Hi friends,
With so much going on, you can be forgiven for inattention to local elections. Allow me to help. Voting has already begun in New York, so let’s start with when to vote.
Check out early voting options. Election Day is Tuesday, November 7.
To find out what’s on the ballot where you live (in NYC), enter your address here. Indicate that you want to see sample ballot, and then enter your address again on the next page. When you reach the next page, there’s a rather small button near the top of the page that says view sample ballot. You have to want it.
At the top of the ballot you will have choices for various judges (Surrogate’s Court, Civil Court, and New York Supreme Court). Read the choices with care. Some names are listed multiple times for different parties. You may not want to vote for someone who runs as a Democrat, a Republican, and a Conservative.
Your city council seat may or may not have a competitive race. I urge you to vote on the Working Families Party line. The Working Families Party is a force for
social, racial, and economic justice in NYS. By pushing for progressive legislation and by also training, recruiting and supporting progressive leaders to run for office, [it forms] a unique bridge between progressive activism and electoral success.
The last items on your ballot are two statewide proposals, both of which raise or eliminate debt limits for local governments in NYS.
The first proposal frees small school districts from constraining debt limits that frequently result in more spending when projects are completed piecemeal. Cities with fewer than 125,000 people are constitutionally bound to a debt limit “equal to 5% of the total value of taxable property in their city.” The proposal is to raise that limit to 10 percent.
The second extends an existing exemption for sewage projects; these projects are frequently urgent. They will not be subject to debt limits if we approve the exemption.
Vote YES on both proposals. For more details, see my post from 10/20.
There were mass shootings in Florida, Illinois, and Indianapolis this weekend.
Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver noted,
"America is not the only nation where evil exists. But we are the only nation on Earth that has more mass shootings than days on a calendar. It's the guns."
Tell your representative and Senators that you want to see a federal assault weapons ban. This action is from Everytown for Gun Safety.
We are weary of the violence at every level of our experience. This article explores the tribalism that is preventing us from hearing people who disagree with us about the war between Israel and Hamas.
It begins with a Palestinian peace activist who recalls feeling that
“to acknowledge someone else’s suffering, feels like a betrayal.”
The author writes about the difficulties that even cross-cultural peace groups are having at this time. If groups designed to foster dialogue are struggling, it can seem beyond most of us.
The single best thing I’ve read on the subject is Leah Hager Cohen’s “The fury born of moral certitude.” She notes that
The importance of interpretation, with its implicit acknowledgment of complexity and diversity, the need to be curious and to ask questions, is deeply valued in Jewish culture.
This idea is at the root of my own identity as a Jew. Cohen discusses the choices that storytellers make: when did the story begin? where does the action unfold? how do we name the protagonists and antagonists?
She begins her article with a midrash, “a story about a story” — usually an interpretation of a biblical tale. The story she tells is about an act of civil disobedience by Egyptian midwives who helped Jewish women to resist the Pharaoh’s order to kill all of the sons born to Jewish mothers.
And then, Cohen describes what is happening now to people taking considered and courageous action:
Usually thoughtful people are suddenly railing against honoring complexity. They insist that sympathy for all is inherently unjust, whether because it implies false equivalencies between oppressor and oppressed, or because it absolves the subjugated of responsibility and robs them of agency.
The voices of the enraged are having some success at breaking peacemakers apart. They succeed in Jerusalem when police officers detain members of a joint Palestinian-Israeli organization for the crime of putting up posters stating, in Hebrew and Arabic, “Together, we will get through this.”
They succeed in Tel Aviv when an ultra-Orthodox journalist who says kaddish for all victims of violence, Israeli and Gazan, goes into hiding because of death threats.
They succeed across the United States when diverse groups of students working for justice for Palestine are doxxed and blacklisted, when demonstrators make throat-slitting gestures celebrating Hamas’s murders, and when a prestigious cultural institution cancels a talk by a Pulitzer-Prize winning author after he signed a letter criticizing Israel’s government.
The wiffij — this newsletter — is devoted to right action, informed by probing curiosity.
When I taught history, I remember telling my students that courageous people are those who change their views in the face of new information and understanding. Among my examples were Abraham Lincoln and Malcolm X. Jared Golden joined that group last week.
President Biden, who has frustrated me for many years, is also such a person. Biden is responsive to events and to reason.
[A] rapidly rising Palestinian death toll, the difficulty of freeing hostages held by Hamas and an increasingly vocal outcry from Arab nations, European allies and some Americans at home, have pushed Biden's team to support a humanitarian pause to Israel's attacks and focus on getting aid to Palestinians, say multiple sources inside the administration and out.
David Vine, a professor at American University, speculates
“that the secrecy is a holdover from when US presidential administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts.”
Contact the President and share your thoughts. As always, you can adapt my comments to say exactly what you want.
It is heartbreaking to read about Israel’s massive attacks on Gaza, the blockade of aid to Gaza on Saturday, and threats of violence against Jewish students on Cornell’s campus in Ithaca, NY, among other places. Leah Hager Cohen has good advice:
Over circumstances beyond our grasp, we can do little but anguish. All the more reason we must take good care of what lies near to hand, beginning with the stories we tell. . . . Let us choose the stories most likely to help us fathom one another, stirring us to imagine the conditions necessary to bring about real-world healing and justice.
Finally, here is a poem that a friend sent this morning. It is by Audette Fulbright.
Did you rise this morning
broken and hung over
with weariness and pain
and rage, tattered from waving too long in a brutal wind?
Get up, child.
Pull your bones upright.
Gather your skin and muscle into a patch of sun.
Draw breath deep into your lungs;
you will need it
for another day calls to you.
I know you ache.
I know you wish the work were done
and you
with everyone you have ever loved
were on a distant shore
safe, and unafraid.
But remember this,
tired as you are:
you are not alone.
Here
and here
and here also
there are others weeping
and rising
and gathering their courage.
You belong to them
and they to you,
and together
we will break through
and bend the arc of justice
all the way down
into our lives.
with love,
L