for a few months I have been on the fence about whether to keep up with this blog...I started it in 2012 with the intention of holding myself accountable as a writer...to have a twice-a-month deadline to keep writing through writer's block...and to write through the minutia of life which can often interfere with the creative process...but the world has radically changed...so does your response to it as you age...in your sixties and beyond social media tries to convince you that you have reached an age when your response to all negativity around you should elicit one overriding response..."I don't give a shit"...and yet, I can't get there...and it comes at a cost...we have become a rather cruel society since Covid...the fear and isolation Covid created permeates our feelings to the core...in 2020 we were frozen in time...and when allowed to thaw, we were gaslighted...we are not allowed to remember how we felt...who we lost...what we lost...2025 is nearing an end when we think of Santa's lists and Epstein's lists...2026 looms...in the shadows of a fragile brokered peace in Gaza I am once again gaslighted...this time as an American Jew...I am held to a standard that no religious or ethnic group is held to in this country...I can choose to condemn Israel's response to Hamas's atrocities and modern-day declaration of war on October 7th...I can defend it...I can keep my mouth shut...I can ignore revisionist history textbooks throughout this country that condense the Holocaust to half a page if any...or I can say I don't give a shit...hands over my ears...and my eyes...so I can't see the swastikas on Yeshivas in Brooklyn...or hear modern day "kapos" laughing at my deep-rooted fear...that all evil is born of arrested development...and that these are not the times to not "give a shit"...
