Op-Ed

I welcome in the new year with a sense of abstract helplessness, as the headlines continue to bring us dead children, bombed hospitals, torture, rape and, of course, ever more “self-defense” (sometimes known as genocide).

From my safe, secure office space I absorb the daily news – from Gaza, from all across the planet – with a whiplash of guilt and naivete. What the hell do I know what it feels like to have my house, or my tent, bombed, to see my children die, to have no access to water, let alone healthcare? Is it enough to comfortably empathize with the collateral damage of this world at war?

No, no, no, it’s not.

But I empathize nonetheless, and shake to my depths with an incredulity that never goes away: “As if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe in fact became a death trap.”

Dig, ponder, dig some more.

A year ago I wrote a column about some of the early moments of my growing up – not just memories but profound moments of awareness; flickers, you might say, of becoming who I am. I was 77 at the time. Now I’m . . . oh yeah, 78. Can you believe it? Another year is almost over. Holiday season shimmers, the smell of pine is in the air. It’s Christmas: a perfect time to open, once again, the stocking known as memory.

Social media censorship is a global phenomenon, but the war on pro-Palestinian views on social media represents a different kind of censorship, with consequences that can only be described as dire. 

 Long before the current devastating war on Gaza and the escalation of Israeli violence and repression in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices have been censored. 

 Some date the censorship to an agreement in 2016 that, according to the Israeli government, sought to “force social networks to remove content that Israel considers to be incitement.”

More than fifteen years after the “kids for cash” scandal shocked the nation, it’s back, stirring not just public incredulity but, for some, soul-slicing memories of hell on Earth.

This is thanks to Joe Biden’s decision to grant clemency to Michel Conahan, one of two juvenile-court judges in Luzerne County. Pennsylvania, convicted of accepting cash from private detention centers – as much as $2.8 million over a period of about six years – in exchange for sending them children (my God, as young as 8-years-old) convicted of petty offenses, such as fighting, shoplifting, underage drinking, to serve prolonged sentences in prison.

You may not have noticed this. The world “celebrated” International Human Rights Day the other day, even as wars across the planet continued, bombs fell, children died. What if “freedom from war” were a human right?

I don’t ask this to be cynical, but rather to expand the reach of what should be a global day of connection and collective inner reflection. International Human Rights Day is Dec. 10. It’s an annual honoring of the day in 1948 when the newly formed United Nations, in the wake of World War II, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which publicly recognizes “the inherent dignity and . . . equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”

The easiest thing we can do is to give up. I know for many of you, what we face now seems insurmountable. So I want to share with you something GOOD that happened this week, before I get to the Bad and the Ugly.

THE GOOD 

In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black Woman elected to the United States Congress, representing Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, New York. I’m sure she felt like giving up many times, too. But in 1972, she did just the opposite — she ran for President of the United States of America, the first Black Woman Presidential candidate for a major political party in this nation’s deeply racist and sexist history.