli Christian Palestinian named Sally Abed. For me, the most compelling stuff was this:

 

After a long discussion of the actions of Israel's right-wing government that has not only indiscriminately bombed Gaza and had a dual system of rights—civil law for Jews; military law with no due process for Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, Sally eschewed "the middle way."

 

When there is an oppressive authority, one must call it out and reject its binary message: "us or them." The middle way is not an option.

 

Suddenly lightbulbs popped on in my head.

 

Imagine it like any container. A jar without a top, for instance: The opening to freedom and joining the atmosphere is right there, but a very tiny portion of life who is dedicated only to holding power, blocks the opening. Because they are proportionally so small compared to who is being contained, they have to use pressure to cover the space, and they press down.

 

As with any contained matter, eventually the pressure makes it explode, fracture. The more this happens, the more the small group exerting the pressure must press to try to contain us.

 

When we fracture into binary groups, "us and thems," the oppressive force has an easier time staying on top because it has created chaos among us and there is no cohesiveness pushing back.

 

The oppressive force does not care about any of the groups. Their sole interest is their position, and the fractured "us and them" groups feed them.

 

The only way to change this whole dynamic is to wake up to the fact that it is happening. Then refuse to take part in it. Even if you are looking into the eyes of somebody who is rejecting you because you do not agree with them—the eyes of somebody who believes you are their enemy—look with soft eyes, insisting on the truth of our oneness, and at least then there is the chance that they will see and wake up to their own humanity and desire for peace and freedom.

 

The morning following the October 7th Hamas attack on Jews, Standing Together organized a meeting at the only space that would accept them—a mosque. Sally was supposed to make a speech. Instead, she got up on the stage and broke into tears. As she wept, so did everybody else. Everybody in the mosque cried and cried, feeling their common grief: Jews and Palestinians. And for a brief time, there was oneness.

 

Let's feel our grief together. And our joy. We all have it. That is the only way to dethrone the bogus "leaders" who choose killing and bullying.

 

Wake up!

My article "Tulsa 1921: The Trauma Continues" about my family history research and the Greenwood, OK, massacre of a neighborhood known as "Black Wall Street" was just published on Mukoli: The Peace Magazine, produced by the School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding and Development at Kennesaw State University.

 

When I posted the link to the article on social media, I accompanied it with an old Polaroid of me and Mom, stating that it seemed appropriate. It is a lovely photograph that is in many ways a lie. (Read the article to understand that.) And I urged all of us to be brave enough to tell the truth.

 

There was a lot of good feedback from people, and one friend cited a New York Times article about the way the Tulsa Massacre started; the Times piece was far more simplistic, cut and dried, than my understanding. (Again, read the article to understand this more.) And my knee-jerk defense of what I'd written—as well as my defensive feelings—brought up a whole other story. Hence, this blog.

 

My friend was "puzzled by [my] description [at the end of the article]: "rumors about what was probably an innocent disagreement between two people spread like a virus"—a white elevator girl and a black janitor had an altercation which ignited a terrorist attack.

 

I replied:

If you read Krehbiel, which I only recommend if you want to dive into all reports ever recorded, he presents absolutely everything. The book is more like a research report of every archival source. He reports theories and then says, but they were wrong, and reports other reports. So I condensed everything, attempting to do it accurately when so many things were hearsay. Some reports say the two knew each other, may have even had a relationship; some say they argued and she yelled when he grabbed her arm; some say he tripped and grabbed her arm and she yelled. The point is, the explanations of what really happened were as viral as the internet today is, to the point where it's a game of Telephone and the truth no longer matters in the hurricane of rage that takes over.

But still I couldn't let this go. After much contemplation, I realized what was niggling at me was my friend's blanket acceptance of simple explanations she'd read, when the whole truth includes many truths. And I replied once more: Read More 

Yesterday I went to a 1:00 matinee of Merrily We Roll Along. It was wonderful as only Stephen Sondheim played by actors at the top of their game can be wonderful. The first scene shows a man whose life is a career success and a personal debacle, and then the music asks, "How did I/we get here as we seemed to be just merrily rolling along?" The answer plays out in reverse chronological order.

 

Everything about this production, from the Playbill cover to the music to the mess that ensued in the last row of the balcony behind me was perfect. But it took till this morning's contemplation to see that.

 

The successful mess of a character, Frank, was at a crossroads after producing a Hollywood hit: would he completely fuck up his life and his family by giving in to addictions for sex and money, or would he stop himself? It was during the church silence of the moment of this decision that the usher decided to seat an entire row of high school students behind my row. They tried to be quiet, but they were kids, so they disrupted the mood and tension that the entire play had built to.

 

Shortly after this, at intermission, one audience member took it upon himself to scold the students, whereupon their teacher refused to allow that they'd made the mistake which had disrupted the dramatic tension, and he reprimanded the man for his anger, deflecting with an impenetrable smile and finally accusing the angry man of intolerance, thereby enraging him more. In the teacher's mind—he later explained to me—the entire problem was upper-class theatergoers disparaging inner-city students who they believed didn't belong there. When the "Fuck yous" erupted, the usher took the two men outside.

 

During their exeunt, I tried to explain to the girl behind me, who'd asked a question right in the middle of the silence, that the problem was that they had interrupted a tense emotional moment; that it's necessary to understand the environment they'd entered.

 

"It's not my fault," she protested.

 

The teacher, still with his impenetrable smile, returned and explained to me about mass intolerance of his students. I pointed out that the entire balcony had been jarred out of the play, and finally, he mentioned almost as an aside that the whole thing was his fault because he had thought the show began at 2:00, not 1. (Meaning he had ignored three emails from the theater verifying the time.*)

 

I asked the girl who'd been trying to understand the plot if she'd like to know the plot. "Yes," she replied with gratitude and relief. So I gave her and the students around her an emotional recap. They seemed to appreciate it.

 

What dawned on me this morning was that we "principals" all took on mirror roles to the principal actors. I became Lindsay Mendez's peacemaker/explainer, Mary; the attacking audience member became Daniel Radcliffe's irate jilted writing partner, Charley; and the smiling teacher became Jonathan Groff's irresponsible writer, Frank.

 

All the world's a stage . . . It is mind-blowing how we be. But if we principals in our own plays can see this device as a principle of life, if we can admit what we're really doing, maybe we'll stop being so angry.

 

____________

*And my need to point this out in this blog is me, once again, taking on the Lindsay Mendez role of being the smart one who's seeing the whole thing, cannot affect it, so she gets sarcastic. Oy vey, it never ends.

Little did I know almost 30 years ago that my "money job" would render one of the most important experiences of love and altruism in my life. Little did I know that it would birth not only a one-act play that got published but was never read in performance until this year, and that that experience would birth journalism in the form of this essay: "To the Hero on the J Train that Crashed on the Williamsburg Bridge 28 Years Ago.

In an editorial meeting at a spiritual magazine I used to work for, owned by a church, a senior editor proposed we do a feature on all the special knowledge about money known by Jews—have a Jewish writer do it. I gasped. So did another female Jewish editor. She was kinder than I was in her explanation of why this was not a good idea. I wanted to kill the guy. He was dumbfounded by "our" problem with his idea, but finally he gave it up.

 

Antisemitism is in the fabric of world history. It lurks in places you'd never expect it. The stereotypes, the belief that all of "one people" are one way—although the people who think this would laugh if you put them in such a category: all white people, all Christians, all women/men/children, etc.

 

People's stereotypes and extreme ignorance of this history of antisemitism, and therefore the experiences of Jews—religious Jews and people like me with no religious or cultural upbringing, but whose faces tell their heritage—remains astounding to me. When you assume that people are monsters for wanting to defend themselves, when you blame people whose children were butchered in front of them, whose families were abducted, you are being unknowingly directed by antisemitism.

 

I keep thinking about my first novel, Plan Z by Leslie Kove. When I wrote it in the 1980s, I had no idea it would age and therefore morph as I have. First, it was a novel about war, then trauma, then seeing all the beautiful colors in the world, and in this particular moment, about the experience of being a person bombarded by other people's misconceptions of them.

 

My mother would be 102 today. I just read a letter she wrote to her brother in 1942 where she waxes poetic about a man she wanted to marry (not my father). "Don't let his last name fool you—" she writes, "he's one of us." Code that Jews know well, whether you grew up in the religion or not.

 

[This article first appeared in www.Rewireme.com in 2016.]

 

It's a scientific fact: experiences change markers on the DNA of traumatized people, and these markers can be passed to future generations—making them more likely to deal badly with stress. However, the good news is that since we know that this adaptive evolutionary process happens, we can consciously choose to use it in the opposite direction—creating a legacy of positive conscious change.

 

I am sitting in the cluttered office of Rachel Yehuda, Ph.D., the very vibrant and very busy Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Director of Mental Health at the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx, NY. I am here because of the results of two of her studies on the transgenerational effects of trauma on the DNA of the offspring of Holocaust survivors and mothers who were pregnant and traumatized by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But I quickly learn that these studies are but stepping stones in a research journey that has been going on for decades. And it is the accumulation of stepping stones that has led Yehuda and her team to know how to interpret the epigenetics ("the study of the molecular mechanisms by which environment controls gene activity") of the Holocaust and 9/11 trauma legacy studies.

 

"We've been saying versions of [the study results] for a really long time," Yehuda says. But the irrefutable finding of a chemical mark on a gene that is passed from parent to child has given validation to something many people sense.

 

"There's no particular reason to believe that the findings would be limited to the populations that we've studied," explains Yehuda. "It's hard to imagine that if there were such a thing as transmitted effects of trauma or reactions of the offspring to parental trauma that this would only occur for some traumas and not others. So we've got to imagine that this is going to somehow be a universal phenomenon." However she emphasizes the need for more scientific studies in different groups of people.

 

"I think that people are resonating with [the findings]," she continues, "because they see it for what it probably is which is something more universal that explains a lot of things that have really not had the proper words by way of explanation. People do feel that somehow the experiences from their parents and generations past are meaningful in some way. Epigenetics gives us a language, a vocabulary to begin to talk about these kinds of phenomena.

 

"I think that people who feel traumatized know that something isn't what it should be, but sometimes they have difficulty connecting how they're feeling to an event. Or perhaps they feel that they're exaggerating or have an exaggerated response to an event. And what concepts like this—concepts of sensitization or things like that—have going for them is that they help us understand why our response to the environment isn't just a response to what's happening to us but may be more of a collective response to how we're looking at things based on events that might have occurred in prior generations. So maybe it's like an overwriting on the genes in some way."

 

So how can we use this information? Read More