Composting Fear & Catastrophic Thinking

Within a spectacle of horror and hope

A little over a month ago, I volunteered to sit in the booth of the local Jewish Voice for Peace at the Bite of Black Business Tacoma Festival. Surrounding the booth was a very striking educational installation detailing the crimes of the Nakba (the brutal displacement of the Palestinian peoples that started in 1948). Before I go on, I want to thank those who created this physical documentation of an earlier iteration of genocide that has been erased in the minds of much of the populace.

While I did my shift as a volunteer at the booth, I met several young activists who were all draped with keffiyehs, worn in a variety of ways. I have thought often about why I’ve chosen NOT to wear a keffiyeh as a sign that I am an anti-Zionist, secular Jew in support for Palestinian resistance and an end to the genocide. I respect those who do wear one, and recognize that they may be paying a price for doing so given the current climate in the US, especially in businesses, academia, the art world, and in airports. I feel enormous grief and rage about the senseless, brutal, and racist killings happening in Gaza, the West Bank, & Lebanon; I’ve donated my share to organizations who can help those who are suffering and who are educating people about the realities behind the current brutal violence, but given the personal griefs that I am carrying, I have not felt that I have the emotional capacity to deal with the blowback I might receive from strangers if I were to don a keffiyeh. I feel it’s more important to have discussions with people about why I support the Palestinian resistance to the apartheid state of Israel. I have some Israeli friends who have been working actively to dismantle the racism, inhumane and brutal policies of those in power, and despite their organizing for many long years, the momentum of their work is only visible as enormous street demonstrations, and it has not generated substantial change, as of yet. There is no question that what is going on there is horrific, and witnessing its continuation so graphically documented on social media has caused many to reach a state of exhaustion and despair that impacts the ability to function well, both physically and cognitively.

Very quickly, my new acquaintances and I got to talking election politics, and I was soon quite dumbfounded. They were all making a single issue choice (based on the continuing genocide launched by the Israeli State) and said that voting for Kamala was like voting for Trump, and that Democrats and Republicans offered the same platform. I understood their cynicism given my experience living in AmeriKKKa, but their ignorance about the difference between these platforms was challenging for me, especially around the social safety net, women’s reproductive rights, and labor issues. I tried to reason with them to no avail; their minds seemed impenetrable and their passion around this decision was fierce. They did not seem willing to hear another perspective from an elder who has been around the bush a few times, an elder who campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, back in the day, and became deeply discouraged by electoral politics long before she was able to vote. Voting strategically has often been discouraging, so I do my best to empower folks in other ways, even though our ridiculous two party system has forced me to vote for the lesser of two evils, over and over again. Ultimately, over the years, I have felt that the most potent political impact happens on the grassroots level, and I argued that if Trump gets into office again, little of the latter will happen without a huge pushback and painful repercussions. Under Kamala, we can keep organizing. I sensed that I was talking to deaf ears.

One of them referred to Kamala as a “baby killer,” and I had to wonder if this was a common description of the candidate often used within this activist’s crowd. I asked her if she felt that one person had the power to impact to create an arms embargo. I brought up the loss of structures and “checks and balances” that would likely occur if the list offered up by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 became functional (in reality, it’s about making many things like Social Security and Medicare dysfunctional). The fundamentalism that I felt from this group of supposed allies was intense. Perhaps if I had been out on the street protesting with them, I might have been more aware of this thread of thinking. Yesterday, I heard a report from Code Switch, one of the regular podcasts that I listen to, about the Arab vote coming out of Dearborn, Michigan. Like I felt as I left the JVP booth, I can see that I had been living inside a particular kind of bubble, one that looks at the long view, rather than the painful realities of folks concentrating on their anger and grief in the present moment.

I also listened to Green Dreamer’s interview with Nick Estes where he asks us to think critically beyond the suffocating cycles of electoral politics. He addressed these questions: “What does it mean to expand political action beyond the voting booth? What are some ways that colonialism and imperialism persist today? And what is the relationship between building community locally and confronting issues abroad that we may be entangled in?”

Here’s what Lawrence Tribe, a lawyer and constitutional scholar says about the current Supreme Court (where he’s argued 3 times since Trump put his acolytes in place): “The threat to all our personal freedoms and civil liberties posed by a second Trump administration is not principally that Trump will finally have learned how to thoroughly weaponize his Department of Justice, filling it with obedient acolytes…. It is those freedoms, both negative and positive, that are secured to all of us by the Bill of Rights [and] the ordinary, day-to-day life we lead at our kitchen tables and in our bedrooms that [are] most dangerously threatened by the tyranny that a return of Trump to power would represent.”

So I will leave these thoughts and questions here. I know that I’m voting for the lesser of two evils once again because I see more breathing room under Kamala, but I recognize that I may be delusional for thinking this way. I’m going off to a grief retreat this weekend to move some of what my body has been carrying, both personally, as well as when I watch Bisan Owda’s reports on IG. My plan is to stay off social media this weekend, and dive deep into the shadowlands. We’ll see how much compost I can create.