The younger Mr. Wilner is fired up about circumstances and situations that seem to baffle people who ought to know better.
He shared a story about a work colleague who didn’t understand that Hamas is a terrorist group and wants to know why Israel is killing civilians.
I welcomed him to the world in which we are asked to account for and explain a complex history to people who rarely are interested in details that take longer than 15 seconds to explain.
“You are going to need to develop a thicker skin because many people will offer excuses for Hamas and blame Israel. Some of them will do it out of ignorance and some will do so out of hate.
They won’t care about us you’ll wonder if they would watch us be loaded into box cars. You’ll need to continue to educate yourself so that if someone has legitimate interest you can provide an educated answer and you’ll need to know how to decompress.”
And then I played the song below and explained I like it because it doesn’t make me think of the situation.
If You Don’t Acknowledge My Words
Before we ended our talk I shared one other thought with him.
“You know how I get if you don’t acknowledge my words. You know that if I share something that is important to me and you don’t acknowledge it I will get progressively more irritated and repeat myself. Not because I have dementia but because I want to know you heard me.”
I told him that sometimes that is the tack I take in some of these discussions. I suggested he be cautious in his engagement because some people will never be open and even if they listen you won’t feel heard.
Then I told him that I don’t need agreement to feel like I have been heard because the important part is being heard.
I have tried to explain to some friends, acquaintances and colleagues how this terrorist attack has impacted the Jewish community and why so many of us feel like the world has just changed.
Explained it is similar to what happened after 9/11 in that we all knew that life had changed but were not quite sure how.
I thought about how some people I know made aliyah and moved to Israel after 9/11 because they figured if terrorist attacks were going to hit America there was no reason not to be in Israel anyway.
Thought about how I have said for years the terrorists only have to get lucky once to make a big impact. Thought about how I have gone and debated everything around this multiple times with people who never questioned the American, British or French response to terrorism.
Never occurred to them to ask if any of them tried to only bomb the ‘Bad Germans’ or the ‘Bad Iraqis’ or just the ‘Taliban/Al Qaeda’ and no Afghanis.
Not sure if any of them gave an honest response or offered anything substantive though some of them definitively told me we ought to go somewhere else.
By we I had some people tell me to leave the US and others say that Israel should just pick up and move.
They couldn’t see me roll my eyes but I did because the guy who considers himself a huge progressive and proponent of human rights had no need for mine or Israelis. I asked him if he would give his house back to Native Americans or Mexico and he blocked me.
It is a ridiculous response.
Told my kids and multiple other people we need to remember that we can work towards building the world we want to live in but have to do that within the world we live in.
It is not complicated in concept but it can be a painful reality.
****
I do use the go somewhere else remarks as a reminder and advice to occasionally check out of the online discussions and obsessive news watching.
It’s mentally and emotionally exhausting.
If I don’t take a little time to clear my head a time will come when I am not particularly good for anyone.
It has been a hard road for lots of us for multiple reasons, not just the last week but the last decade or so. Some got divorced and or buried parents and all dealt with a pandemic and political chaos.
That preceded this time and some of us may not feel like we have fully recovered from it. Certainly more than a few of us are looking back upon the last 30 years and asking ourselves what came out of it and if we spent it correctly.
It is not a particularly surprising comment for those of us approaching or in middle age. We’re always going to have some questions but our feelings about those likely be mixed as so much of it is based upon individual experiences.
That exacerbates this moment because as we look at the second half and determine where to live, who to live with and what to do the idea the worst pogrom since the Holocaust is unsettling.
Especially when there are voices supporting the terrorists that come from people we would think would know better.
It is not hard to hear the voices of my parents telling me to focus on what I can control and to try not to get too crazy about the rest.
“People will love/like/hate/despise you regardless of your thoughts and feelings about them. You can influence some of that, but you can’t make them do anything” or so my father once said.
He was mostly right and I made sure to remind him we could absolutely do things to make them happier or less happier with us and listed some of the ways.
The old man glared and told me he wasn’t interested in my ‘nunsense’ and I smiled.
Earlier I responded to something my son said and he groaned and told me not to use grandpa’s bad jokes.
I only wish that now was a bad joke, but it is not. So I remind myself of some of what Tolkien said and continue to make my way through the mist.
