Havdalah #5: Flu Shots, History, and the Dismal Science
28 Cheshvan, 5784 / November 11, 2023
Greetings, neighbors!
Since our last issue, the clocks have rolled back and the dark months are now well and truly upon us. The cold snap has finally arrived after an uncharacteristically balmy early Autumn, and I’m savoring the approaching close of the year. However, I confess I’m apprehensive about 2024, as it leers around the corner.
In our Sidebar, I expand on some of these feelings, which are hinted toward in this issue’s title — a pun which comes courtesy of Katherine. The dismal science is a derogatory term for economics, a discipline I allude to later with all my talk of grim trades. It’s also bleakly appropriate that this phrase apparently originated from a repulsively racist pamphlet that argued against the abolition of slavery.
I will stress only that nothing is certain, and this is as much a concern to me as it is a consolation. In the meantime, we will take the easy victories, to keep and to celebrate when the winter is harsh.
Bella ciao.
James
National Day of Action: Families for Gaza
When: Sunday, November 12, 12:00pm-3:00pm
Where: Michael S. Van Leesten Memorial Bridge (aka Providence Pedestrian Bridge), Providence RI, 02903
Join Jewish Voice for Peace-RI in solidarity with Families for Ceasefire’s National Day of Action. This will be an interactive, family-friendly event with an opportunity to contribute to a memorial to the 4,500+ children who have been murdered in Gaza by Israel. There will be short speaking program, starting around 1:30, focused on the devastating impact the attacks on Gaza have had on children and families.
Flu Vaccine Clinic with Scituate Health Alliance
When: Thursday, November 16, 1:00pm-4:00pm
Where: 606 West Greenville Road, North Scituate, RI 02857
Drop in to receive your free flu vaccine from the Scituate Health Alliance. No registration required.
Power Half-Hours for Gaza
When: every day, Monday through Friday, 3:00pm EST
Where: online
Jewish Voice for Peace is holding Power Half-Hours for Gaza every day — join us as we channel our fury and sorrow into collective action to stop genocide.
The same link will work every day.
Jewish Voice for Peace Website
Continuing Actions for Palestine
The siege of Gaza has continued and intensified. Palestinians are in desperate need of water, fuel, medical supplies, and more; however, this aid has been locked up at the border and prevented from entering into Palestine. Please contact your representatives to call on them to work for a ceasefire and to get aid into Gaza.
This toolkit has a variety of links, including call scripts, groups accepting donations, phone banks, petitions, and more:
Telecom services in Gaza are periodically being disrupted. This makes knowledge of what is happening there very difficult to get and to verify. Various social media websites — including and especially Twitter — while vitally necessary in getting ordinary voices heard, have also been full of dis- and misinformation of people deliberately trying to cause trouble. Especially now, be aware of who is sharing information and why they’re doing it.
Al Jazeera apparently has a reporter in the area that is occasionally managing to make contact:
Help a Black DV Survivor Free Her Children from Abuse
The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (AMOR) is fundraising for an undocumented mother in our community, who has been experiencing domestic violence and is fighting for custody of her two children. Please support if you can.
Help A, an Incarcerated Activist
A is a Providence-based activist who is currently incarcerated and expects to be granted parole in December. Before A was imprisoned, she participated in Never Again Action Rhode Island actions and is eager to re-engage upon release. A, who is a trans woman, is currently being held in a men's prison.
A was at the Wyatt Detention Center protests in Rhode Island, Facebooking live for Never Again. She has also protested for Climate Action Rhode Island and attended Black Lives Matter rallies protesting against systematic racism and police brutality. She has struggled through all this while suffering from childhood trauma, PTSD, suicidal thoughts, and housing inequality coming from her being a trans Latina.
Funds raised will be used to help A with rent, clothes, technology, transportation, and an emotional support dog. A has experienced and resisted much systemic and interpersonal trauma, and these funds will help her build a more stable, peaceful life that she has never been afforded. Please contribute to help set her up for a smooth transition back into society and into her community to which she has dedicated so much care and love, and to show our thanks and to support her in her time of need.
Lecture: History, Memory, and Representation
When: Thursday, November 16, 6:00pm
Where: Cross’ Mills Public Library, 4417 Old Post Road, Charlestown, RI 02813
Lorén Spears, executive director of the Tomaquag Museum, presents a loose Narragansett history timeline up to present day, with focus on pre-colonization lifestyles and how they have changed post-colonization.
The Tomaquag Museum’s mission is to educate everyone on Indigenous cultures of the Dawnland (focusing on Southern New England) through engagement and shared dialogue to reconcile the past and empower present and future generations. Their vision is that everyone will understand the history and culture of the Indigenous People of the Dawnland, recognize and understand the impact of conquest and colonization on Indigenous People today, and take action to create equity.
This summer I started playing a game.
It’s not a fun game. There’s really no winning it, and more often than not, I’m left disappointed instead of relieved.
I look at the people around me. Evaluate. Measure them against the weight of a feather. I study them, collate what I know about them, what I think I know about them. I review our history. I imagine what answer they’d give if asked directly. I sit with my gut, try to decide if I’d believe them. I consider whether they really know themselves well enough to answer truthfully.
I look at the people around me and think, Would you hide me?
I’ve had multiple conversations over the last several months with other trans people. Many of us are playing my game, I’ve found. All of us know that the numbers do not look good.
It’s a resigned evolution of Dorothy Thompson’s party game, I’ve realized, her “Who Goes Nazi?” thought exercise that appeared in Harper’s Magazine in ‘41. She identifies the opportunists, the cowards, the petty tyrants, the “born Nazis,” and finally the rare people who, she claims, will never “go Nazi” by virtue of the strength of their character alone. Thompson’s observations were incisive and almost fatalistic, but I wish I had what little optimism she did. I am not entirely persuaded that there is anyone among us that cannot be enticed, influenced, or intimidated into fascism given the right circumstances.
Most times, my game is unsurprising, and bitterly disappointing. Disillusioning, even. Rarely, there is grim relief. But more often, when my most uncharitable assumptions are not confirmed, I am left with an uncomfortable ambiguity. The inability to divine whether someone will be a safe harbor is more unsettling than the certainty that they will not be. Despite the fact that this wool-gathering only provides panic, I can’t stop playing it. The practice brings an illusion of preparation that, absent any real security, I am not willing to part with. It’s a trade, as many things in the business of genocide are.
The economy of eradication is a barter system; the trades we make, even the symbolic ones, are all conducted through and within this mechanism, and therefore the consequences are as real as brass. An inverted trade to the one I make – peace of mind for agency – is the one many cis people seem blissfully unaware that they’re making.
Unavoidably, I have had many conversations with cis people regarding the mounting eliminationist rhetoric towards TGNC (trans & gender-nonconforming people). A common refrain, particularly when I name this rhetoric as genocidal, is that I should take heart in the fact that this endeavor to exterminate us is inherently doomed. I am told that we have some advantage over groups like Jewish people for the fact that, short of a miraculous breakthrough in eugenics, trans people cannot ever be prevented. I should rejoice, they say, in the knowledge that “we” “will win in the end,” slowly (they promise), but inevitably. This is not the well-reasoned, well-earned optimism of Dorothy Thompson; this is a choice of denial, an abdication of responsibility in exchange for the placation of fear.
This idea that we will eventually “win”, while clearly meant to jolly the petrified trans person, is flawed and deeply callous. Leaving aside that many people join Judaism through means outside of reproduction, the monstrousness of genocide is not only the ending of a lineage or erasing of a culture. It is also the butchering of people, the taking of lives. Trans people will never go away, yes, but how am I meant to count this as a victory that assuages the myriad trans individuals lost? Every one of us should make it. None of us should expect that the axe may fall on our necks. No one should be volunteered as a martyr.
What is not intended by this sentiment, but what the sentiment invariably means regardless, is that there are acceptable losses. Or at the very least, there are some losses that are more acceptable than others. I obviously disagree with the principle, and not solely because I belong to one of the groups counted as acceptable casualties. The preventative antidote to a society careening towards genocide(s) is not to organize the queue to the altar by which sacrificial group is most likely to appease. We have played this game before, too. It didn’t work during the Shoah. It didn’t work during the peaks of the AIDS crisis, what has been referred to as a “genocide of indifference.” It will not work this time.
But obviously, I don’t actually know what will.
Right now, I am still playing my party game. I am still placing dear friends and family on the scales. I am still seeing the people around me as they are. I am still looking in the mirror each day, hoping that the assumptions I’ve made about my own character need never be tested. I am still losing the game. I am still playing the game.
Would you hide me?
The scarier question:
Would I hide you?
Needle Drop #5: “Would You Hide Me?”, Geoff Berner
Moms For Liberty Makes Landfall in RI to Thunderous… Crickets
On Saturday, November 4th, a small gaggle of pearl-clutchers rolled up to the State House for what was supposed to be a four-hour rally to “Save the Children.”
They were met there by over 80 counter-protesters.
For a full write-up on the massive pratfall these Qanon quacks took, please read Steve Ahlquist’s coverage (and also subscribe to his Substack, the man is a gem). Spoilers, none of the scheduled events happened, and the final four stragglers were eventually played off with a snare drum, a cowbell, and “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” sung by a cadre of mincing twenty-somethings. Special guest appearances by the ever-fashionable staties did not disappoint.
What’s of interest to FashWatch is the behind-the-scenes of this failed rally, specifically the ties to Moms for Liberty.
As many of you have probably heard from the nuisance they’ve been making of themselves, Moms for Liberty is a far-right organization, with chapters primarily targeting local schools on the premise of “parental rights.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has a stub on Moms for Liberty under their Hatewatch initiative.
Until very recently, Moms for Liberty did not have a presence in Rhode Island. But one of the four rally organizers was listed as the chapter chair for RI, possibly making this event the group’s organizing debut in the state.
The embarrassment on Saturday, with the rally’s planned speakers bailing and the attendance not even enough to make a minyan, in conjunction with their candidates getting absolutely housed nationwide on Election Day (which Erin Reed wrote about in her newsletter), indicate that the organization may be on the ropes, although not out of the ring. This is worthy of celebration; as Steve said to me on Saturday, take the easy victories when you can get them. However, this is also a crucial time to push the advantage. We cannot afford to get cocky or complacent, especially after the previous encroachments anti-student groups such as Moms for Liberty have successfully made into local schools and governments across the nation.
While the rally failed, local conspiracy theorists were still able to network with one another on Saturday. Next time they come back, they may come back bigger.
Interestingly, the new RI chapter of Moms for Liberty is having a launch party on November 16th at 4:00pm. They already feel welcome enough here to make themselves right at home. The party has a $25 cover and a super secret location, but don’t worry, that fee “can cover the cost of an annual voting membership upon approval.” $25 for democracy, what a steal. Do with this information what you will, but make sure you've got a buddy, a plan, and plausible deniability.
DISCLAIMER: White Rose RI does not endorse any particular action — especially not in a public document — but honestly these assholes deserve it so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
