A poem for this moment

One Day at a Time

One day at a time.

One day at a time.

One day at a time.

I live in these five words.

One thousand, four hundred and forty-five days left of this creator of chaos.

I suppose I’m relatively safe from his malign focus.

A white person. Jewish, but not the kind of Jew he likes.

The ones who give him money, the ones who love him for whatever reason, because they think he loves Israel.

He loves the Jews who wear yarmulkes every day to count his money for him. (He did say that once.)

He also harbors antisemites who wore Camp Auschwitz sweatshirts on January 6.

One day at a time.

I have to live in my country as he deforms it.

How do I do that?

I cannot ignore the news because the news will not ignore me or people I care about.

One day at a time I breathe and breathe and breathe. By breathing, I exist and resist.

One day at a time.

SOLMarch 7: Politics Tonight

Tonight was the State of the Union speech as a campaign event. Biden was very good. He stumbled just a couple of times, but mostly he was in control of what he wanted to say, even seemed to ad lib a bit, and he dealt well with opposition interruptions when he could tell what they were about. (Who was that man up in the balcony and what was he shouting?) And Biden took excellent advantage of knowing who his competitor will be in the general election and taking direct aim at him.

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I’m participating in the 17th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 7 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

NaPoWriMo April 1

For National Poetry Month I will try to write a poem a day using the golden shovel form. This form takes a line of text, usually from a poem, and write your own poem with the first word of the text becoming the last word of the first line of your poem, the second word of the text becoming the last word of the second line of your poem, and so on. I will be using New York Times headlines as my source material, inspired by a New York Times suggestion in the middle of the pandemic.

 

On a sunny day in April, for

Children and oldsters tired of the cold, some

Take their political signs that show GOP

Support, while others’ signs are from voters

Who oppose. Diehards feel no fatigue

In the fight for justice. What slows

Is the endless fight against the rich, who rush

To grab the most, leaving scraps to

Trickle down to the rest of us, our back

Against the wall, wanting to ignore the ex-president.

 

Source: For Some GOP Voters, Fatigue Slows Rush to Back Ex-president.

SOL Tuesday: Politics in New York City

Today is Primary Day in New York City for local races. As I went to vote (for candidates for mayor, public advocate, and city council) at a local public school, I passed a table surrounded by volunteers for the incumbent, Mark Levine, and a few feet away a large sign and a young black man handing out campaign cards for the challenger, Thomas Lopez-Pierre.

            After I voted, I stopped by the young man to ask him some questions about Lopez-Pierre. The candidate’s campaign materials all note that, first of all, he is Christian. This struck me as an odd way for a New York City candidate to identify himself, though many who live in the district are Hispanic, and probably Christian. Another campaign handout listed campaign contributions he had received from landlords or other real estate figures, but the photographs show obviously Jewish men wearing yarmulkes. Lopez-Pierre even explicitly claims, on his Web site, that Mark Levine is supported by “greedy landlords,” again showing those men in yarmulkes.

            I had to find out what this young man thought of the overtly anti-Semitic campaign of the man whose campaign cards he was passing out. But after I’d said I wanted to ask him some questions, he explained that he probably wouldn’t be able to answer them well. You see, he had just arrived in New York a couple of weeks ago from Mississippi and had seen this job listed on Craig’s List. Aha, he was being paid; Lopez-Pierre didn’t even have enough, if any, volunteers to hand out his materials. When the young man heard what my questions were about, he was concerned and said if he’d known this, he wouldn’t have taken the job.

            We then had a nice conversation. His name is Jonathan, he’s a photographer, and wants to finish his art degree. He’s come to New York because his girlfriend is attending the New School. I welcomed him to New York, and we shook hands, smiled, and exchanged names. Maybe this encounter will even get Jonathan interested in politics in his new home.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

SOLSC 23: Agitating in the Cold

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            It was about 34 degrees just before noon today when I set out for a little politicking. Our local state senator was elected as a Democrat, but she is part of something called the Independent Democratic Conference, eight state senators who vote with the Republicans to give them the majority in our state Senate, even though elected Democrats are the majority.

            (Why do they do it? The Republicans promise them committee chairmanships, staff, and funds, which they didn’t think they’d get from their Democratic compatriots. One result is that a single-payer health system, which the state Assembly has passed, is blocked in the state Senate.)

            With IL, a neighbor, we set up a table near the farmers’ market. I handed out leaflets explaining what we were for, and my IL asked people to sign a petition asking this state senator to either come back to the Democrats or resign.

            But it was cold. Really cold. And breezy on the corner where we stood. Most people walking by had their hands in the pockets and didn’t want to take them out. The pen for signing the petition seemed to be freezing. IL managed to get at least a dozen people to sign, and she had some good conversations. I’m not so good at conversing, but I know how to hold leaflets so passers-by can see what it’s about before they ignore it, or take one. 

            When my fingers began to feel frostbit, after about 45 minutes, we decided we’d done enough good work for the day. Packed up our gear and headed home for a warm lunch.

 

Slice of Life, #18

            Yesterday, through the wonders of the Internet, I watched about an hour of political commentary on Israeli TV, i24. I’d become interested in that country’s elections since Netanyahu used the U.S. Congress as a prop in his campaign, to divert Israeli voters from their economic problems and widening inequality.

            I don’t think often about being Jewish; I’m not religious, and while my parents tried to give me some Jewish culture, sending me to an after-school secular Yiddish shul, all I remember is what some of the letters look like. Periodically, I tried to understand the Middle East conflict, and sensed that settlements in land occupied after the 1967 war were not a good sign. In the 2000s I sometimes joined a Women in Black vigil in sympathy with the Jewish and Palestinian Women in Black and against the occupation.

            I’m not a Zionist either. My parents were leftists and not nationalist. The Jewish “homeland” my father told me about was Birobidzhan, an “autonomous region” the Soviets set aside for Jewish Communists in far eastern Siberia, bordering China. (Did the Russian Communists think they could solve their “Jewish problem” by getting all the Russian Jews to move as far away as possible?)

            Watching another country’s election is fascinating, especially when the system is so different from ours. The program on i24 had a woman host and four male pundits whose names didn’t register since I don’t really follow Israeli politics. Here’s what I learned from just that brief dip.

            1. Racism in Israel is complicated, not only Jews against Arabs but also Ashkenazi Jews (those from Europe) against Sephardim (those from the Middle East). Alas, it’s skin color again. Netanyahu blatantly appealed to the first kind when he said, on election day, that Arab Israelis were voting in hordes and his right wing was in danger. But some commentators thought Netanyahu’s opposition, Labor, with its Ashkenazi roots, had failed to be inclusive of Sephardim, and I find that very disquieting.

            2. Because Israel has a parliamentary system, there are multiple parties, 10 in fact. I was engrossed listening to the pundits add up the various possible combinations to form a coalition that the heads of the two parties with the most seats projected to win, but each far from a majority, would need. Would American politics be any less dysfunctional if there were separate parties for all the factions within our current Democrats and Republicans? Maybe, maybe not.