FINGERS IN THE PAST

  An interesting concept. There was a meeting of descendants - children of survivors and children of Nazis in a place where the survivors lived for years in a DP camp, right near the camp where they had been slave labor and tortured beyond any kind of comprehension. They exchanged family stories, apparently seeking some kind of understanding. One soldier had asked his family what his grandfather had done during the war and they said to leave it alone, did not matter - ‘Why do you want to put your fingers into the past? We don’t want to know what happened,’ they said."  The grandfather had been a Nazi propagandist. Well, without those fingers, many fingers, throughout history, we would all have been worse off than we are at present. Fingers matter.

Continuing on my thinking re who I am, particularly my Jewish affect, I can easily transfer that thought into the Jewish spin on it - said both in jest and in all seriousness, with a knowledge learned over the centuries. A harsh knowledge, that when forgotten leads to tragic consequences.

"Is it good for the Jews?"

 Not asked out of selfishness, but out of a deep and bitter centuries learning cycle. If things are bad in society, they are generally bad for the Jews. When the Jews become the targets of extremists, of haters, of fascists, it is a signal to the rest of society, to WAKE UP! Nothing happens in a vacuum. Nothing happens overnight. It is only that people close their eyes to ugly unwanted truths, bothersome, troublesome truths that we try to magically wish away. Playing the game of "if I do not acknowledge it, it does not exist"  - along with the corollary, of "It can't, won't happen here."

Yes it can and yes it will unless we get on guard. Numerous people way smarter than I am, though slower than I was to pick up on the truth of Trump, have warned us re the near success of Traitor Trump's plan to overthrow the government, to turn upside down the peaceful transfer of power, to become the monarch that George Washington turned down. That threat, that existential danger remains, can bite us good and hard unless we do what we must, painful as it might be, lest we find ourselves in a 'It did happen here' society. Bad for the Jews and bad for everyone, for hatred, unfairness, inequality, will fall upon an entire society, the only difference being that it will happen to the Jews first. Always and forever. So the fingers into the past tell us.

Yet the fingers are proving inadequate to the task. Violence rules the streets with the Supreme Court enabling more violence. It has become a joke, a dangerous joke, of a Court, as it smashes the barrier between state and church, and what next - a return to the time when Jews were forced into reciting Christian prayers in schools and related events? A fundamentalist Christian right wing nationalistic country is bad for the Jews and bad for all. Yet here it is, becoming clearer and clearer, the closer it gets to us. As the possibility of a future like that grows closer and closer to a present probability.

 Unless we wake up, face reality, as much as we wish it were not so and act. ACT. Force out dangerous bigots of judges with plans of their own, with political goals inimical to the rest of us. Say no to dangerous morons who continue to insist that women have power over rapists, who are the ones to control pregnancy and semen!!! Or that the vaccine is made of cells of aborted fetuses. Who would insist that a woman with an ectopic pregnancy die, rather than end that misplaced egg.

Sounds ridiculous, right? But so very much not so. These words come from the mouths of supposed leaders of society. G-d help that society, manifestly not good for the Jews nor anyone else. A society where ignorance is the rule. Where hatred, devolving policies are the name of the game. Where someone as dangerous as DeSantis can appear to be a front runner. The man is more dangerous than Trump as he is cruel, bigoted, bad for all, yet not demented in the same way as Trump, with more knowledge of how to play a winning, poisonous game, gather more traitors to his Party, perhaps to his wished for private uniformed militia.

This cannot be. It must not be.

It is bad for the Jews.

It is bad for American society.

It is bad for the world.

We have been there, done that - is it not enough already?