Tag: fear

Soviet-era animation inspired by Bradbury’s “There Will Fall Soft Rains”

If you’ve never watched 1980s Soviet-era animation, then this 10min Uzbek production from 1984, inspired by Bradbury’s “There Will Fall Soft Rains,” is a great place to start. Yes, it’s all like this, in my experience.

(Incidentally, I’ve always loved the poetry of Bradbury’s prose in general, and the opening line of this story in particular: “In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o ‘clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would.” It’s like a super-sinister Goodnight Moon, a story that is itself already super sinister.)

Anyway, in case you’re wondering what New Year’s Eve 2026 will be like in America, here you go. Perfect for fans of Threads (1984), When the Wind Blows (1986), or whatever atomic holocaust shitstorm Putin kicks off next week.

Don’t know why, but this image disturbs the hell out of me

I can’t swim, so the ocean is baseline scary for me, but man, there’s something about this lonely planet bouncing around out in the middle of a sunless sea that—and the very notion of an entire planet that’s less dense than water—the whole thing gives me the… 🥶💀 yikes! Creep City!

(And it doesn’t help that Saturn is watching us, and probably planning to devour us as well.)

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s claim that “the leading cause of death among children is a firearm” is actually MUCH MORE upsetting than you think

Yes, “the leading cause of death among children is a firearm” is an extremely upsetting sentence—and also, a sadly accurate one (given that you define children as “humans between the ages of 1 and 19”; infants in their first year die from lots of stuff that doesn’t kill you after your first year; if you include them in this number, then it skews toward premature birth, birth defects, and SIDS).

But, the truly upsetting part is buried in this chart (shown below with a big dumb pink circle to emphasis the “Mechanisms” section), which was an addendum to the original source Schumer’s staff cited. 

Guns are the leading cause of death among children, and most of those deaths are murder.

Population wide, gun deaths are usually ~66% suicide and ~33% homicide. Among children, that’s now basically flipped.

In other words, in America today most gun deaths are suicide, and most adults will die of something else (probably disease). But for kids in America, the leading cause of death is guns, and most of those gun deaths are murders.

Flashback Friday: “First Days”

Just a brief reflection on First Days at school. I wrote this back in 2017, when my youngest began kindergarten. I posted it now, because after 406 with no in-person school, it’s taken me a month to process that her first day of the school year came and went without dire consequences.

About to board the bus for her First Day

This old essay begins like so:

Tuesday was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten. At 4:20, when her bus finally arrived, she didn’t get off.

The driver checked, first calling out from the front, then shushing all of the kids and calling out again, then finally going seat to seat down the length of the big yellow bus.

My daughter wasn’t there.

Don’t worry—this is an “all’s well that ends” situation…

from First Days (or “To Hell with Mitch Albom and his Bullshit Flat-Earth Nostalgia”)

It goes on from there. And, no, I have no clue why I chose to defame Mitch Albom in the title of this pieces. I never mention him in the entire essay. He must have just pissed me off that day. Dude does that.

This is a fun little film…

… but just a reminder to my American readers: We already live in this reality. This country isn’t just full of guns; it’s full of ammunition. If you have access to even a single bullet, you are $10 and a trip to the hardware store from making a wonderfully lethal weapon: unserialized, untraceable, highly concealable, nearly foolproof.  You won’t be doing any civil massacres with a hardware-store slam gun, but you can mostly definitely kill the guy standing in front of you with little effort.

The reason no one will shoot you today is because no one feels like shooting you today.

Bigots: Please Use Punctuation!

I’ve got no clue if your message is the command “KIKE: FREE PALESTINE 卐!” or the wish for a “KIKE-FREE PALESTINE 卐”, and that’s driving me nuts. Please, parents: Don’t just teach your children to hate Jews; teach them to use hyphens and colons properly!

Vandalized synagogue door, spray-painted: KIKE FREE PALESTINE [swastika]
[This message brought to you by
British Vandals for a Kike-Free Palestine,
and the Letter 卐]

Straight talk, though: If you’re vandalizing a synagogue in England—regardless of what words you paint—it really doesn’t have shit to do with Palestine or Israel or whatever.  Likewise, if you are holding a protest outside a synagogue (as has been the case at the synagogue ~1 mile for my house for the last 16+ years), it has nothing to do with what’s written on the signs. 

Similarly, the extremely high likelihood that right now you’re thinking “My Gosh! That is so clearly and obviously wrong, but you have to admit that Israel blah blah blah…” —that thought, it doesn’t have shit to do with Palestine, either.

The vandalism is anti-Jewish. 

The protest outside a synagogue is anti-Jewish. 

Expecting Jews in England or Michigan or—hell, anywhere OTHER THAN ISRAEL—to bear some special responsibility for Israeli domestic policy is anti-Jewish and, frankly, crazy. It’s literally the same as protesting outside a Black church because you’re upset about the ongoing lack of accountability or reconciliation from the Liberian Civil Wars, or protesting the Xinjiang internment camps by picketing outside of a Chinese restaurant.

The fact that any of what I’m saying maybe makes you uncomfortable, that’s for you to sort out.

But if you’re afraid I’m maybe implying you harbor anti-Jewish sentiment, here’s a test you can do in the privacy of your own head, and never tell anyone the outcome.  Do you agree with the following statements: 

  1. I feel weird acknowledging the 3000+ rockets Hamas fired at Israeli civilians in the past month without also acknowledging the 20x difference in Israeli and Palestinian casualty rates.
  2. When someone mentions the 58+ Palestinian children killed in this latest paroxysm of violence, I don’t even think for one second about the terror of ~3000 rockets coming at you in a single month.

If you answered YES to both, congratulations: You’re pretty much like every other person in the world.  If you’ve ever wondered how something like the Holocaust happens, now you know.  

Sorry to be a bummer, but real talk and then we’re done: Did you feel worse about the thousand rockets, or the 58+ Palestinian kids, or the fact that some Jew in Michigan called you out about it?

You probably feel attacked right now, so I want one last thing to be crystal clear: My answers to those two questions were “Yes”es, too. If your culture has a bias, you have that bias as well—even if, in your heart of hearts, you despise the bias.  Even if that bias contributes to your own destruction.  None of us get to stand outside our culture; there are no free passes in this game.  It’s noble to want to fix Israel, or Liberia, or China—but sorta weird not to give a moment to healing yourself, too. 

Incidentally, my source for the image above includes some interesting history (which I’ve touched on before) specific to the town where this happened:

(here’s an easy-to-read “unrolled” version of his eight-part tweet, which is worthwhile)

Don’t wanna get into why I’m reading up on Little “Saint” Hugh of Lincoln Today…

… but for those looking for insights into why the Defeated PotUS is obsessed with an absolutely anti-factual narrative of a rigged election, this is worthy reading, especially the “Royal Intervention” sub-section:

The difficulty remains as to why King Henry and his servant John of Lexington would have believed the accusations in the first place. … While the decision to act belonged to the King, Langmuir believes that he was weak and easily manipulated by Lexington. Langmuir says Henry III has been described as; “a suspicious person who flung charges of treason recklessly, [who] was credulous and poor in judgment, and often appeared like a petulant child. When to these qualities we add his addiction to touring the shrines of England, it becomes easier to understand why he acted as he did…” Langmuir therefore concludes that Lexington “incited the weakly credulous Henry III to give the ritual murder fantasy the blessing of royal authority”. Jacobs on the other hand sees the financial benefits that Henry received as a major factor, conscious or unconscious, in his decision to mass arrest and execute Jews. As noted above, he had mortgaged his income from the Jews to Richard of Cornwall, but was still entitled to the property of any Jew executed, adding that Henry, “like most weak princes, was cruel to the Jews”.

Anti-Jewish woodcut depicting blood libel child murder
[Popular Anti-Jewish woodcut depicting the blood libel child murder of either Simon of Trent or William of Norwich (which are basically the same story, in either case). Note the dude at the far left who appears to be wearing George Jetson’s house on his head; that’s a “Jew Hat.”]

Note the profit motive, the crushing debt, the love of touring from big public event to big public event, the absolute credulity to believe what is convenient, the tendency to flit and flip-flop from outrage to outrage, and a reflex to accuse sinister cabals composed of largely powerless minorities of master-minding vast schemes against a blameless populace.

If all of this seems long ago and far away, then please note that QAnon, Pizzagate, and a goodly portion of current Trumpery-driven White Violence is just this same story repeated over and over and over again.

Nice prayer at the bottom of that link, though.

Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln

Anyway, Happy Nittlenacht everyone!!!

What Comes After the Paint and Swastikas

(N.B. I originally wrote this for my congregation, but I figured some of the rest if you might benefit from the message, too.)

You almost certainly heard about the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Grand Rapids shortly before the election,“TRUMP” and “MAGA” spray-painted over the names of the honored dead.

[source]

Maybe these pictures worried you.  Maybe they frightened you.  Maybe they embarrassed you—because, let’s be honest: it’s shameful to be bullied, to get the “Kick Me!” sign pasted to your back again and again, century after century.  

Or maybe you didn’t feel much of anything. Maybe you’ve grown numb; one more slap in the face at the tail end of four years of unprovoked suckerpunches, it can all sort of blur together. I get that.

I don’t exactly have words for how it made me feel.

I saw these pictures of the Jewish cemetery in Grand Rapids, and I immediately thought back to the swastikas spray painted on Temple Jacob last winter, way up in the Upper Peninsula town of Hancock.  And I thought about the dozens of swastikas and slurs defacing our local skatepark back in 2017.   

(I go to that skatepark a lot.  It was hard not to take it personally.)

And I thought about the increase in anti-Jewish hate-crimes here in America over the past four years.  I thought about the increasingly violent nature of those crimes.

I thought about the bomb threats. And the synagogue shootings.  And the stabbings.  And the rallies.  And the men with guns in the capitol.  

And so on.

And I felt hopeless. And I was afraid.

So I emailed the rabbi of Congregation Ahavas Israel (who maintain the cemetery in Grand Rapids that was desecrated on election’s eve). I wrote to voice our support and solidarity, and ask what they might need to restore the cemetery.  

Rabbi David J.B. Krishef replied almost immediately:

“Hi Dave — the cemetery was cleaned by a small group of people who live around the corner and took it upon themselves to clean the stones without even letting us know what they were doing, and a few other people, including one from Ann Arbor, who drove in and decided to wash the paint off. We are grateful for all of the love and support and positive notes we’ve received.” 

It dawned on me that this second half of the story is rarely reported, but often the case:

A lone jackass skulks around smearing his petty foulness in the dark; the whole community—not just Jews, but people from all over the community unwilling to let ugliness linger—return in the light to set things right.

That’s what happened in the cemetery in Grand Rapids.  And when I went back and checked, I discovered it’s what happened at Temple Jacob in Hancock.  

And that’s what happened here in Ann Arbor, too; I know, because I saw it:  I went to the skatepark the day after it was tagged. The city had already power-washed away the paint. And unknown members of the community at large had come through with colored chalk and, evey place where there’d been a symbol of hate, replaced it with a message of welcoming and love:

[source]

What I saw in Ann Arbor was not the exception; it was the rule, even now, in this time of widely reported “unprecedented division and unrest.” And maybe it feels like we’re mired in a time of unprecedented division and unrest because we only report the first half of the story—the smeared paint, the thrown punch, the shots fired—and then move on to the next catastrophe, without checking back to see what comes after the paint and the screaming: a nation of folks ready to take it upon themselves to fix whatever any single angry loner chooses to break.