A Horrible Year

Twenty twenty-three has been a horrible year. Other than during the Vietnam War or the invasion of Iraq I don’t remember feeling this much grief and anger at the United States and all who are complicit in our disastrous foreign policy. In the 70s, as the Vietnam War raged on, I was young and living with a college cohort who felt exactly as I did and who went with me—along with 500,000 others—to the 1969 Washington D.C. anti-war march. In the 1990s, I had Mark and another cohort of activists who raged with me at George Bush and organized into grassroots coalitions like Occupy Wallstreet.

Today, older, more infirm—which I will delve into a little later—and more constrained, I’m overwhelmed with outrage and helplessness at the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza. Mark isn’t here so I’ve had to transfer my angst to Jakob, who’s actually been to Israel and seen the apartheid state. Mark and I interviewed him in La Jicarita just before Mark died in 2010 and I reran the interview a few weeks ago. Jakob turned me on to all the Instagram sites covering the genocide—middleeasteye, Shaun King (who was just blocked by Meta), jewishvoiceforpeace—while I turned him onto podcasts—Useful Idiots, Jewish Currents On the Nose. Reading and listening to voices like Gideon Levy, the Israeli journalist for the Haaretz newspaper, Ilan Papé, Israeli historian, and Masha Gessen, Russian journalist, help keep me sane by validating the insanity of those perpetuating and defending Israel’s massacre of Gaza civilians and escalating murders in the West Bank.

Most of my friends and political allies also provide validation but there are those whose attention remains so focused on Trump when all I want to do is prosecute Biden for war crimes that I can’t really have a conversation with them. This fixation with Trump has led us down many rabbit holes—Russiagate and Hunter Biden—and diverted our attention from the depravities of the Democratic Party, but none compares to what Biden is doing now in the Middle East (and on the Mexican border). Independent journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, who just died, had this to say about the failures of the left: “The obsession with Trump the man—not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system—beckons great danger for all of us.”

I was reminded today when reading Mary Gaitskill’s “Out of It” column on Substack about how “people of her generation” grew up as defenders of Israel—she’s only a few years younger than me—that I’ve always lived in a Jewish cultural and secular bubble where Israel wasn’t even on the radar. My parents sent us to the Unitarian Church where all the kids in LRY—liberal religious youth—were also Jewish and provided my political, musical, and sexual awakening. My mother-in-law, who lost her extended family in the Holocaust, referred to Israeli prime ministers as Nazis. The only deviation I recall was reading Leon Uris’s Exodus, which was published in 1958; I I was around 12 when I read it. I was completely enthralled and had to ask my mother to hide the book until I finished my homework (geez, what a studious little kid I was). But at least that wasn’t as bad as Gaitskill’s admission that she was enraptured of the Six Day War at 13.

To end this year’s tale of horror I’ll try to be brief about my infirmities. After a four-year remission my interstitial cystitis returned, which required more trips to the urogynecology center at UNM Hospital for treatments that didn’t work. While there, I was diagnosed with pudendal nerve entrapment, which is a condition that makes sitting a problem. An hour in the car is painful; anything more than that is tortuous. I had to drive two hours to the hospital in Albuquerque for treatments that also didn’t work. I’m waiting for the treatment of last resort: botox, which I learned is used for all kinds of conditions, including migraine headaches. Then six months ago my right foot began to hurt and after numerous trips to a foot doctor, six weeks in an orthopedic boot, physical therapy, and a cortisone shot it’s even worse now. That’s what it took to get to an MRI, coming up in a week. And last but not least, my right knee, which has been deteriorating for a while, took a decided turn for the worse and walking Paco every morning is challenging. Will this be another descent into the medical industrial complex of getting from the primary doc to the MRI that takes at least six months?

On our walk this morning Paco and I ran into neighbors taking a day trip to escape a year similar to mine. We commiserated that yes, it had been a horrible year. They expressed hope for 2024. I’m afraid that I, along with the world, am on a declining path where my own descent won’t make much of a difference but that of the world will bring a greater amount of suffering to a greater amount of people. That’s a tough bargain for hope.