Hey y’all. As much as my Substack articles represent what’s on my mind, the music I’m making is also what’s on my mind, just in a different way. I will try to release a song alongside my posts when I find the time and space. Here’s a little ditty for today’s post. It also plays throughout the podcast/audio version of the article.
“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha.” This means that if you can find Buddha and say, “It’s this way; Buddha is like this,” then you had better kill that “Buddha” that you found. Contemplative and mystical Christians, Hindus, Jews, people of all faiths and nonfaiths can also have this perspective: if you meet the Christ that can be named, kill that Christ. — from Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron
I’ve been thinking a lot about the long tentacles of war.
The way that this war in particular is sucking energy and life force not only from the people of Palestine and Israel but from all the people of the world.
Reaching out from the Middle East are the long arms that come even into my house in Portland, Oregon. They suck energy, compassion, anger, grief, and vitriol out of me and my wife. And I’m sure in some way they also suck from my children, who are too young to understand what all of this means for them but can feel mom and dad’s somber tone and feel our distracted hearts.
I can barely look at them without having images of screaming Palestinian children flash before my eyes. Multiple times a day, survivor guilt shoots down my spine like a chill.
I can’t sit down at the Thanksgiving table this year the way I have for the past three decades. This was the last straw. I won’t ignore a modern genocide for a day while I celebrate a past genocide. I don’t want my sons to see that sort of cognitive dissonance. I want them to see their dad wide open, confused, hurt—feeling. I’ll ‘celebrate’ by praying and grieving and singing with my fellow Substacker
and his family.It’s good to see that people aren’t watching idly as European colonialism claims more lives and erases more civilizations. People are protesting. I’m writing and thinking things that even a few months ago would have felt totally uncharacteristic. My Zionism was a given until recently. It went unchallenged and unexplored.
While a lot has been said about Hamas’ tactic of using Palestinians as human shields, I find it more reprehensible and shocking that the US and UK are using my traumatized and desperate Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel as human shields for their own holy war.
On dealing with anger, the Buddha is believed to have said that “when someone offers you a gift, and you decline it, they get to keep the gift.” And this is the compassionate way to handle someone’s anger. If they throw anger at you (the gift), you can politely decline, and then they can keep it for themselves so it can run its course elsewhere.
In making a deal with the devil to establish the state of Israel, the Jews accepted Hitler’s angry gift. Since then, they have been regifting that anger to the Palestinians. Anger is like a brain virus constantly looking for a host; its hotheaded hosts are always excited to find new hosts to infect.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been taking an inventory of all the angry gifts I have received over the years. This has been most clear in two words: jihad and terrorism.
I’m seeing now that these are racist slurs that represent the West’s (by which we mean the White’s) anger for different cultures, different colors of people, and those unwilling to simply accept the West’s way of life and vision of the future at face value.
According to US culture, are there white terrorists? No. Not really. We call them white nationalists, but some people might consider that a compliment.
Is there a white jihad? No.
And, after some pickup truck plows over a parade of people, news anchors on every station wait with bated breath to see if the authorities deem it “Islamic terrorism.” If it’s Islamic terrorism, it’s newsworthy. It needs expert analysts, deep investigation, and coverage, and is the result of a complex web of evil people who want to destroy the American way of life. And, if it’s just some economically stressed, mentally unwell white person, well then, it’s just the news of the day, and we won’t hear about it after some time.
The implication is that horror brought by brown people, or non-Christian people, is worse than the horror brought by white Christians.
The word jihad, similarly, is supposed to be scary because it’s in Arabic and it relates to Islam. But really, it’s just a holy war, the same that Christians and Jews and Muslims have been fighting for millennia. We’ve been led to believe the racist narrative that only Muslims are backward enough to want a holy war. But the reason the Christian West stands by the Jews and Israel is not because they are morally superior; it’s because their own jihad dictates that the Jews must be in Israel. There’s this idea that only the Muslim world has holy wars and that America is above that and past that. But nothing else can explain the vehemence and shamelessness with which they are backing the Palestinian Genocide.
I was daydreaming the other day and had the lovely realization that if explorers today had found some new continent, the arrival would likely go much different. Landing on this uncharted land with new cultures and peoples, the explorers would be excited and curious, not scared and angry. They’d, as sensitively as possible, ask questions about the cultures there, the technologies, the language, and the customs. There would be a cultural exchange, the kind we dream up in fantasies, like the fictional Thanksgiving dinner where the American Indians taught the colonists how to grow corn. There would be an openness.
But for many people—Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike—they are still in these dark ages of fear and anger, of good and evil. They see outsiders and different cultures as threats to their existence. They don’t feel they are part of that dynamic in any self-aware way. They feel they are the world’s peacekeepers, always on a higher moral plane, always with God on their side and their side alone. Everyone else should get on board or die.
Turns Out I Don’t Understand How the World Works
This war, as much as it is fought with guns and bodies, is also a PR war. I said in my last post that Israel could probably win this war on both the PR front and the physical front if they would do something nontraditional, such as dropping billions of roses all over Palestine.
But these alternatives to war do not get corporations and nations very excited. They deem them to risky, too hippie.
When I propose peaceable options like this, Zionists will often tell me that I just simply don’t understand how the world works.
As far as I can tell, the world works with war, money, and fear, and choosing options that change this deadly dynamic is the only real route to peace. And the route to peace is not one humans often walk. We don’t know what that route holds, what other lurking dangers hide there, and what sort of fallout such peaceable actions might result in. And that’s where the sadness lies with me. It’s the same sadness I get when I think about our capitalist society and where it’s led us.
I can see how wealth and technology have benefited certain corners of the world and certain people, but I know deep in my heart that there are better options, endeavors, and ways to spend our energy. And my sadness is that I don’t know when we will all get together to choose a better way.
Election season is coming, and like every election for the past decade, pretty much since Obama got elected, I greet each election season with a deep sense of dread, not excitement about my democracy.
Election season now serves to remind us of our powerlessness, not our powerfulness.
And that’s how you know something’s up.
Get Out and Don’t Vote
Today, I’m laughing at all the people up in arms around election season, trying to get other people to vote. There is a deep judgment about people who don’t vote as if they are part of the problem; they are the evil bystanders. While this might be true, the same logic applies to those who don’t use social media to fight evil. Voting is just one of many small ways we can partake in making a better world.
Whatever your reasons for not posting about this publicly, not talking to your friends about it, and not kicking up dust in the name of the world you’d like to see, it is a cop-out. I take more of an issue with people declining to share their thoughts on social media and being part of the conversation than with people who decline to vote. The only thing that matters in a functioning democracy is that those in power understand the views of those who feel powerless.
And these days, the medium for this sort of expression is social media, newsletters, and blogs like mine. I’ve often said I don’t care about people’s political views. My friend the plumber, my friend the graphic designer, even my friend the doctor, we all lead small and local lives. Our view on one thing or another doesn’t really matter. Maybe it’s my Libra rising, but I don’t put too much weight on people’s political views. But I do hope that whatever people’s political views are, they’re sharing them. Even if you’re Zionist, sharing your viewpoint with the world lets people know where you stand, and that’s valuable and honest on a level that can’t be underestimated.
Marshall McLuhan, the media philosopher who inspired the title of this blog, once said that “the only alternative to war is conversation.” And as these nations do represent us, we must show these nations how to communicate without war and how to approach peace without putting our safety at risk.
The real estate agent that helped us buy our new house in Portland is Palestinian. He also has a deep fondness for Jews, even though Zionists kicked his family out of their land in the 40s. This past Shabbat, he purchased tons of Challah from the local Jewish bakery and stopped by each of his Jewish friends’ houses, including ours, to give it as an offering of peace, grief, and camaraderie.
These are the ways we fight this war. With food, with love, and with openhearted grief for the pain that must be in the hearts of the people who consider war the only option.
This is not a new feeling; pacifist activist Jews and Palestinians have all been murdered in this war. I’m saying nothing new. Every time a new war begins, troves of people come out to scream: “Give peace a chance.” This isn’t rocket science—don’t kill people.
There is No Good or Evil
The concepts of good and evil are solely Judeo-Christian creations. Any other cosmology could have gained precedence on Earth, but we are stuck with this one.
But it needs an update.
We know that trauma affects people in head-spinningly confusing and complex ways. I don’t think I believe in good people and bad people anymore.
There are certainly people who are so hurt and angry that they commit bad actions at a frequency and with an energy that is incomparable to most ‘good’ people. We might be tempted to call these people Evil. But once we do, they are dead; there is no more communicating with them, there is no more community with them, there is no more relationship with them. Just like that, we receive their anger, and it infects us. Now we are closed off and hellbent on destruction, just like them. And suddenly, we begin exhibiting the very decision-making that made us call them evil.
There is no nuance in the good or evil binary—it’s a tool for dividing and destroying people, and it’s the modus operandi of Christianity and Islam. Jews may have been responsible for the First Testament (and I’m no scholar), but they had very evolved views of good and evil and had what we might call a more Eastern sense of duality. That Jews are now caught in the grips of a war between good and evil is how I know that something is awry and that they are being used to fight someone else’s war.
For those interested in this sort of thing, I have been working on a book about the trauma cycle with a psychologist in San Francisco for 3 years. It’s called DADDY and it is now available for purchase. My readers get 25% off using coupon code CONTENTUSER.
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I’m going to end this article here because there comes a point in writing about this that it feels stupid. There is nothing more to say. I start to get nauseous that I’m even having to write this. Stop killing people. Stop thinking anyone is evil. You are perpetuating the trauma cycle. Peace is possible. Death is inevitable. Life can be good. Love your families. Be present. Fuck Thanksgiving.
Thanks for reading,
Josh
There's Nothing More to Say