I replied to the email with four words, “Great gardens require dirty hands” to which I received a question mark in reply.
Thought about ignoring it, thought about typing out my response and instead picked up the phone, dialed and received voicemail.
“If you ask me to do this I am telling you that it requires getting our hands and bodies dirty. We will dig into the dirt and lean into this and then I will do it again and again and again. I don’t know any other way to make some things happen other than to go hard.”
I paused and then finished with, “my best advice is to let me go and do what I do. Don’t ask questions. Don’t slow me down. Just let me be.”
If it were thirty years ago I would have gently hung up the phone. If it were thirty years ago I might have gone to the the phone used by the other person and unscrewed it so I could remove the microphone part.
But it is not thirty years ago and I can’t engage in that kind of silly nonsense like I once did. Can’t use up all the tape on an answering machine reading the yellow pages either.
I was asked by a few people to engage with some folks online who are either ignorant or willfully blind in their usage of antisemitic tropes and nonsense.
One of them told me I ought to be upset because Israel’s actions were going to create more antisemitic behavior.
I asked him to explain why it was ok to Jewish college students in America for something that happened 10,000 miles away. I asked him if it was ok to attack Muslims in South America for things Hamas did and he said that was ridiculous.
“If that is ridiculous why isn’t it ridiculous to attack those Jewish college students. If the answer isn’t you’re right it is ridiculous you need to own hating Jews.”
They never responded and I’d like to say it is because they were embarrassed or because they got busy but these days I’ll say I nailed an antisemite who didn’t have the stones to own their hate.
Maybe I am wrong, that would be good but caution leads me a different direction.
During some of these online debates I have often told people they are asking the wrong question or looking in the wrong direction.
That’s because they miss the forest for the trees. They diagnose cancer as a common cold and get lost in minutiae.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that I am old enough now to have seen and experienced things others haven’t.
Old enough to remember life before the peace process, the first and second intifadas and 9/11. Some of that life experience changes you just as a lack of it can impede your understanding even on some issues where it shouldn’t.
****
I had a conversation about ambition and the need to light some kind of fire in our belly so that we have something to strive for.
We need things to look forward to. We need goals to push us forward just a little. It is ok for some of those goals to change over time.
Sometimes we grow in different directions and change. Sometimes we don’t know what we really want until we start digging in the garden.
Someone came at me with “bombing children isn’t self defense” and I responded with “rape isn’t resistance.”
They pushed an article from The Atlantic which said something to the effect of “Israel is too brutal in fighting this war.”
My response was simple, “when is war not brutal. When is trying to kill people not horrific, just war or not it is always going to be brutal and horrific. There may be rules of warfare but brutality is never going to be escaped.
There is no nice way to kill others.
If you haven’t figured it out I am not a pacifist by any definition of the word but I am also not naive nor dumb enough to think that we can talk our way through everything.
Wish we could, but I am not Neville.
****
In every aspect of life we are faced with the need to do the work.
Doesn’t matter whether it is business or personal, private or professional there is work to be done and if you don’t do it you miss out.
Don’t know if any of this made sense, I wrote just cuz I felt like writing. Sort of did a mind dump and now I am putting down the pen and walking away.
