This site is supposed to be about writing, art, and creativity. But I’m so disturbed by current events my creativity is seeping through the cracks of my distress to scream alarms at the people of my nation.

It’s nearly midnight and I’ve already called all the relatives I have in the West a day or two ago because I couldn’t go to sleep on previous nights. I can’t sleep because my country’s politics seem so extreme, so crazy, so like Hitler’s Germany which my Jewish mother fled from in 1938. Now I know what an existential threat is – it feels like the nuclear war will explode any second now, I’m going to step on an ordnance planted on my native soil, someone will suddenly lift a gun to their shoulder and shoot me. 

But it is necessary to be optimistic even now. The seeds of destruction of the United States were planted before our independence, with genocide of Native Americans, with slavery of Africans transplanted to this ground, with the oppression of working class and poor people, squashed by the Calvinist ethic that if you are poor, you deserve your fate. At 66 years of age, I am closer to the end of my life than my beginning, and yet I’ve never seen anything like this in my country. Okay, I have. Racism, class discrimination, oppression of women, and approximately 1/4 of our children living below the poverty line, not knowing where they will sleep or if they will eat today. 

I am not Charles Dickens, nor John Steinbeck, not even Studs Terkel. The people of the United States either have to resist the rise of an autocratic dictator or we will be crushed. 

Hope lies in our independent spirit, our distaste for authority. Getting Americans to rise up may be like herding cats but if we join hands we can maybe find our way to a true fair and equal democracy. If we dream it, it can happen!

#Resist

Today I drew Cybele, the ancient Anatolian goddess of fecundity, of motherhood, of protection. In my mind she is linked with Kali, the Indian goddess of destruction. I seek to channel them, to worship them, to lead to the warmth of the woods and a sunny tomorrow.