Category Archives: politics

Washing Away the Numbness

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Like most writers, I’m constantly trying to strike the perfect balance between time for my writing and time for the rest of my life. And, like many activists, I struggle to balance responding to the demands of a situation, while setting boundaries so I can stay focused and not burn out too quickly. This past week has certainly been a test in maintaining all these balances. Nearly every day I’ve had 2 or 3 long meetings, some of them highly frustrating in the amount of disappointing new information revealed, or in their lack of productive outcomes.

This doesn’t even include time dealing with the text threads and email chains to plan and debrief these meetings, and sorting through the hundreds of issue-related texts and emails that have come into my inbox–many of which need to be responded to or forwarded to the right people.

Nor does it include the demonstration a few of us planned last Saturday as part of a regional day of action to boycott Citizens Bank, one of the few banks that still provides loans to CoreCivic and GeoGroup, two major players that run most of the ICE detention centers. And it doesn’t include the insomniac hours I spent worrying about the zero-degree wind chill forecast for that day and pondering whether or not we should postpone. (We decided to go for it, but set a shorter time frame. Happy that we got a good turnout and the sun kept the cold tolerable.)

It also doesn’t include dealing with the numbing grief as one shocking news story after another unfolds in Minneapolis and elsewhere. A second murder of a protester, the abduction of a preschooler used as bait to detain his parents (my grandson has the same bunny hat), a gunpoint wrongful arrest of a US citizen who was taken in his underwear in the frigid cold, and 5-year old twins being denied release after 8 months in detention in Texas because the judge said they have no access to collateral.

These are just a few of the horrific stories that can easily send me reeling into a state of numbness.

While people now seem to be galvanized by DHS’s murders of Tim Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, it’s important to know that they are only 2 of the 8 people who died in dealings with ICE just in the past month. Perhaps it’s easier to see ourselves in Pretti and Good, since they were protesters, but let’s not forget the other six people who died in ICE detention centers this January, often under questionable circumstances: Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Parady La, Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz, and Heber Sánchez Domínguez. Campos’s case is particularly disturbing, as ICE claimed he committed suicide, but the medical examiner determined that his death was clearly a homicide.

So, yes, friends, it has been hard to find balance. And hard to find the psychic space to write, though in some ways being inundated with all these meetings and emails and events and projects does make me feel like I’m doing something to fight the tsunami, even if at times, I worry that I’m just wading right into it with my surfboard. Still, the cold water pouring over me does help wash away the numbness. And somehow, I’m still managing to stay afloat. And if you’re moved to take a small but important action right now, you can ask your Senator to vote against continued funding for ICE, using this call script from Indivisible.

Image by Elias from Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/photos/wave-ocean-sea-storm-tsunami-1913559/

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Grandma, Dance!

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Once again, I was in the middle of preparing a blog post on my submissions stats from 2025. And once again, life happened. Or, should I say, death happened.

Renee Nicole Good. 37 years old. A poet, and the mother of three young children.  Sitting in her car as a legal observer during an ICE raid in Minneapolis. Shot four times in the face after being harassed by ICE agents as she attempted to drive away.

The feds are spinning this story by painting her as a domestic terrorist who was trying to run over ICE agents with her vehicle. An outright lie, but what else would you expect from an administration who had the audacity to rewrite the events of January 6? The videos made by numerous bystanders show otherwise. No ICE agents were in the vehicle’s path as she attempted to escape. The person who shot her–four times in the face–was standing by the side of the car, not in its path. And besides, as my partner pointed out so matter-of-factly, if you want to stop a car, you don’t need to shoot the occupant. You can shoot the tires.

And after she had collapsed and crashed into a utility pole, ICE refused to allow a physician in the crowd to provide medical treatment, claiming they had their own medics, who, at the moment, were nowhere to be found.

I first read accounts of this story yesterday, sitting in the dark in my grandson’s room while he napped. And two things came to mind. First was a blurry melange from Schindler’s List and other Holocaust movies where Nazi guards randomly and blithely shot any Jew who wasn’t immediately conforming to whatever order was given.

The second was an event that happened to me when I was about Renee’s age. I was backing out of a parking space with my one-year-old in the car, when all of a sudden I heard this man knocking on my trunk. You hit me! he shouted. He told me he had fallen from the impact and re-injured his knee. Mortified, I dropped off the baby to my partner at home, a few blocks away, then drove the man to the ER. When he said he didn’t need me to come and wait with him, I drove to the police station to report the accident. When I gave the name of the victim, the policeman rolled his eyes. That guy’s a known scammer. I’d be very careful, he said. He probably didn’t even go into the ER. You probably didn’t even hit him.

And I had stupidly just shown him exactly where I lived!

The next day he called me and asked for money for medical expenses. I took the easy way out. I met him in town with cash.

I was lucky. I never heard from the man again. I have my life. I watched my children grow up, as Renee never will. The feds’ story circulating about Renee, embellished and exaggerated by Kristi Noem and Donald Trump, is another scam. A scam of out-of-control proportions, which if people start believing it, will give ICE the authority to keep randomly shooting anyone they deem “non-compliant”–to be no different than the Nazi guards were, needing no justification to shoot anyone they pleased.

So today, I’m wearing dark colors, feeling a different kind of grief, a stunned sadness punctured with fear for my country. Renee’s death is not the only senseless death of a protesting activist. I think of Rachel Corrie in Gaza, Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. And I think of the hundreds of African-Americans murdered by authoritarian police for no cause: George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Daunte Wright, Breonna Taylor, Stephon Clark–just to name a few. More profiles and stories are here.

I hope all the readers of this blog–those of you who are inclined toward political action and those of you who aren’t–will think of one thing you can do in response to Renee’s death and this unraveling trajectory towards authoritarianism. Call your Congresspeople. (Jessica Craven has a script here), attend a vigil, write a poem, as Cyn Grace Sylvie did in yesterday’s poetic resistance blog, Second Coming, or make a piece of art. Post your responseon social media/and or share it with friends. Share this blog. Or share something else that might speak to you more deeply.

After I first read the news story about Renee yesterday, I only had a few minutes to absorb the severity of it all before my grandson woke up and wanted listen to clips of his favorite band, The Tokyo Paradise Ska Orchestra (an odd choice for a 3-year-old, but that’s where he’s at). He has about 50 cuts on the playlist his parents made for him, and was happy to put them on shuffle and see what came next.

Grandma, dance! He kept shouting as he bounced up and down to the beat,  a different stuffed animal in his arms for each song.

I didn’t feel like dancing. But this is life.

And as I bobbed around, I realized one more time, that this is why we must keep fighting. So we can dance.

Carolmooredc, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

If I can’t dance, then I don’t want to be part of your revolution.–Emma Goldman

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Reflections on a Year of Loss

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Happy New Year! I was intending to write my annual post of my submissions stats for the year (which I will do in the near future) but a prompt suggested by poet Meg Hartmann, who offers a self-led write-a-poem-every-day course and other goodies for writers on her website Ah The Sea, led me in a completely different direction. The prompt, by sheer coincidence, turned out to be a line from my first writing teacher and long-time mentor, Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers & Artists.

What could be more generous than a window? 

I have a gorgeous set of floor-length sliding windows in my dining room, where I often work in the winter in order to take in the maximum amount of sun. Looking out that window, I ended up meandering down a wider path and considering all of 2025–the good, the bad, and the ugly.

For me personally, the salient event of 2025 was my father’s death on March 1. Despite my gratitude for his long life (he was 93) and relatively short illness before his passing; and despite our not being exceptionally close even though our overall family bonds were strong, I couldn’t shake the feeling that a foundation of my world had come undone. My father’s illness and death, as well as its aftermath, have forged me into an entirely new relationship with my mother. Before 2025, I’d speak to both my parents on the phone every week or two, casually recounting the newsy highlights of my life while they shared theirs. This past year, I spoke to my mother no less than every other day: at first providing emotional and logistical support in navigating my father’s care, and then, after his death, occasionally helping her problem-solve life’s relentless administrative demands but mostly providing someone to talk to in the unbearable dark loneliness of isolation.

This has made me so grateful for my partner, Shel, and our 46-year relationship. I have major hermitic tendencies (and I’m grateful that he’s learned to dance around them) but ultimately, I will always choose connection over isolation.

I’m also grateful that my mother, at age 91, is cognitively sharp and physically able to care for herself. As with my father, my mother and I are not exceptionally close, though we share the same family-bonded loyalty. And we probably have less in common than my father and I did in terms of personality, outlook and values. But I’m determined to be the best daughter I can be and provide whatever support I can in this inconceivable transition. (My parents were married for 72 years.)

As I look out the window and watch 2025 recede into the distance, I can’t close out this reflection without considering how many people in our country have suffered losses, even if, due to luck and privilege, I haven’t been as deeply affected: loss of safety due to hate crimes and ICE overreach, loss of economic security, loss of access to health care, loss of access to food, loss of due process. I continue to be distraught as news story after news story reinforces the conjecture that cruelty is not only a result of the administration’s policies–it is the point. Yet, I’m hoping that some of the pundits are correct in predicting that the swelling tide of resistance will continue to rise in 2026.

Happy New Year! May it be joyful, peaceful, and cruelty-free! And may all your windows be generous!

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Speaking Truth to Power

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A few years ago, shortly after George Floyd’s murder by the Minnesota police, my late brother, Danny, asked me if I believed in critical race theory. He wasn’t particularly interested in my answer; he was just trying to goad me as he’d done all our lives, making fun of my favorite baseball players when we were kids, dissing the few rock stars I admired that he didn’t like when we were teens, and later tuning into our political differences as he sunk deeper and deeper into the influence of Fox News.

“I don’t call it critical race theory,” I told him. “I call it truth.”

I earnestly began to explain why I thought it was so important that we learn a true accounting of our history–the good, the bad, and the ugly–rather than a white-centered version that discounted or trivialized the experience of black people in the US. He didn’t really listen. I would have liked to chalk that up to ADHD rather than to our past history, except that he kept interrupting me with sound bites he’d clearly heard on TV that had little to do with the points I was trying to make.

Not so different from the sound clips from news pundits about a recent assassination of a right wing leader that Jon Stewart used in his “government-approved monologue” recorded after Jimmy Kimmel’s firing.

Just to be clear, I don’t condone political violence. No matter who does it to whom, and no matter what the underlying motivations might be.

But I also don’t condone this administration’s vilifying those that oppose their policies. I don’t condone their outright lying, or–as they would call it–“alternative facts.” I don’t condone their attempts to simply remove information that doesn’t speak to their political agenda, such as scrubbing DEI from government websites, removing the mention of slavery from national parks, and targeting exhibits at the National Museum of African American History, just to name a few of many examples.

While I agree that those grieving the dead should be respected, I don’t condone the administration’s and right-wing news media’s sanctification of the recently assassinated MAGA influencer after they ignored they ignored the assassination of Minnesota State House Speaker, Melissa Horton, for whom the flag was not lowered.

Narih Lee, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Sadly, this is the first time in my life that I feel I need to choose my words very carefully. The freedom of the press and the freedom to express our opinions that our (quite conservative) teachers taught us about so proudly in elementary school is at risk. Even though Jimmy Kimmel has now been reinstated on some, but not all, of the ABC-affiliate stations, others who commented with concern about some of the things this leader said about black people, Jews, LGBTQ, women and other marginalized groups permanently lost their jobs.

But as writers and as human beings, our moral imperative is to speak truth to power, no matter how much we might dislike being goaded, or cowed, or threatened to stay quiet. Coming out of Rosh Hashanah, I realize this one of the things I need to do more of in the New Year.

Poet Ilya Kaminsky nails it here:

WE LIVED HAPPILY DURING THE WAR
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
#art for change

 

Protest Poems

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Today I woke up to some good news. Two more of my poems were today’s offerings on the Substack site Second Coming, a poem-a-day protest against the threats to our democracy by our current administration.

And last night, I went to hear a writing colleague, Bill Mailler read from his new book of social justice poetry, Trauma, Truth, and Outrage. Bill’s poems tend to be gut-punches. He doesn’t shy away from horror or attempt to beautify it through language. His work is like that sign our small group of witnesses illuminated at the border in 2020: Don’t Look Away.

 

 

 

What I liked most about Bill’s work were the questions relating to our human capacity for meanness, a key component of the poem, Meditations on My Whiteness, where he asks directly:

For what possible reason
could good or well-meaning people perpetuate or participate….

before offering a long lamentation of possibilities including:

because we are cowards and cannot acknowledge
the consequences of our actions?

because we teach our children to deny their natural empathy
for others, themselves, animals, and the earth itself? 

I also think constantly about the issue of human cruelty. Though my own work tends to take a less direct approach to writing about political issues, neither is wrong or right. They’re just different. The point, I think, is to enter the world through a lens of empathy, rather than simply ranting or trying to be prescriptive about what you think should be done. Poet Kwame Dawes talks eloquently about this issue in his own writing: When I write the poems about Haiti, people living with the disease, I’m not writing poems so that people will give.. but so the person who experiences when they read the poem, they’ll say to me… that’s it. That’s what I’ve been feeling but I didn’t know how to say it.

As many of us are staggering through these times with deep and heavy feelings about what’s happening in the world, reading a protest poem or a political piece of artful prose can help us feel less isolated as we try to make sense of our grief and uncover a path through it into some kind of meaningful action. That’s why when I’ve read my own protest poems at workshops or readings, even raw and unfinished generative responses to prompts, I often got more positive feedback than I expected because I was able to verbalize something that someone else had not yet been able to verbalize–touched a nerve, so to speak.

This isn’t to say writing protest poetry is easy. While I do believe that all attempts at creative expression should be acknowledged, respected, and validated, it’s difficult not to fall into ranting, generic abstractions, slogans, self-pitying, etc. And the problems with these pitfalls is that it becomes easier to lose the reader, who’s likely heard it all before and can gloss over or check out. Keeping empathy in the forefront can help. So can paying careful attention to language–using sensory details, fresh verbs, and unexpected metaphors. In prose, this might mean creating vivid scenes where the viewer can watch what’s happening to characters and form their own judgments.

What has made the process of writing protest poems and stories slightly easier for me in the past decade has been my being able to more fully integrate my life as a writer and an activist. While this wasn’t true in my earlier life, I now feel the fallout from political issues as viscerally as the other subjects I feel urged to write about. Allowing myself to deeply feel the horrors of all I read about in the news has certainly made it more difficult to maintain emotional balance, but I do think it’s necessary. We need, somehow, to find a path into a more deeply rooted empathy if we really want to break the pattern of ignoring atrocities–often done in our name by a system in which we are all still passively participating.

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The Power of Stories

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I’ve noticed over the years that I get far more likes on social media for my personal posts than my political posts. Especially if the personal post is a happy one. It makes sense. On the whole, people would rather read something uplifting, poignant, or inspirational than the gloom and doom embedded in political messages, even when they convey what I think is important information or ask people to engage in a quick, painless action.

Because of this observation, I’ve generally been judicious about posting political content, even in these trying times. But lately I haven’t been able to help myself when nearly every day I come across another story of someone being wrongfully taken by ICE and sent to prison: sometimes here in the U.S. (although often thousands of miles away from their families), and sometimes to El Salvador, where the U.S. no longer has jurisdiction over their cases and torture and abuse are even more rampant.

In many of these cases, the people taken have no criminal record. In fact, they often have legal status: a green card, a visa, an asylum case pending. In nearly all of the El Salvador deportations, the people detained have been denied the opportunity to speak to an attorney or argue the charges against them in court. Instead they are quickly loaded, shackled onto a plane simply because someone has accused them (often based on a tattoo or hearsay evidence) of being a member of a gang.

In many cases, when ICE cannot find the person they are looking for, they make collateral arrests of whoever happens to be nearby. Sometimes these people are U.S. citizens, who are eventually released, but not until they’ve dealt with the trauma of spending several nights in jail. And those who aren’t citizens–hard-working people with no criminal record–enter the detention/deportation system, even if they have parole or asylum claims pending.

Even tourists have been arrested, strip-searched and sent to jail for visa mix-ups or under suspicion of plans to work illegally.

During this administration’s first term, when I wrote the stories in my collection Immigrants, I tried to envision the impact of DT’s policies on real people. While there were love stories that ended with deportation, a woman facing a dilemma of whether or not to bail out her housekeeper’s brother, and a mother in a squalid border encampment who sent her daughter over the bridge to the U.S. alone, there was a still a softness to the stories. I did not talk about the torture and abuse inherent in  detention facilities. I balanced these stories with others where immigrants played a positive and vital role in people’s everyday lives. And I took the stance that these people were victims in a system that had gone out of control due to misguided information and decision-making.

But in current times, these people are no longer victims; they’re prey. Deliberately hunted. Shredded. Devoured. And they don’t just include people who entered the U.S. without documentation. They’re people with legal status who are being imprisoned for writing op-eds or social media posts against the government’s point of view, or for organizing peaceful protests. Or they’re people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I don’t feel like I can write any stories about immigrants any more because the true stories are too hard to read. And to write anything that waters down the truth is mitigating the effects of what is happening.

Yet, I know that as a writer, I have a responsibility to speak out.

So, on my Facebook feed, I’m posting these stories as I come across them. Most are from Witness at the Border, a group I worked with when I went to the children’s detention center in Homestead Florida in 2019 and the Brownsville/Matamoros border in 2020. You can read quick summaries of some of these cases in this Axios article,  but it’s the power of detail in the actual stories that really strikes a chord. In my fiction collection, one of my goals was to change people’s hearts and minds by inviting them to really know the characters I wrote about. The stories profiled by Witness at the Border do just that. I’m hoping we can get past the sadness and disempowerment and channel the power of these stories as inspiration to take whatever actions we can to make this stop.

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Taking the Plunge

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One of the parts of the Passover seder I resonate with most is the story of Nachsun. Nachsun was at the head of 600,000 Israelites running away from Pharaoh’s army when he came to the frothy waters of the Red Sea–the end of the road marked by angry waves and deep water stretching all the way out to the horizon.

But, rather than succumb and turn back to the horrors of slavery, Nachsun plunged into the water. And it was only after this courageous act that God told Moses to lift his staff and part the waters, enabling the rest of the Israelites to cross over on the dry path.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/st-stev/2432121049

According to some Biblical scholars, “Nachsun’s name has become synonymous with courage and the will to do the right thing,” even when it’s f*ing scary.

So, I’ve been thinking about Nachsun as I read as much as my stomach and soul will let me: ICE smashing car windows to make arrests, taking random people who have legal status when they can’t find the ones they were looking for, arresting a man at his citizenship appointment, and grabbing an international student off the streets for having views that differ with the government, and defying Supreme Court orders and refusing to return a man who was sent to a prison in El Salvador by error.  In fact, there has been no due process for anyone sent to prison in El Salvador, and now the government is threatening to send U.S. citizens there, as well.

These are only a few of the incidents. There are more people effected, and more stories. What I learned from visiting the border in 2020 is that everyone had a personal story that made me cry and tug at my hair and fall into an awe-struck paralysis where there just were no words to fathom the cruelty of human beings.

But the people I met in 2020 were fleeing cruelty in their countries of origin. Here in 2025, they–and we–are facing an equal if not greater cruelty from our country, our fellow Americans, people that we (collectively) elected, whose lawlessness we continue to enable each day with our fear and our silence, whether or not we voted for them.

So, I’m pondering… how can we… how can I… be like Nachsun and jump into the water. Even if it’s cold and rough. Even if my swimming ability is shaky.

How can I keep my head above the rough waters and shout, NOT IN MY NAME!

Not in my name as an American, and not in my name as a Jew who rejects the contorted use of antisemitism as an excuse for this barbaric behavior and understands that the definition of a concentration camp, “a guarded compound for the mass detention without hearings or the imprisonment without trial of civilians, refugees, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc.” fits this situation far too well.

In the Passover liturgy, the word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, refers to “The Narrow Place,” and some of the observance consists of reflecting on how each of us as individuals can get past the obstacles that constrict us and emerge into a wider and more abundant state of being.

I’m thinking we need to do this as a country, maybe even as a species.

How can we stop being cruel? How can we jump into the water and believe that some hidden internal goodness–divinely inspired or otherwise–will save us?

Writing in Dark Times

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I haven’t been writing much lately. Between family health care issues and a full-scale constitutional crisis, aka coup, I’ve been thrown into what feels like a cyclone of political organizing. One could say I’ve been writing like crazy, but it’s all calls to action, newsletter updates, emails, and carefully constructed agendas–left brain stuff that speaks to my skill set, but doesn’t quite feed the hungry monster inside who only likes the juicy, creative stuff.

And yet, the questions came up once again this morning in one of my Zoom writing groups:

  • How do we write in these times of upheaval?
  • Does anything we write matter?
  • Do we have a responsibility to use our writing to speak out?
  • What if we don’t want to write about political things–or feel like we can’t write about political things without having our work turn into a rant or some didactic prescriptive cliché?

Ted Eytan/Flicker/Creative Commons, nhpr.org

As someone who embraces the dual identities of writer and activist. These are questions I’ve struggled with all my life.

Back in my 20s, I lived briefly in a social change community in Philadelphia, learning facilitation and organizing skills, studying theories of nonviolence, and engaging in personal growth initiatives, which included being frequently challenged on my choices and attitudes. I remember one person from the community saying something like, There’s no point in writing all these poems about your feelings. You can get counseling on those. Write poems about the state of the world that matter. 

I know that all writers store hurtful comments that lodge like ear worms in our brain. This was one of mine. It probably took thirty years before I could hear it in my head without feeling reactive.

No one should dictate what we should write, even when people are being well meaning, such as the numerous times a friend or acquaintance has said to me, you should write a story about  ______________.

No, I always say. You should write that story.

Ask me, if you need my help, to write an article, a flyer, or a delicate email. Ask me for feedback or editing on your story. But when it comes to poems, or fiction, or essays, I’ll choose what I want to write about–thank you very much.

This doesn’t mean the questions above are invalid–only that each of us needs to answer them for ourselves. In the last ten years, I’ve been motivated to write more things that might be considered “political,” but this is because I’ve figured out a way to approach them from a personal angle. For instance, my poem, Evening, recently published in Collateral, a journal that defines their mission as “publishing literary and visual art concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone,” layers reflections on the Gaza War as I’m playing with my grandchild in the backyard.

Whether or not our writing becomes an overt call for action during these dark times, it still matters. There are countless articles on the Internet on the role of art not only as a political catalyst, but also as a force that heals–both the person who creates it and those who read, or view, or listen to it. I remember shortly after the 2016 election, when many in my community were caught in a tizzy of fear and disorientation, a close friend who is a visual artist said to me, “The best thing we can be doing right now is our creative work.”

I’m glad this is another ear worm that has also stuck in my brain, inspiring me to keep doing the work.

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