Community Blog

By Gabbi Traub

I have a very complicated relationship with modern-day Valentine’s Day. On the one hand, I think it’s beautiful to designate one day to celebrate your loved ones. I grew up “celebrating” Valentine’s Day with my parents and family. However, as I got older, it became (or perhaps I was just starting to become more aware of) this insanely over-commercialized romantic holiday where you were required to shower your significant other (if you happen to have one) with gifts, activities, and a crowded overpriced dinner with 200 of your closest friends. 

The origins of Valentine’s Day fascinates me.  Like any now over-commercialized Hallmark holiday – it has pagan origins and is based on a Roman tradition of men getting drunk at the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain. The women welcomed it because it was thought to bring fertility.  Later in history, it became about honoring a saint in the Catholic tradition.  In this case- Saint Valentine.  No one can agree who was the actual Valentine. According to the History Channel, it was (probably) one of three men.  All of whom were executed by the Emperor for various crimes including performing secret marriages or helping Catholic prisoners escape Roman torture. Super romantic. 

I’ve never really understood the appeal of a modern-day Valentine’s day.  Maybe I’ve never understood the need to shower your significant other with gifts and flowers and candy and spend exorbitant amounts of money on a mediocre 3-course prix-fixe meal, especially when one could do this any other time of the year or even spread it out over the course of the year – for significantly less money.  Why do we feel the need to shower each other only once a year? 

Perhaps that’s my naivité, perhaps it’s how I grew up, and perhaps it’s the fact that I was single for the majority of my life and was (still am?) bitter about it only being marketed to couples. I certainly celebrated many “singles awareness days”, or “SAD” (pun unfortunately intended). Perhaps it’s all three.  Who knows.  Regardless – I’ve spoken about my feelings before and been met with overt frustration.  How could I not want to be showered with gifts and told I’m loved? How could I not want to celebrate love? And while I certainly understand the appeal of having one designated day a year to vomit up as much “love” as we can muster, why not expect that always? Why does it have to be one day and one day only?  

Now I’m not saying that one should expect to give/receive flowers, gifts, and candy (or your gift of choice) every day of the year.  That’s a bit much.  But why can’t we celebrate love in our own way, every day?  Why does it have to be romantic love? Why can’t it be platonic, familial, or god forbid, self-love? 

All I’m saying is – I don’t appreciate over-commercialized Hallmark stamped proof of love being shoved down my throat every year.  It (in my humble opinion) has no other purpose than for us to feel guilted into buying things and professing our love in a way that could be uncomfortable, for no other reason than it’s what we’re told to do.

Now, if you love taking one day a year to just go nuts for your loved ones, by all means, go for it.  And one perk of this crazy holiday? Severely discounted heart-shaped candy at every major store the following day.  Honestly, I’m all about that life.  Just some food for thought. 

By Leah S. Abrams

My friend, Ed Jackson, offered me one of the wisest life lessons I’ve learned anew many times: “Sometimes, in life, a twig is just a twig.” He shared this nugget with me when I was in high school, when he was Dr. J., my history teacher. It was profound to me that this notion should come from someone who was always teaching us to dig down further into the story.

A few weeks before this past November’s election, I asked Dr. Jackson – now Ed – why the way I’d been taught seems so vastly different from how I’ve recently found myself learning is not how most folks appear to have been educated, particularly in high school. How was it, I wondered, that so many people learned what seems a very one-sided, glossed-over version of U.S. History. What were these text books responsible for people’s knowledge base?

You see, I learned history and government through teachers, beginning in junior high and fully blooming with Dr. Jackson in high school, who offered us a variety of books, essays, lectures, and facilitated discussions. As a rather direct result of Dr. J.’s sophomore year class where I spent weekends with my classmates in our city’s then very intimate library, tracing the routes followed by Native American tribes as they were continually pushed off their land, I ended up on a cross-country trip.

My sister and I were the only students on that summer’s teen bus /camping tour who most relished the history and geography of the trek. My sister had inherited our father’s passion for local history. We were from Boston, he’d enthused, steeped in our Nation’s long narrative for all the pride that comes with it, along with the responsibility for the many accompanying ails. My sister, upon moving with her mother to Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn two years before that summer journey, was steeped in pursuit of becoming the local fountain of historical knowledge that my dad was on our home state and, like him, she soaked in tales of any place she visited.

As for me, geography had long eluded me, until Dr. Jackson brought it to life, connected it to stories of progress and of all the tribulations, suffering, injustice, loss that is the ongoing price paid for those bits of advancement. To see the country I’d finally understood on a map, to physically attach landmarks and rivers and mountain ranges to all I’d been studying was thrilling.

In another of Dr. Jackson’s classes, I wrote a paper comparing three U.S. cities, looking at subjects that included education and economics. That is the first time I remember encountering a dismay that would come to continually pang me as it did my grandmother with whom I discussed it years later when she visited me in Oakland and noticed it herself. Namely, the condition of places named in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

While I no longer recall all three cities I researched in Dr. J.’s class, I remember vividly the fury and heartbreak of reading about East St. Louis, Illinois. It was in Jonathan Kozol’s then just-published “Savage Inequalities” that I first ran across this passage quoting a 14-year old girl:

“Every year in February we are told to read the same old speech of Martin Luther King. We read it every year. ‘I have a dream…’ It does begin to seem – what is the word?… Perfunctory… We have a school in East St. Louis named for Dr. King. The school is full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains. Every student in that school is black. It’s like a terrible joke on history.”

There is a review from the Chicago Tribune at the front of that book that strikes me now, nearly thirty years later, with a heavy blow: “One wonders, though, whether a sequel to Savage Inequalities – written, say, twenty-five years from now – will document a country that decided to embrace and educate all its children.”

If one is to tune into any reputable news outlet, it is abundantly clear that we would have to answer Thomas Cottle of The Tribune with the response he clearly feared: no. Inequities reign. Our schools are still largely segregated and not at all equal. And, at 2020’s Martin Luther King Day commemoration in East St. Louis, The Rev. J. Kevin James Jr. called on the community:

“to not wait for the one time a year when King’s dream is celebrated… This should not be the only time we push for justice… Imagine an East St. Louis with black-owned businesses, black-owned grocery stores, a Walmart with a black general manager, a city where our schools are thriving not because of test scores but because of content… I wrestle today with this idea of this beloved community. Dr. King’s dream spoke of hope. He wanted us to continue in this dream and make it become a reality. But, in the world we’re living in today, it almost seems like we’re going backwards… All around this country we call the land of the free, we find there’s a continual joy in allowing other people to suffer and be persecuted.”

My pre-election conversation with Dr. Jackson – now Ed – shed a good deal of light on how we’ve gotten here and why it is that my history education was unique. In the 1980’s, Ed explained, states began pushing for more standardized tests – tests designed by outside consultants rather than by teachers, and those tests would be used to grade schools. One result? A nationwide slashing of civics courses – no more education around voting, the Constitution, city and state government workings.

I was fortunate. I grew up in a Boston suburb that my mother could not afford because my great-uncle had built my grandparents a house there long before and we moved in with them before she met my dad in the same town. And so, because of good luck relating not at all to anything I did or accomplished, I went to a high school where Ed Jackson, along with another of our teachers, had responded to those educational system changes by creating a “Government & Politics” course that proved so popular it was expanded to include 10^th graders.

That move away from an in-depth understanding of how our country has evolved, of the way our Democracy works, of the ways in which systems perpetuate inequity if they remain unchallenged leads directly to where we find ourselves in this moment in history. We must do better. We must not turn to yet another generation and demand they continue fighting the same battle for simple human decency in a country more than capable of providing for all its inhabitants. We must not continue paying attention to what we call Black History only in February.

I want my nephew to come of age in an era where Black History is fully absorbed into all U.S. History courses, in classrooms that are truly representative of all of us. I want him to know a society that finally woke up, once and for all, to all its faults and realized it had the power to change – to actually embody the principles upon which it proclaims to be based. When he hears from a student at that East St. Louis school named for Dr. King, I want him to hear of an education like the one I got from Ed Jackson, in a building as safe and overflowing with resources as the one where I got that education. And when he drives down Martin Luther King Blvd. in any city in this country, I want him to see those thriving Black-owned business described by Reverend James, being frequented by people of every race and ethnicity and gender identity and religion as makes up our species.

Ed was right – there are too many very real, very big things in this world for us to work toward repairing to spend time on those small, personal things we make into so much more than they are – the twigs that are just that. The complicated part – the part that needs our attention – is the tree as a whole, its expansive root system, the communication system that runs among the forest as a whole. Let us turn our attention there – let us tackle it once and for all so that today’s young people are not, thirty years on, shaking their heads at books they studied long ago under a misguided faith that, ugly truth exposed, we would choose a different path once and for all.

By Leah S. Abrams

To hit PAUSE forces a certain stillness, reflection. A pause is different than a STOP – it suggests a natural un-pause – continued movement, eventually…

Oh, how I mocked the language when it all began. We weren’t going into quarantine or lockdown – oh, no – we were, the governor insisted, going to PAUSE. As a state, as a community, we weren’t, New Yorkers that we are, going to STOP – just… PAUSE. Together. Language, Mr. Cuomo averred, mattered, and words can carry positive or negative connotations. And, while my industry may remain largely decimated, I now believe wholeheartedly in Cuomo’s choice of terminology.

(As an aside, you may want to make a note of this moment because I am far more often found chiding the governor, even more than I do the mayor which is really saying something.)

To hit PAUSE forces a certain stillness, reflection. A pause is different than a STOP – it suggests a natural un-pause – continued movement, eventually, but forcing you to, say, get up for that computer-alert stretch break you typically dismiss.

Last January obviously looked very different for me than the month we’re now wrapping. I rang in 2020 with college friends and their families, as I do nearly every year – something the pandemic would steal from the group at large for the first time in nearly thirty years of gathering. A week later, I celebrated Rona’s birthday at her 54 Below concert, with my mother and Norm who’d made a special trip down for it, and surrounded by this most generous artistic community that continually inspires me. I signed a theatre contract to produce a playwright whose extraordinary gift with language is the very definition of what our society needs in this moment.

In those early 2020 months leading up to the long PAUSE, I saw more than sixteen shows, including “Come from Away” for the third time and “Mazz & Bricks” whose writer/performer I just watched in Origin Theater’s First Irish Festival gone virtual for 2021. I’d made my inaugural outing to the Cooper Hewitt Museum with one of my newest friends who, the week before the pause officially began, would take my bride’s maid’s dress to alter for a wedding that has been twice postponed, before I headed to my final in-person play – Simon Stone’s “Medea” at BAM.

In that time, I’d also attended a protest march when this country’s failed leadership refused to hold its egomaniacal leader accountable for his first called-out impeachable offense, and a concert commemorating the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with my mother and Norm in what would be our last visit for what is now over a year and where I spent the evening well aware of where each security guard was stationed and where were the children in my section who are always first priority in protecting under life-threatening circumstances. And I went to see Hilary Bettis’ “72 Miles To Go,” about a family living in Arizona, 72 miles from their deported mother in Nogales, Mexico.

And, then, PAUSE. Fast forward – a worsening pandemic that much of the country ignores or, worse, calls a hoax; the country watches, on video, police officers deliberately and slowly kill an innocent man, surrounded by civilians; peaceful protestors of that violence are met with kettling and tear gas and clubs and mass arrests; an armed mob breaks into the Nation’s Capital, calling for legislators’ deaths, and is met with no violent resistance.

And people, in every one of these instances, are shocked. I am not. I simply wonder how any of it is news to anyone. Has everyone gone ignorant of U.S. history? Of humankind’s history? I could easily continue down this road, as I often do. Or, I can use the PAUSE – regroup, shift.

One week after that insurrection, the country swore in its 46^th President, a man who has spent his life in service to this country and who chose, as our Vice President, the first woman, first person of color, first Indian-American to hold the position – all in one. For the first time, a President’s inaugural address called out our cancer of systemic racism. In their first week in office, both rhetoric and action shifted to pro-immigrant which, as a reminder, is actually the single identity each of us shares unless one is Native American and just now finally being represented in the federal cabinet of the country that was stolen from them in the first place.

And, a week after white supremacists proudly sported “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirts while waving confederate flags in an attempt to overthrow our Democracy’s fair elections, a worldwide community of Jews and non-Jews alike gathered together online to commemorate the 76^th anniversary of the camp’s liberation with readings from children’s, from young people’s diaries of the time, after days before having celebrated the 40th anniversary of both the Yiddish Book Center and Klezmer Conservatory Band – two organizations each launched by a college student’s dogged enthusiasm for a culture and language on the brink of extinction.

Like everyone, I miss my pre-pandemic life. But I don’t miss the pace of it – the societal pressure to always be working, doing, striving. I fear the desperation in people to return to “normal” when so much is ailing us will result in lessons having not been learned, a return to complacency.

But then I see so many little glimmers of hope – the friend of privilege who has had an awakening on the subject this past year, the community refrigerators neighbors are stocking for one another, organizers keeping people engaged in political activism and volunteer efforts to care for one another, storytellers and artists of all kinds calling out our truths and continuing to entertain us. And, like so many others report, I no longer wake up in a state of a panic because my government is being led by a madman on a social media platform originally designed to help folks navigate conferences and which has, in this writer’s humble opinion, yielded the worst bastardization of language we’ve ever seen.

The governor was right – language matters. We have a long road ahead, full of work I fear never ends, but to turn on the news for White House press briefings where eloquence and decency are back in fashion, where the people in charge take science and our health seriously, leading by example? That is reason enough to hold onto a bit of faith that starting up again may actually yield improvement rather than simply a neglectful return to pre-PAUSE status quo.

By Rona Siddiqui

Arts & Culture generates at least $1 billion in every state. We account for 4.5% of U.S. GDP (more than Agriculture and Mining combined, and bigger than Transportation or Tourism).

Dear Mr. President and Madam Vice President,

Artists are in peril and we need your help. We all know we could not get through the pandemic without our frontline workers, those in critical retail and trades, food production, transportation, and child care, but imagine getting through the pandemic without music, film, television, books, photography, art. Historically, Arts & Culture have been considered just as essential to the human experience as the air we breathe and here is why:

-Artists remind us of our humanity.

-Artists tell the stories of our past that have fallen from our collective consciousness, but live in our bones. Our gravest mistakes are forgotten within a generation unless we continue to remind ourselves of the dire consequences when our actions are motivated by lies.

-Artists are the harbingers of danger, the speakers of truth, the connectors of generations and cultures, the voices of the marginalized and forgotten. We are only as strong as the most vulnerable among us. We are here to remind you.

-Artists reach to the heart of the human experience to make people feel. When people feel, the pathways to empathy open and beliefs can change, and right now, we need a whole lot of change!

-Artists are powerful. They are often the first to be silenced under governments who lie, cheat, and attempt to bend reality to serve their own selfish ends. Remember when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan and outlawed music? Or when Hitler banned abstract art?

Beauty is essential to remind us that we’re good. Music is essential to remind us that we vibrate at the same frequencies, theatre is essential because it causes our hearts to beat together and our minds to expand. We are reminded that we share one common experience of life on earth. Each one of us has equal value.

We need artists more than ever to tell the truth, draw us out, and give us all the strength to face our demons together.

We need the government to help us do our jobs so we can help you do yours: Provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for every American.

Artists are in peril. 2.7 million Arts & Culture workers are unemployed. 41% of Arts & Culture institutions report they will not survive the pandemic. Arts & Culture generates at least $1 billion in every state. We account for 4.5% of U.S. GDP (more than Agriculture and Mining combined, and bigger than Transportation or Tourism). With its undeniable impact on our lives, how do we not have a national department of Arts & Culture like so many other countries do?

I know that you understand what is at stake. I implore you to be bold and take action to lift up Arts & Culture, make sure this community is taken care of now and beyond the pandemic, and give Arts Workers their place at the table. It is essential to our emotional and spiritual well-being as well as our economic health.

With your action, you will allow artists to continue to give us hope, drive us to be better and to understand the world around us, frame difficult conversations and dream of new possibilities for a brighter future.

Thank you for your service to our country during this troubled time. Your bravery and integrity will not be forgotten. We will tell the story.

Sincerely,

Rona Siddiqui

By Jamie Rosler

It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, over fifty years since his assassination, and American politicians are making excuses for white supremacist rioters’ invasion of our government buildings.

There’s a general rule (laws, actually, all over the United States and in several other countries around the world) that pedestrians have the right of way at all intersections and crosswalks (marked or unmarked). As a pedestrian, though, one knows how rarely that rule is adhered to by drivers.

Regardless of legal standing, the responsibility ultimately rests with the person most likely to sustain a life-threatening injury, assuming they care to keep living. It’s not fair, but it’s true.

Also not fair but true, as with many other statistics in the USA, people of color are more likely to be injured or killed in a vehicle-pedestrian accident. This is the result of various factors, all of which could themselves be written about at length (and indeed have been and should be). Those factors are not inevitable facts of human existence. They are entirely within our control if only we (white people, those in power anywhere, you who are reading this essay) would stand up every day and speak these truths out loud.

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As I sat in a Jayco-brand camper in a Dallas wood lot less than a ten-minute drive from where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, I wondered why messengers of peace are murdered but messengers of murder aren’t.

Not wanting to be a messenger of murder myself, I have to acknowledge the innate hypocrisy of having little to no objection to someone assassinating the 45^th President of the United States. For people who care about humanity, and have been paying any attention to American politics, it seems hard to argue against the idea that innumerable lives would be better, if not outright saved, had he been disposed of a few years ago.

Of course there’s no knowing what his most rabid supporters might have done in reaction, just as there’s no reason for progressive liberals to think a Pence presidency would have been kinder (the modern Republican party has been heading down this road for decades, after all), but the mob that stormed the Capitol earlier this month would certainly have been fed less fuel by their narcissistic dear leader.

As I was writing this, an historic second presidential impeachment came to pass, and of a one-term president no less. The likelihood of a conviction in the Senate is sadly not guaranteed. We’re looking at the very real possibility of a second American Civil War, fought over much of the same ideologies (hint: it has nothing to do with federalism or states’ rights). 

People are posting on social media to help their community prepare for the worst possible scenario. I changed my travel plans (don’t @ me, I’m being Covid-safe) from driving from Texas to New York right now, to waiting until after Inauguration Day to avoid a potential spike in nationwide violence. It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, over fifty years since his assassination, and American politicians are making excuses for white supremacist rioters’ invasion of our government buildings.

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Walking my dog in west Dallas the other day, a pedestrian in a city of drivers, I stood on a corner across the street from a park and at the entrance to an interstate on-ramp. There was no traffic light to wait for or obey. Cars from two different directions were taking their turns, as they saw it, disregarding the person standing and waiting to cross, until one driver stopped. Instead of making a left turn onto the highway when traffic stopped coming from the other direction, they stopped and waited for me to cross the street.

This simple act resonated so deeply, in a way it might not have in a different time or place.

We all have the power to change patterns of behavior that seem otherwise ingrained in our society. We have the power to see, to decide, to act for change. We have this power every day in everything we do. We can be the government official supporting sedition, or we can actively stand against it and protect our fellow humans.

Which do you want to be?

In response to the past week’s events, the culmination of all that is broken in our shared home, we offer you something different for this week’s community blog: a strongly suggested read.

Please consider setting aside the time to read, in full, Lawrence Wright’s recent New Yorker article, “The Plague Year: The mistakes and struggles behind an American Tragedy,” excerpted below.

“You need to do something,” [Glen] Hubbard warned. “We’ve been having a debate for decades now about the size of government. The more interesting debate is the scope of government… If Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War, had the idea of using government as a battering ram for opportunity, why can’t we do that today? Instead of focusing on how big government is, think about what you want it to do.”

[Dr. Ebony Hilton] became the first Black female anesthesiologist to be hired by the Medical University in South Carolina, which opened in 1824. U.Va. hired her in 2018. “If you look at white women with my same level of degrees, my child is five to seven times more likely to die before his first birthday than theirs. It’s been that way historically for Black women. Our numbers haven’t really changed, as far as health outcomes, since slavery times.”

The country, it turned out, was experiencing wildly different pandemics. For every ten thousand Americans, there were thirty-eight coronavirus cases. But, for whites, the number was twenty-three; for Blacks, it was sixty-two; for Hispanics, it was seventy-three… People of color are more likely to be exposed because so many are essential workers. “Only one in five African-Americans can work remotely,” she [Hilton] said. “Only one in six Hispanics can.”

Hilton, on the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests: ” For black men, one in every thousand is at risk of dying in his lifetime from an encounter with a police officers. If you think about that number, that’s what leads Black people to say it’s worth me dying and going to this protest and saying enough is enough. Police brutality is almost like a pandemic… It’s a feeling – I’m going to die anyway, so I might as well risk this virus that I can’t see, to speak about the virus of systemic racism that I can see.”

Such doctors knew how to click into emergency mode. Before COVID, that might last thirty or forty minutes – say, with a heart-attack patient. After a bus wreck or a mass casualty event, emergency mode could last a full day. With COVID, it lasted weeks on end.

Lorna Breen, a forty-nine-year-old doctor, was admitted to the psych unit… Lorna had been living in Manhattan, overseeing the E.R. at New York Presbyterian Allen Hospital. When COVID inundated New York, she worked twelve-hour shifts that often blurred into eighteen. She barely slept. Within a week, Breen caught COVID herself. She sweated it out in her apartment while managing her department remotely. After her fever broke, she returned to work… So many doctors in New York fell ill that, at one point, Breen supervised the E.R.’s in two hospitals simultaneously. It became too much… During the eleven days she spent in U.Va.’s hospital, she was terrified that her career was over. Licensing boards, she knew, might flag evidence of mental illness. Before COVID, Breen had never had a trace of instability… Breen seemed to improve… Feist took Breen home with her on the last Saturday in April. The next day, Breen killed herself.”

“I’m not buying a fucking mask,” Ricard Rose, a thirty-seven-year-old Army veteran from Ohio, posted on Facebook. “I’ve made it this far by not buying into that damn hype.” He tested positive on July 1st and died three days later. There are many similar stories.

More than a thousand health-care workers have died while taking care of COVID patients. Nurses are the most likely to perish, as they spend the most time with patients.

“Across America, people waited in long lines to vote – despite the disease, despite attempts to discredit or invalidate their vote, despite postal delays, despite Russian or Iranian meddling, despite warning from the White House that the President would not go quietly if he lost. They voted as if their country depended on it.”

By Reed Seifer

In this age of mass emigration from cities to the suburbs here are tips on how to become a “suburb-a-hole”…

Firstly, remember, there is no “us” in suburbia, only “I.”

Be certain crossed arms, impatient foot taps, and dead stares will make any desired eventoccur more quickly. It’s especially effective at Starbucks or at any café. Stand as closely to the barista as social distancing allows. Or throw caution to the wind, get in close, get it faster! 

Might as well stick your nose out of your mask, too.

Don’t bother to take three minutes wait and send a text to a friend, cruise your social media, or even indulge in the serotonin boost of leaving a negative yelp review.  Everyone knows, texting is for doing while driving. 

Actually, what are you doing inside a café?! It’s more impersonal and ideal to use the drive-thru. If the drive-thru line of SUVs is long, don’t dare park elsewhere and walk over. That may burn a few calories, but you are privileged to own a Peloton.

The line of cars extends into the main street? No problem. Practice obliviousness. Forget people who are using the road. Maybe you can tie up traffic. Focus mentally on your skinny chai latte. With one. pump. of. sweetener. Yum! Beep Beep Honk Honk. You have surround sound audio. Crank it. 

Continuing on the topic of driving, never use a turn signal. Never! Why should people benefit from knowing what direction you are going in? Frankly it’s none of their business! A car may be a lethal weapon but it’s also a status symbol. 

Lastly, the best time to mow your lawn is 7 am Saturday or Sunday. There are these fabulous devices that blow cut grass off your lawn. They’re harnessed to one’s back, and require ear protection while using because they are so LOUD. Blow all the shards of cut grass off your lawn and into the street and your neighbor’s lawn. You know the ones who let the clover grow wild?They deserve it. Everyone knows weeds must be chemically executed. 

Following these steps you will find yourself well on your way to being a discourteous, incautious, self-centered suburb-a-hole. Congratulations! May you find your just deserts. 

By Jamie Rosler

When I signed up for this blog slot, it was a choice made entirely absent of the realization that this is the last Undiscovered Works blog post of 2020. One might expect the writer of an essay published on December 27 to wax poetic about the year past and the possibilities that lie ahead, to reflect sagely on where they’ve been and where they hope to go, or at the very least to recognize the responsibility inherent in an end-of-year reflection.

I have no waxing and no sage reflections, with just the weight of an unmet deadline on my shoulders. There are people whose job it is to recap past events, report on present circumstances, or predict future possibilities (though that last group rarely does us any favors with their forecasts), and I am not one of those people. Sometimes I turn those events into trivia questions but my editorial expectations regarding the public good are confined to the small spaces and networks of people that make up my individual world. My dog tends to agree unconditionally which is good for the ego but bad for perspective.

It’s hard to write about the last year (or the outgoing presidential administration) without using the word unprecedented. Can we all agree to shelve that word for the next four years? In fact, let us just scrap the entire concept of unprecedented actions, instead leaning into choices that have been tried by other societies and proven positive for years. Things like universal healthcare regardless of individual wealth, financial reparations to those that our government has directly harmed through generational enslavement, taxing the absurdly rich and seating more women in places of power.

Appearances and content aside, this essay wants to be light and funny. It wants to bring you a moment of delight to help counter the weight and the worry that you’ve carried with yourself since March, or since you came out, or were born Black in America. Does that make me David against Goliath, but my slingshot is broken and the sun’s in my eyes?

I don’t have the skills, or perhaps just the distance from our present moment, to offer viewpoint-changing revelations that provide answers to all (or probably any) of your questions. What I do have is sympathy for your worries, a shared sense of confusion about humanity’s expression of both its best and worst traits, and a wish that any harm this year caused you can and will be reversed in the months to come.

The problems of our world can feel insurmountable in even our most plentiful of times, let alone in our current state of widespread half-truths, authoritarian power grabs, and white supremacy teeming all around the nation. Yet, in this same year that saw the ultimate politicization of public health, we saw innumerable protests across the country and the world decrying the ongoing violence against our Black brethren at the hands of the state. We saw record numbers of queer people and people of color running for public office and winning. We saw neighbors helping neighbors eat, vote, and stay healthy. Teachers, healthcare workers, and stay-at-home parents may soon finally receive the credit, respect, and pay that they deserve for raising our children, caring for the unwell, and educating the next generation. If your eyes were previously closed to these inequities, it is not too late to stand up for a better future.

One thing I believe we can all take away from this past year is that nothing, literally nothing, is guaranteed. We can view that through a lens of nihilism, or we can see the beauty and promise of a world that has yet to be created, but for which the seeds already exist in all our hands. When enough of us understand that we truly are Stronger Together, we will then be ready to Make America Great.

By Jessie Wayburn

The following is a jumble-story of my family. It isn’t cohesive or linear. If you follow along, you may get a taste of what it’s like for me to experience life. Maybe you will see your experience in mine. Maybe you will see a new side of reality. I share this in the hopes of addressing the hard topic of family at a time of year when a lot of us are choosing to stay away from family for the first time. I have either had to choose to stay away or had unwilling separation, and I’m here to tell you you can get through it.

If I could, I would tell my father right now: “I will never know how much I could miss you. Thanks for the good hair.”

Every so often, I have to remind myself of how many siblings I have. I am the oldest of four sisters, two of whom I did not grow up with, and one of whom I did. I’ll call her my homesister. I have met one of my two half sisters from my father, both with whom I’ve been friends on Facebook for several years – since his death three days after his birthday, three months after I met him on my 27th birthday. My newest sister and I threw our father’s ashes, which promptly blew back on us, off the Golden Gate Bridge. I haven’t met my other sister. I wonder if I ever will.

For whatever reason, I recently googled the name of the father of my homesister. As a half-sister, she looks nothing like me, and we are complete opposites. Shitty confession: I think I genuinely hated her when I was young, though the adults around me assured me I would grow to love her. She was born when I was 5 and a half. I did say to my mom that we should put her in the garbage can because I was made to put her copious diaper trash out in the hirby kirby, and I legit thought it would be more efficient-slash-I really-hated-the-change-in-my-home. 

The real reason I wanted to throw out my baby homesister was that I felt abandoned. Again. I realize now that I was abandoned at least twice in my early life: first, passively/actively, by my father, and then actively/repeatedly by my mother. I deeply love my homesister now. The adults were right. I was a typical, shitty, only child. I probably considered myself an only child most of my life, mostly because we were treated so very differently. Honestly, I haven’t really processed that yet, one trauma drama at a time, please.

Because I corrected my mother when she texted me, “Happy anniversary yyyyyy [sic]! Hope it was a good one! Love you!” on the first anniversary of my wedding after I had told her I was getting a divorce, she didn’t text me again for four months. She hates being corrected so much she won’t check on her offspring going through a trauma. She’s gonna hate this post. Hi, mom. I do love you. You are hard to love, but I appreciate the thought. I hope you find happiness. I hate text messages. Since then, we’ve spoken a couple times, but it’s tersely cordial, and we don’t joke. We are both funny as hell, can you imagine being so hurt by someone, you hide your funny?

My conception story is problematic. Most people I tell this to don’t know their own conception stories (if you can, ask about your own, but prepare yourself). According to my mom, she was raped when she was 30. She told me that when I was 12, which was almost 25 years ago, so let’s just say I am able to put myself in her shoes more specifically now (if, like me, you can’t do math, I’m writing this at 36 and a half). According to my father, and my mother’s story she told her family, they “got drunk and screwed.” I think both stories are true. A yes that turned into a no, maybe during intercourse, maybe post-event. I definitely believe my mom did not want to become impregnated, she let me and my homesister know that repeatedly, actively, that she would, in fact, send us to a children’s home if we didn’t behave, that she never wanted kids in the first place, but she doesn’t believe in abortion. (Who even knew how to behave when the rules/reality changed unpredictably?) So, my foundational understanding of my existence is that I am essentially unwanted, foisted upon a mentally ill mother who was generous enough to let me, the daily reminder of a rape, live under her roof. See? Problematic. I have a very good, patient therapist.

My father’s other two daughters grew up in a lovely, middle-class, nuclear family. He got clean and became a beacon of light in his community, as evidenced by the 400+ people at his memorial.  It’s hard not to compare , and of course, their lives weren’t perfect, but it sounds like they did their best, which seemed to be good enough most of the time. My younger homesister and I continue to be emotionally bludgeoned by the generational trauma. I know my mom did her best, but in a lot of instances, that wasn’t good enough. It’s hard to sit with that reality with compassion. I do feel anger. I do feel grief. I do feel resentment. I struggle to trust the feelings of love from others. But I don’t judge. 

So how do I get through this half-forced orphanhood? I mentioned my therapist. Quarantine necessitated a dog, who is now my kid. I also find family in my friendships. I have dearly beloved extended family, and of course, my homesister. It’s all given me tools to survive this wild world.

So, as I wrap this up, I wish that your unwilling distance from your family gives you something you didn’t know you needed, and that you notice you can survive.

By Rossi

As a Jew, I always felt left out on Christmas. Sure we had Chanukah! Chanukah, Shmanukah! 

Mom would remind us every year, “The Goyem (non Jews) only have one day to celebrate. We have 8!” 

Every night we would gather around the dinette table in the kitchen as Mom lit the candles and then, hearts in our throats, we would wait for her to dole out our gifts. One by one they would come; lead balloons plunging our hearts right into the toilet. A hair brush, a bottle of shampoo, hand lotion, these were, you know, things Mom’s are supposed to give you, but NOT on Chanukah! 

After every 4^th or 5^th horrible gift Mom would let loose with a real one. A Barbie doll for my sister, a Tonka Truck for my brother. I was the queen of the tomboys and wanted the GI Joe Action figure or The Big Jim action figure. Mom finally relented after years of watching me use the Barbie dolls as road kill for my brother’s Tonka trucks and gave me Big Jim the first night of Chanukah and GI Joe on the last. 

The problem was that Mom never bought anything that was not on sale. Paying for full price for something was completely un-Kosher! This wouldn’t have bothered me much if it weren’t for the fact that on sale, often meant, “damaged goods.” The best thing about the “Big Jim” doll was that this muscular boy was supposed to Karate chop through wood, through all sorts of things. You would push the button on his back and  “Wham” karate chop. When you pushed the back of my damaged Jim, all he did was twitch. So instead of getting a super hero I got a neurotic. Perfect! What could be more Jewish than neurosis? MY GI Joe came sans his army uniform. I got a naked GI Joe. I wrapped him in a handkerchief. In his makeshift rope, he looked more like Jesus than Joe. 

By the time the 8 days of shampoo and body lotion was over, the whole town was lit up for Christmas. So beautiful lights and Christmas trees in every window! Nobody seemed to be grumpy! Every one smiled, every one said Merry Christmas. My friends talked about sipping hot cider as they watched Christmas specials on TV on Christmas Eve and then opening their gifts in the morning. Beautiful brand new gifts in brand new wrapping paper (not the old newspaper mom used) were waiting for them under the twinkling Christmas tree! 

“Can’t we have Christmas too? “I begged my mother. 

“That’s GOYISH!” mom screamed in horror, “Next thing you’ll be asking to eat ham. Why not stick another knife in your mother’s heart?!” 

After I grew up, I contented myself to do what Jews do on Christmas. We go to Chinese restaurants, (the only thing open). We go to the movies. We stay home and watch “March of the Wooden Soldiers.” We cry. And then I started to do something better. Celebrate Christmas. Most of my friends were Christian. Why not join them? Glorious Christmas Eve suppers at Anne Marie’s house sipping spiked apple cider around the fire, watching “It’s a wonderful life” and eating apple pie with my BF Trey.  It was all mine! I felt like I’d been given the VIP ticket to the party I’d been missing my whole life! 

Then, 10 years ago I hit the holy grail of Christmas. I started going out with an Italian Catholic, born and raised in Brooklyn. “My family is your family,” Lydia explained as we drove to her sister V’s house for Christmas. I’ve had Christmas dinners before, but this was my first Italian Christmas dinner. It’s like Uber Christmas. There was her sister, her other sister, their husbands, kids, grand kids, cousins, grand parents, aunts, uncles. There must have been 35 people there! My family’s idea of a huge dinner was when we invited Bob the handyman to join us for day-old goulash. With Bob we were six.  

Everyone brought something; manicotti, meatballs, escarole, three kinds of pasta, two kinds of sauce, chicken cutlets for Pete who doesn’t eat red meat, a huge prime rib, all sorts of anti-pasto and for me, for just me, a special bowl of gluten free pasta. “Lyd told me you can’t eat gluten. I hope this is okay.” V said and I nearly cried with joy.  

There were 35 hugs and kisses hello and 35 hugs and kisses good-bye and every one of them genuine. After eating enough food to feed Pittsburgh I collapsed onto the easy chair and Lyd’s 4-year- old twin nieces climbed onto my lap. “Tell us another story!” they squealed. “Do you want to hear the one about the alligator who almost bit my tushy off?” “YESSSS!” they squealed in delight. 

Mom I love you, (wherever you are), but you got it wrong. You don’t have to be Christian to celebrate Christmas. Okay yes, there is the Jesus stuff, but you know, besides that, it’s a time to celebrate peace, love and joy. This Jew is loving me some Christmas joy! And.. um.. Penne in red sauce. YUM!  

** A little side-note here. Sadly, like for many of us, the big extended family extravaganza is postponed this year due to the Pandemic. But next year! Dreidels and Egg nog here I come.