I'm quite stereotypically Ashkenazi. Like so many of my peers at my heeb school growing up, lots of my family branches had been burned during WWII. (Yes, literally.) My great Aunt told me stories about growing up in the Warsaw ghetto while her sister, my grandmother, got gently drunk on white Franzia and turned off her hearing aid so that she couldn't hear my mom squawk at her to put the box down. I hadn't dredged those stories to mind in a long time, but recently, they started fluttering limply back from the 'ol hippocampus like Exxon Valdez birds.
So many of my aunt's stories sound vein-chillingly familiar to some of the news stories of the last 6 months. Stories of the gestapo being helped by local militant groups, or just conservative randos who were nearby, to herd and incarcerate the Jews of the area when they were moved to the ghetto, or, more specifically, when they resisted being moved. Jews being shot by law enforcement just for talking back or walking down the street. My aunt hated telling me these stories, though my dad and I always pressed her to. She was beaten pretty badly once as she was on her way to school when she was 8 by some older teens while being called (screamed) the equivalent of kike, just before her family moved. That particular story she never told me, my grandmother recounted it because, as she put it, "it's too hard for her to talk about, but it's important you never forget it, where we were, and what we did, and why we're here instead. Now eat some ruggelach, you're too skinny."
Baked crumbly Jewish delicacies aside, she was right, it was. I think, looking back on it now, she meant that this moment right here is why it was important to remember. It was important to remember what impact the news can have on a populace, and how that populace can feel empowered to be monumental prolapsed anuses to any group they don't like if those in power encourage it. It was important to remember how to identify the warning signs of an impending autocracy. It was important to remember how it looked and felt as empathies, and rights, were degraded by centimeters and eventually parsecs. They tried to trust the law, the government, their non-Jewish neighbors, wanting to keep to the high road and assuming it would all work out because, c'mon, these were their neighbors. But, eventually it all exploded in a long, heavy shit shower, and the country eventually disappeared entirely up it's own asshole and then imploded. And that's how I ended up here. Blogging at your face. About how this all feels way too familiar. My aunt and her family didn't march or protest, they feared, and they ran. To be vodka transparent, I ain't mad at them for self preservation. BUT. I can't help but wonder what my aunt's stories would have sounded like if she, and all of the other amcha and righteous (or just middle of the road) gentiles at the time, would have loudly taken to the streets.
My point, if indeed I even have one in all of this fappery, is this: TAKE TO THE GAWDSDAMNED STREETS. I'm tired of despairing, I'm tired of feeling like there's a heavy inevitability to all this syphilitic dipshittery. Cussing a lot helps, so cuss up a fucking storm. Yeah, I'm still sad, it's unavoidable. But I'm rapidly finding that the best tonic for sad is RIGHTEOUSLY FUCKING PISSED OFF. It's important you never forget it, it helps when you're where we are, doing what we're doing, here instead of someplace better. Now go eat some muthafucking resistance ruggelach.
No comments:
Post a Comment