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The Unemployment Chronicles: Chapter 1

27 Sep

I’ve often said that what I do for work is the least interesting thing about me. Now, almost two weeks after my company severely downsized, catapulting me into unemployment, I’m left wondering how true that really is. Funny thing about working full-time is you spend so many of your waking hours working towards someone else’s goals that you lose sight of what it is that you want. And then when that job goes POOF, along with the barely enough paycheck, you’re left picking through the rubble, trying to find the you that you were when the whole thing started.

When I first found out I was being liberated from my paycheck, I tried to focus on the possibilities time would give me. I could get back to the person I was before the pandemic started. I liked her, she was fun and productive and adventurous. Being her was somewhat effortless but getting back to her, that’s proven to be a bit more of a challenge. It’s like that corporate train with its steady paycheck and paid vacation is an addiction. It got me thinking about how I could progress in that world even as I saw my favorite parts of myself going dormant. As if money – humanity’s arbitrary and uncontrolled measure of value – is somehow enough to displace our joy. If you really think about it though it makes sense. Our jobs are how we relate to one another and how we make our money provides the means through which others make sense of who we are as people and what roll we play within society as a whole. Our jobs are also how people determine our usefulness to them and their own potential career advancement. Honestly, sometimes it feels as though our entire lives are just very, very long networking events. And, in my personal opinion, there is very little joy to be found in a networking event. Like spending all your free time scrolling through LinkedIn, only in person. Yuck.

I’m not entirely certain what the point of this piece is. Maybe it’s to tell people,

****HEY, GUESS WHAT, I NO LONGER HAVE A JOB****

in one fell swoop so I can avoid the awkward conversations I have with people when I tell them in person that I don’t have a job. We have been so conditioned to blame individual actors for every little thing as opposed to looking at institutional failures. The result is that when I inform people I don’t have a job, though it is through no fault of my own, I end up feeling like a deadbeat loser with no future.

RIP

Anyway, it’s like a rollercoaster. Sometimes I feel pretty lucky that I have this time to get back to myself and really think about what I want to spend my time doing. In the evening, when I think about what the next day might have in store for me and I get the chance to truly focus inwards, I consider a lot of different paths I could take.

  • I could train for another half (or full!) marathon
  • I could write a book
  • I could go back to school and get my PhD
  • I could try and get a job in radio
  • I could get in my car and just, drive, aimlessly, with no real goals or ambitions (Is this a parallel for my life? Perhaps.)
  • I could throw my phone into the ocean

And then in the morning when I wake up, the hours stretching ahead of me and I’m presented with yet another bureaucratic hoop to jump through to qualify for a whopping $504 a week (pre tax!) from New York Unemployment, it all seems a little daunting. I don’t know. I guess all those times as a little girl when I answered the question

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” (Answer: a marine biologist, duh)

I never truly realized what it meant to grow up. To live, to build community, to earn your way, to find joy. So here I am asking myself that same old question: what do I want to be now that I’m grown?

Answer: Honestly, I want to be a lady who lunches. Imagine living a life that allows you to have long, fancy meals with your friends in the middle of the damn day. And when you’re not having lunch you’re doing other things. Going on a road trip, perhaps. Searching for turtles in a lake. Noodling around in some night market somewhere, looking for a snack. Hey, a girl can dream.

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I’m just a mouse, alone in a bucket

1 Jun

I keep thinking about this time about 15 years ago when we had a mouse in our apartment. What were we, a few twenty-somethings without the heart to hurt a mouse, to do? My best friend’s boyfriend, staying with us at the time, decided to take matters into his own hands. He put a bucket in the sink, built a little weighted plank with one half of the board resting on the countertop and the other half hanging over the middle of the bucket and placed a small snack on the end of it. Sure enough, our mouse pal – too enamored of the small bit of food at the end of this board to nowhere to realize the danger – marched his little mouse behind across the board and tumbled (uninjured) into the bucket. The sides were too high and too slick for the mouse to escape. I’m sure the poor thing was terrified. Lucky for the mouse, we were benevolent overlords and took it to safety in Prospect Park, located a little more than a mile away. In hindsight, there’s a not-so-tiny chance that it got eaten by a hawk or an owl inside that 526-acre plot of land in the middle of Brooklyn, but better that natural end, I think, than the one humans would have imposed upon it.

I’ve been thinking about that mouse a lot recently. Not because two of my good friends have been battling with their own unwanted furry visitors, and not to reflect on the complete ridiculousness of the fact that our simplistic, makeshift trap actually worked. I’ve been thinking about that mouse because recently I’ve felt a lot like it. Stuck at the bottom of a bucket, alone, every avenue of escape just as steep and as slick as the one before. Right now, and likely in the forever before now, we’ve all, knowingly unknowingly, been that mouse.

Maybe that’s a bad example but I’m having a really hard time putting anything into words these days. Let me try this. One of my friends recently introduced me as someone with a lot of rage. She meant is as a compliment and I took it as such. I’ve always been quick to anger; anger is something I can work with. I can redirect it towards productivity, I can use it as motivation to speak out about something, hold someone to account for their bad behavior. Somehow anger makes me feel like I have some utility in this world full of so many difficult, horrible, inhuman, unjust things. Recently, all that anger has been replaced by a deep, aching sadness. Every horrific thing that happens piles onto the thing that came before, compounding it. The thing that makes it so hard to deal with is that all of this horror, if not completely preventable, is at least mitigable. This pandemic didn’t have to be so deadly. Those children in Texas, those adults in Buffalo, did not have to be massacred. George Floyd didn’t have to be murdered by the state. It certainly shouldn’t have taken a video captured by a teenager, a video that showed a man in the worst and last moments of his life, to hold his murderers accountable. At he very least, that video should have caused the entire system to burn.

I recognize that I’m late to this party and that people have been saying this for years, decades, centuries. But, I’m going to go down this road anyway. I’ve always had some vague understanding that everything was a scam, everything interconnected, everything orchestrated for a singular purpose. Since George Floyd was murdered, it’s as if the top blew off the whole thing. All of these incidents throughout history that felt somewhat maybe related are in fact all deeply intertwined with one another, so tangled up in a ball that it’s hard to distinguish one thread from another. And this was all intentional. I’ve written a lot about the American Dream being a load of horse shit. That lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps is actually not possible unless the person in question happens to be very, very strong and also a contortionist. Even then I struggle to imagine how it would look. The purpose of this false narrative, the false telling of human capability within our current system, is to leave us all feeling as though we, alone, are in control of our own fates, our own futures. That any success we have is due to our own hard work and any failure is due to a moral shortcoming. In the story of the American Dream (which, let’s be honest, was imagined to empower white people, specifically white men, and disempower everyone else) there is no role for society or community. There is no acknowledgment that the people who are in power were born into power and generations of their families will stay in power until their greed destroys everything we have.

I’m sorry to sound so gloom and doom. I just don’t know how else to view it anymore. We were all born into a system of brainwashing and, over time, it becomes increasingly more difficult to discern the difference between truth and fiction. This, too, was all be design. Call the press liberal elitists even while they parrot police union talking points. Spend decades arresting and incarcerating Black and Latino men for drug offenses, then make marijuana legal, doing nothing to mitigate the lifelong effects of inhuman imprisonment. Oh, and for funsies, how about we let white people reap all the benefits and use the new tax stream to give more money to the police state. Just last week, the President of the United States, supposedly the most powerful man in the world, said this:

Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?

I know he is using the word “we” which normally would be interpreted as meaning the collective, but in our context, this “we” is every one of us, individually. You and I are not doing enough to stop this carnage. Never mind that I (and maybe you, too) are against guns, that we vote to put anti-gun politicians into power, that we march and scream until we’re red in the face. You and I? We need to do more. That’s how it can be guaranteed that nothing will ever change, that the same people will continue to hold all the power and more and more money will land in their bank accounts. We have some people who think there are rules and decency and others who see the current state for what it is, what it has been, and are wringing every last bit of power and money out of it. Then there’s the rest of us, stuck somewhere in the middle.

I’ve been crying a lot, down here at the bottom of my bucket. I tear up when I see kids playing outside of a school, thinking about all the kids who have been killed by gunfire. I can’t watch shows about the environment anymore, because all my mind focuses on is how corporate greed is destroying everything and we’re powerless to stop it. It’s hard to see old or immunocompromised people moving through the world without thinking about how we failed them in this response to the pandemic, how we continue to fail them every single damn day. It’s impossible to walk past a police officer without tumbling down a rabbit hole of how much money we give these fuckers to keep people down, money that could be so much better used to prop them up. I could continue. I don’t think I need to.

It’s a rough go for all us mice in all our buckets. I don’t know. I wish I had a little uplifting thing to put at the end of this, but I’m plumb out of uplifting things. Maybe next time.

Rebekah’s (New) Pandemic Diary, Entry #3: Who’s in Charge Here?

11 Aug
Photo by LED Supermarket on Pexels.com

I keep thinking back to this conversation I had one morning back in 2007 in the now defunct Has Beans coffee on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn. I was talking to my friend Ben Curry – may he be arguing for eternity with his intellectual equals – about lightbulbs, of all things. I had just updated all of mine to be energy efficient. He laughed at me, telling me that individual action was pointless in the face of corporate and governmental failure. I was appalled. I cited the hundreds of cups I forewent by religiously bringing my own reusable thermos day after day; the energy saved by riding my bike or taking public transit into Manhattan for work; the plastic bags that didn’t end up in the ocean and stuck in trees because I toted around canvas. I simply couldn’t compute that being schooled in the importance of the 3 R’s – reduce, reuse, recycle – could have all been a sham. I dug my heels in. He smirked at me and shot back the quick stats he always seemed to have effortless access to. I shrugged my shoulders in a “let’s agree to disagree” kind of way – he was always hard pressed to let something go – and we continued on to discuss, and argue about, other topics. Of all the conversations we had over the years this particular one stuck with me. I find myself thinking about it more and more as we bumble through this pandemic and race towards a complete environmental collapse. And I keep asking myself, who is in charge here?

We have spent our entire lives, all of us, being indoctrinated with this ideal of individual freedom and responsibility. I know I’ve talk about this a bunch over the years – about the lies of the American Dream, the limits of individualism. I recognize that it’s a dangerous narrative, one that hides the realities of structural inequalities and tells us that if we work hard enough then we too can ride a giant phallus into space. What I didn’t do was think about the true depths of this narrative. We isolate our “heroes” and our “failures.” We talk about how people get themselves trapped in poverty and how others earn themselves millions. The fact of the matter is that none of this is done alone, none of it happens in a vacuum. There are always other people helping us or holding us back.

Bear with me for a second because I’m going to take a sharp turn.

I was recently thinking about this movie, Dark Waters, starring Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway and Bill Pullman (I’ve loved him since Newsies!), among others. The premise, based on a true story, is that a tenacious lawyer (Ruffalo, obviously) takes on DuPont for poisoning an entire town in West Virginia. I liked this movie, actually. I’m a sucker for over the top, based-on-a-true-story legal dramas where the good guys win and the evil corporate empire is forced to pay tons of money to the powerless people they have victimized for decades (even though, relatively speaking, what they pay out is pocket change). But the more I think about it the more it occurs to me: we celebrate this lawyer, Ruffalo’s Robert Bilott, for fighting this battle for over 20 years, but we celebrate him as if he did it alone. The reality is, though, that he couldn’t have done this without support, without help and without the willingness of the community – a community who had been victimized for decades – to fight with him. It might seem like these people, dying of cancer and whatever else they got from DuPont, had nothing to lose but the reality is that almost no one has nothing to lose, no matter how sick they are.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this because I think our habit of individualizing everything – be it a success or a failure – is what mires us in our current situation and makes us incapable of addressing the environment or ending this pandemic or any other manner of totally doable things that we simply cannot seem to accomplish (gun reform, anyone?). The Earth is dying not because you bought a bikini from Shein, took a long shower or (god forbid!) used a plastic bag at the store. The Earth is dying because while people are pointing their fingers at the role individuals play corporations have a free pass to do whatever the fuck they want if it keeps prices low and stock holders happy. We can’t get out of this pandemic not because of a bunch of assholes who refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks (although that certainly is not helping), but because of a complete governmental failure from the day this arrived on our shores until now, 17 months later.

Remember when states were bidding against each other for PPE and then the federal government swooped in and took it all? Remember when we were told this was “just the flu?” Individual actions my ass. I recognize, of course, that there are some individuals who wield more power than others, but their power comes with a force of many. They do not act alone. No one acting alone is this powerful.

Sorry to come back to this space all pissed off after a 7 month long hiatus. It’s good to be here. It’s good to think again. Good to get this loop out of my head and onto the page. But I guess if you made it this far, I’d like to just quickly boil this whole tirade down to one thing:

Ben was right, my eco bulbs won’t stop the world from burning. And, in an argument I’m sure he would make while fully vaccinated and wearing a mask, those actions, although ethically correct, won’t save everyone. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still do them, but we should be honest about where the real power lies. Until we stop blaming (or lauding) individuals, we’re fucked.

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Rebekah’s (New) Pandemic Diary, Entry #1 – The Salt on My Windows

3 Jan

This is entry one of, I hope, many. None of them planned. They will each represent where I am at in a given moment with the goal of sharing my feelings, rather than suffering in them alone. I hope you start documenting, too. Whether to share, or for just yourself. I am always open to read your thoughts so comment or feel free to email them to franklyrebekah@gmail.com. They will be safe with me.

If reading this is too much for you, please skip. The last thing I want to do is make anyone feel more overwhelmed than you undoubtedly already do. I am just hopeful that by sharing my honest feelings, some people feeling similarly will feel a little less alone. And, in turn, so will I.

And with that, let us begin.

It is Sunday, January 3rd and I have hardly left my house since the New Year. The sky has largely been overcast and honestly, walking outside and knowing that we are still in the crush of this feels like too much to bear. It feels better to stay inside, pacing back and forth between the two rooms of my apartment, petting my cats and pretending that when the calendar went from 2020 to 2021 everything magically changed. Since I’ve been inside here quite a bit, I am going to tell you a little bit about my house so it feels as though you are here with me, hanging out. (Thinking about that makes me a little sad – because I miss you – but also smile, because wouldn’t it be so magical if you could just….come over?)

I am sitting at the table in my kitchen, sometimes glancing to the side and out some windows which, I have been noticing over the past few days, are dirty with the salt that was kicked up after the recent snowstorm. It gives the impression that it is always raining – the salt stains are reminiscent of the raindrops that accumulate during a light spring rain, or the proof left over from a summer storm. I can look at it and think about how dreary it is – the overcast sky, some windows that look like they’re always in the midst of some inclement weather – or I can focus on hope, on rain as a rejuvenating force. It really depends on where my mind is at whether I land on despair or promise. What doesn’t change is that a few times I day I meander over to the front door, flip the lock and swing it open to see if it is rain on the window after all, and that the salt is just distorting reality. Sometimes it is.

I then let my eyes wander to my side of the glass, to the plants that clamber and grow towards the light of the sun, however uncommon its appearance has been recently. For them, the pandemic never happened. They continue to grow, undeterred. One of them even has a flower, a red, waxy kind of thing that won’t die until a new one has grown to take its place. I find a lot of comfort in its longevity and predictability – I know a flower’s time is nearing its end when a new stalk starts springing up, eager to inherit the spotlight. Then I get treated with a new splash of red, holding space until the next one appears.

It makes me think of last spring; back when this thing was just starting to truly alter our reality, back when we didn’t know what the next months would hold. We were full of fear for what our city was enduring but also, in my case at least, a bit of hope – hope that the rest of the country would take our plight as an example and do what they could to avoid our fate. We now know that didn’t happen, not even close. But back then, on those first warm days, Eric and I washed the windows to let the light pour in. I stood, rag and cleaning solution in hand, face covered, and cleaned all the grime from the previous year. It’s amazing how much filth can gather, how it can trick the eye. We think we are looking through something crystal clear but it is somehow distorted – it is our eyes and our brains that let us see beyond all that. I remember feeling as though I had cleansed my little corner of the world only to see my work undone over time by countless cars and street cleaners. The hours spent inside gazing longingly out the windows eventually turned into gazing at the glass itself. And noticing, for the first time ever, these salt deposits that probably spend winter perched on the windows every year. I can’t wait to wash it off.

And now, sharing this with you, I feel anticipation for the warm weather and the hopefulness of spring – however far away that might feel right now. I’m excited for our little potted maple tree to grow new leaves that, ultimately, will get burned by the sun. I am reminded that I want to buy an umbrella for our small “patio,” to provide the tree, and myself, some respite from the unyielding light. I hope that our rosemary bush, finally established, will last through the winter – I choose to ignore the climate implications of this. And I so badly wish that when the crocuses and tulips start pushing through the dirt in early spring, that we too enter into a season of rebirth, rather than the unnecessary sickness, pain and death that continued with the arrival of spring last year.

But for now, I am going to force myself outside for some fresh air. These windows will be here when I get back.

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Are You Mad At Me?

1 Nov

Oh, hello everyone. How have you been? Feeling the crushing anxiety of the upcoming election? Did you cast your vote yet? If not, do you have a plan to do so? Are you worried that the hope you have allowed to creep in over recent days and weeks might be dashed yet again by the electoral college? That perhaps this President will get another 4 years, only this time with even less of the popular vote? Are you tired of being stuck inside, protecting yourself and others from a virus that seems entirely uncontrollable? Are you sick of wearing a mask but also, now that the temperature is dropping, feeling slightly thankful that what was once so oppressive during the summer months is a much more welcome face hat? Are you worried about your economic future? What will become of you in the coming months and years? Have you been noticing more wrinkles and grey hairs? But also…

Are you mad at me?

At the beginning of this pandemic I felt connected, albeit virtually. I was on the phone hours every day. Zooming, FaceTiming, Netflix Parties, regular audio-only phone calls. Constant contact. But then as the days turned to weeks, the weeks to months, these daily conversations became fewer and farther between. Part of it is that we have all settled into some sort of pattern. We have become accustomed to working from home or, in my case, working sporadically from behind a thick piece of plexiglass. We have gotten used to only seeing other members of our household – many of whom have four legs – and feeling wracked with guilt if we venture out to hang with family and friends, regardless of the safety precautions we take. (Truly, those early days of Heavy Internet Shame on anyone who dared leave the house really did a number.) And now the weather is dropping which means no safe backyard bar hangs with friends; no appropriately spaced blankets set out on a patch of grass in the park. Almost 8 months into this isolation. I am tired. I am sick of the phone. I want to give you a hug. But also…

Are you mad at me?

I have found myself texting people less and less often. The calling has become even more infrequent. It’s not that I am upset with anyone or that I love them any less, but for some reason it just feels like a lot to reach out and text, it feels even harder to call. How do we cover all the time that has lapsed? How do we talk about the world and what has happened? How do each of us have space in the midst of this emotionally and psychologically exhausting period to open ourselves up to hold other people’s experiences? I want to help you hold your pain and your worries, but have my own anxieties left me with the extra room? I worry that right now, in the midst of all of this, I cannot be the friend I have always prided myself in being. The one who is always there, who can always listen, who maybe interrupts a little too often (I’m working on it!) but tries to give advice and to understand the gravity of what you are going through. I feel as though right now, I am not a great version of myself and I don’t want you to know me this way. Is that okay? Are we okay? But also…

Are you mad at me?

This worry has been creeping into my mind more and more often. The friends who I text or respond to online who just….don’t reply. I take it personally. I feel as though I have done something wrong. Like somehow I neglected to show up for an important moment or said something unintentionally cruel. The reality is that I also have let texts slip by, have become a little less communicative. And I am sorry for that. I am sorry for how that might have made you feel. I am sorry if you felt I loved you less; cared about you or your family less; was thinking about you less. None of that is true. I am just anxious and sad and lonely and fearful of the coming winter. Probably the same as you. I am afraid of being a less supportive version of myself, less fun, more tearful. I want to go places being the best version of myself and right now that version simply doesn’t exist. And that is really hard.

I hope that’s okay. I hope you’re not mad.

In two days maybe we’ll have a road map for relief. Maybe. Maybe. But until then…

I love you.

(But also….?

….if you are mad at me please tell me so I can fix it.)

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Rebekah’s Pandemic Diary: What Happened to Time?

8 Sep

The other day I sat out in a backyard drinking wine out of plastic cups with a few friends. We were appropriately distanced, masked-up when we couldn’t be, grasping for some semblance of normalcy. We tried to talk about everything other than our current reality but, inevitably, reality crept back in. It is a constant companion these days. It has ripped so much from us. Friends, loved ones, idols, jobs, vacations, mental health, time. I know that in the grand scheme of things floating in a time warp for 5 months isn’t the biggest deal, but right now it feels like everything. I mean, it’s the 8th of September and it could just as easily be May…or August…or March. I am afraid that if I blink we will be back again at March 15th, the anniversary of when our world shut down and nothing about our battle with the virus will be substantively different, except that we have lost every single day since we acknowledged it’s existence. It feels like we are all on a hamster wheel and the only way to orient ourselves in time is to make connections with the past.

It was brought to my attention by a friend in that yard that I am coming up on the year anniversary of the death of my last grandparent. I am grateful that she went before the virus took hold. I am certain that her death was scary enough without her lungs turning to crystal in the process. And selfishly, I am thankful that we were spared what so many people have been suffering through – the loneliness of a grief spent isolated from loved ones, of funerals broadcast via livestream, of the obvious absence of the hugs and closeness that sustain us through painful times. I wonder how many people went earlier than they should have – not just due to coronavirus but other things as well – without the lifeblood that is love, company and human contact. We used to hear uplifting stories of people hanging on to life because of connection, so where do those stories go in our present? How differently do they end? I worry about what this will mean for the thousands of people having to navigate their way through grief, through recovery from illness, through the trauma of working on the frontlines during this crisis. Do virtual support groups work as well as in-person? How about online therapy sessions? Or therapeutic happy hours with friends over zoom?

I guess time will tell. If that’s what we are calling it these days.

As I reflected on the privilege my family didn’t know we had in being able to gather in close quarters at the cemetery, in having hundreds of people through the house, in debating about the whereabouts of a missing chocolate babka, I realized something.

*This is going to sound really weird, so be prepared.*

What I realized is that I long to return to those two days of shiva where people roamed through my parents house, concerned about sadness and remembering, but not concerned about contamination. I want us all to take food from communal plates and stand close to one another talking, regardless of whether we knew who the other person was or just pretended to. I want to put down my wine glass and pick up…maybe my wine glass? – or perhaps it was my mom’s or my sister’s – and not worry about one of us falling ill from anything other than a mild hangover. I want that feeling of unquestioned, non-threatening community that I fear we won’t have again in the same way. I want those two days of time-dragging, exhausting, grief-stricken company back.

Or maybe it’s just that I want time itself back. I want to know what time feels like, what it means. I don’t know about you but I’ve been grieving the loss of a lot of things these past few months (are we still measuring “time” this way or…?) but I haven’t grieved the loss of the concept and feeling of time. So, I guess I’ll add that to the list. It’s a long one but…I guess I’ve got time. Or something.

If you are enjoying my writing, and since a lot of the cafes are currently closed, consider buying me a coffee on ko-fi! It only costs $3 (or a multiple of 3 if you’re feeling frisky!) and would make my house-bound, under-socialized heart sing. To those of you who caffeinated me, I send you so much gratitude. And I send gratitude to all of you who took the time to read this piece and helped me hold some of these thoughts. 

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Rebekah’s Pandemic Diary: Eat The Rich and Steal Their Houses

29 Jul

Just two small pieces of housekeeping before we get started:

  1. Thank you to my very good friend Carrie for helping me come up with my new mantra, “Eat The Rich and Steal Their Houses.” I am currently accepting t-shirts with this slogan.
  2. I have a Ko-Fi account where you can buy me coffee AKA give me some money for writing this blog so I can go out and buy coffee or get beans from the store to make coffee myself because it is more cost effective. If you want, and if you have the ablity, the link is here.

And now without further ado, the latest meandering post.

As many of us are very aware, the extra pandemic aid, which has been a lifeline for a lot of people these past few months is about to end. That means a lot of folks who have been kept afloat since March are about to be shoved off the end of a fucking cliff. (I would like to take this moment to say that I hope Mitch McConnell develops a never ending itch somewhere deep in his anus from which he can never achieve relief.) For his part, Steve Mnuchin, the US Secretary of the Treasury and also a colossal dirtbag, when asked about whether or not there would be a continuation of the unemployment extension said, “it wouldn’t be fair to use taxpayer dollars to pay more people to sit home.” So, just before I get into the other things I want to write about I would like to direct a few questions to Mnuchin, if I may.

Steve. You are aware that people receiving unemployment payments are themselves taxpayers? And that those same people pay taxes on the money they receive from the government? And that those people use the money they have received to buy other things which often are taxed? And that an economy cannot function if people don’t have money to spend so by giving people money you are staving off a much deeper and more painful economic downturn?

Yes? No? Maybe?

Listen, I’m not an economist. I was never all that good with things that involve numbers. But what I do know is that in March my job disappeared for 4 entire months. Because of the nature of my job, I don’t receive the maximum amount allowed in NY State ($504). If it weren’t for the additional funding, I would not have brought in enough money over the course of one month to pay my half the rent on our reasonably affordable (by NY standards) one-bedroom apartment. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to pay rent and also feed myself. As far as I am concerned, the length of this shutdown lies squarely on the shoulders of our elected officials and they owe it to the American public to continue helping us pay our bills until they can remove their heads from their asses and stop the spread. I do place the vast majority of the blame on the federal government, but the states have done their fair share of botching things up as well. Before everyone twists themselves into pretzels to tell me what a great job Cuomo and(?) de Blasio have done consider this. In an article in ProPublica, it was asserted that the 6-day time lapse between when San Francisco shut down and when New York City shut down goes a long way in explaining why NYC was ravaged in a way no other area has been (so far). And I know, I am saying this and basing it on articles that were written with the benefit of hindsight. We know now what we didn’t know then. But, government officials knew more than us. And while I do believe that Cuomo did a better job than basically any other state leader in terms of hitting the gas on a shutdown and communicating with the residents of this state, I also believe that if he and de Blasio weren’t so engaged in their damn pissing contest we would have had a far better outcome. But, I digress.

I came here to write about unemployment. I came here to write about how there needs to be long-lasting aid to those of us who work in industries that have to entirely reimagine themselves to stay above water. What we have now in New York City – outside tables only, no drinks if you’re not seated, limited hours – is a huge strain on business owners and employees. However necessary it is to keep us here in NYC at a point in this pandemic that we worked very hard to arrive at, it is an unsustainable business model for those who work in the hospitality industry and those who own those businesses. I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that if I feel safe at work – which I do at my place of employment because my boss is going above and beyond to make sure that is the case for us and our customers – I would rather earn my income than receive government assistance. The reality of the situation, however, is that there simply are not enough shifts. Beyond that, the loss of our indoor space and a lot of our outdoor capacity results in a loss of business that cannot be easily replaced. Our incomes rely on asses in seats, but we have less seats now and, therefore, far less asses.

Please do not confuse this with me saying that I think precautions are unnecessary. None of us want to go back to where we were in April. That was, quite honestly, the closest to hell on earth I ever want to experience.* However, it is clear to my through learning about the measures being put in place that the governor has not spoken to enough (if any) people in the hospitality industry in order to ascertain how to keep our covid spread low while also helping to keep businesses afloat. And I know, he is a busy man. But nothing exists in a vacuum. Like I said earlier, if people have money, they will spend it. But if you have an entire industry of people who are struggling to afford rent, food and bills you’ve got a problem. That’s less money spent in other areas of the economy and in my mind that shit runs down stream. Just like the mortgage crisis rippled across the economy, so will this. And don’t get me wrong, the bar/restaurant industry is not the only one in this pickle, it’s just the one I understand best. I truly believe that if nothing substantial is done we are in for a world of hurt and many people in our government simply don’t give a shit.

Here’s what I think. I think we live in a country that not only equates wealth with success, but one which equates wealth with moral purity. That somehow those who have acquired, or, let’s face it, inherited wealth are deserving of it and above any serious reproach. That is simply untrue. What is true is that because of this idea that rich people are morally superior to the rest of us, and because they can afford to pay someone to protect them legally or otherwise, they are not governed by the same laws as the rest of us. It is this line of thinking that tells us that regardless of whatever structural and institutional barriers that we know to exist, that needing government assistance is due to a moral failing of the individual, rather than a structural failing of our economic system, and for that reason that individual is not to be trusted. Because that individual is morally unsound, they will take advantage of the kindness of the state and those in power – those who have received tax breaks, benefitted from ill-gotten government contracts, taken advantage of insider information to play the stock market, paid extra or used nepotism to get their children into elite universities and land them cushy and important jobs – must keep them in check.

Moral superiority my ass. And this disgust that so many (Republican) lawmakers have with the fact that people are earning more on unemployment than they did at their jobs is shameful. We should be disgusted that people are earning more on unemployment than in their jobs. But rather than say they are undeserving of the level of security they currently have, we should figure out how to make sure people are paid a living wage when they are working. It is offensive to me, and should be to everyone else, that we have people, hard-working, good people, struggling to pay rent and feed their families while a few selfish nincompoops hoard mountains of cash. We have a show all about hoarders, and not one episode (that I know of) has focused on people who hoard money. There is this thing in economics called the law of diminishing marginal utility. Basically what it says is that the first unit of consumption of a good or service yields more general utility than subsequent units of consumption. At a certain point, people have so much money that more money simply does not impact quality of life. More money to the super wealthy is absolutely meaningless outside of bragging rights. It’s grotesque. But to people with less, to people living on the edge, a little bit more money means a lot. It means food, it means rent payments, school uniforms, menstrual products, transportation, a fucking social life. This extra $600 is E V E R Y T H I N G.

I guess I’ve kind of gone off the rails here. Super shocking, I know. There is just a lot to think about and it’s hard for me to distill this all down to something narrow and concrete. I know these problems have existed for a long time, way before this pandemic struck. And I know people have been struggling with our economic and political systems since forever. The demonization of the poor is not new. Poverty is not the fault of the impoverished. And success is almost never self-made.

In summation, it is my belief that the only way forward at this point is to eat the rich, (distribute their net worth) and then steal their houses.

*Despite how poorly some other states – and some residents as a response to their local or our federal government – are handling their own outbreaks, I truly, truly hope they do not endure the degree of fear and loss that we did here. I would never wish this on anyone. Except maybe McConnell. Okay, and Jim Jordan. Bill Barr too, actually. OMG I have to stop.

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Rebekah’s Pandemic Diary: How are you? Because I am Not Good.

8 Jul

A few months back I got a message from a reader on my Ko-Fi page thanking me for sharing all my feelings and experiences throughout the pandemic. I feel that I owe that reader an apology – I have not written about or documented these past few months nearly enough. In part this comes from not wanting to burden others with my feelings. We are all having our own experiences of grief, loss, confusion, fear, anxiety and, for some, a bit (or a lot) of success and positivity mixed in among all the confusion. It feels as though taking up space – even if that space is my own little corner of the internet that people can choose to engage with or not – is an imposition. And also in part it comes from the specific way in which my particular creativity works. I am someone who has always written with a specific story in mind, or a strong reaction to an ongoing issue or big piece of news. In the years since Trump was elected, I have found myself writing less and less often. There is just so much. And to be completely honest, I have been really struggling to make sense of the world. I have been struggling to find my bearings in an environment and a society that I thought was one thing but is, in fact, something entirely different. It feels like walking up to a structure that I think is made of something sturdy but when I touch it it turns out that it was constructed out of sand and the entire thing just crumbles at my fingertips, blows away in the wind.

People have been saying this since the election, that the modus operandi of this president was to plough ahead with one inhumane statement and policy after another, to overwhelm us to a point that action feels impossible, fruitless. Well, consider it a success because I am overwhelmed. Does anyone even remember what life was like before Trump? I’m having a harder and harder time mentally getting there. It’s like when someone dies and in the months following you can still hear their laughter in your head, feel their touch on you skin. They visit you in your dreams and you get to remember what it was like to have them in your life. But then, over time, they visit less often, their voices fade further and further into the distance, you no longer remember how they smelled. I am having a harder and harder time remembering what pre-November 2016 felt like. I know that this country was still horrible, was an enemy in a lot of ways, but at least it was an enemy that I sort of understood, knew how to fight against. Right now I feel like we are all face-to-face with a shape shifter, a reality that makes no sense, follows no rules, changes the game to suit its ends halfway through the match. And then changes the game again, just for fun. And again and again and again after that.

Now of course there is the pandemic, which the administration has decided to wish into non-existence. Turns out, viruses don’t take orders from a wannabe authoritarian leader and his morally bankrupt enablers, those people riding his coattails towards the true American Dream: mountains of wealth brought upon through the only method a lot of the powerful know – depraved indifference. And what about the rest of us? Those of us who are not immune to the shockwaves that will run through our economy for years? What are we supposed to do? I put over a decade of my life into an industry that essentially no longer exists, that will never be how it was just a few months back. There is no longer a living to be made there. So, what now? What now for me and millions of other people. The unemployment extension and eviction moratoriums are about to end and people are going to be in free fall. What we have seen these past months has been incomprehensible and I think it’s going to get worse. I think this is only the beginning.

So, I don’t know. I feel pretty fucking sad. How are you?

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Rebekah’s Pandemic Diary: Back to Work We Go!

3 Jul

Whelp, it’s official. This country is a fucking disaster. I guess no one told the Trump administration that the narrative of “American Exceptionalism” is a load of bullcrap and that even if it were true, which it most assuredly is not, that no amount of exceptionalism would have made us immune to the spread of this fucking virus. We have, what, 131,000 dead now? That is 131,000 lives lost; 131,000 communities that are now without a loved one; 131,000 families and friends forced to mourn from a distance. And that doesn’t account for whatever long term effects those who were severely stricken by the coronavirus might suffer from down the line. That number also doesn’t account for people who could not get the medical care they needed for other illnesses as a result of the strain this virus placed on our healthcare system, or for the people who were too scared to enter a hospital and put off lifesaving care. And of course, there is the mental health toll this has taken on the entire medical field – specifically those in the hardest hit areas like here in New York City.

For those of us who remained in New York through April, it feels like  we will never be the same. It was a goddamn horror show. Overrun hospitals, people standing in long lines desperate for care, refrigerated trucks parked outside to collect the bodies because there was no more room, funeral homes and cremation centers overutilized, daily coronavirus briefings from Cuomo who documented the seemingly never-ending surge in infections, hospitalizations and death. Going to the grocery store felt like walking into certain death. Leaving the house for things as routine as dog walks and bodega visits was fraught with anxiety. Everyone you passed was a potential super spreader, a lethal germ machine unknowingly spewing droplets to land on what? And for how long? Do you bleach everything you buy from the store? Does it make sense to wear gloves? Does Trump know, or care, that people are dying? Does the CDC have any fucking clue what it is talking about? Are other citizens watching? Do they know what’s happening here? Do they realized it is already in their grocery stores, gyms and restaurants, silently spreading? Do they know they will be here too? That it might already be too late to stop it?

And then it was.

And here we are.

So, what now? What do we do now? The past 3.5 months have been really hard. Us New Yorkers have largely stayed home, stayed safe, masked up. For awhile, it seemed like nothing we did could stem the tide. It felt like those numbers would keep climbing, our loved ones succumbing. And then, one day, those ever-rising numbers stabilized and then started to fall, and fall, and fall.  It felt like a miracle, but it wasn’t. I would like to say it was the result of collective action – millions of New Yorkers staying home to protect themselves and others – and in some ways that is true. We did stay home. But let’s be honest, a lot of people stayed home because there was nothing else to do. No museums, bars, restaurants, salons, gyms, jobs to travel to, schools and after school activities to ferry kids to and from. But now that our numbers have fallen and stayed low, things are starting to open. And as I said back in March when I hoped that bars and restaurants would be forced closed, if things are open people will go to them, regardless the risk. And if people go to them, they have to be staffed.

Listen, I get it. We are stir crazy. People want to see their friends, return to some degree of normalcy. But as far as I am concerned, these decisions to reopen are not about us at all. They aren’t about our happiness, health or well-being. They are about the fact that, as I stated at the offset of this piece, this country is a fucking disaster. The unemployment benefits, with the $600 weekly extension, are set to expire at the end of this month along with the moratorium on evictions. So people’s unemployment and housing security will both be gone at the same time. The House has passed an extension of the federal aid – called The Heroes Act – that was supposed to extend the $600 through January 31, 2021. Mitch McConnell will not allow that to get through the Senate. So these re-openings, in my opinion, are largely being pushed through too early because people need to pay their bills and without continued help at the federal level they will not be able to. So, back to work in the middle of a deadly pandemic we go! But not to worry because the governor has put a travel restriction on people traveling here from…16 states where coronavirus cases are on the rise. People arriving here from

  1. Alabama
  2. Arkansas
  3. Arizona
  4. California
  5. Florida
  6. Georgia
  7. Iowa
  8. Idaho
  9. Louisiana
  10. North Carolina
  11. Mississippi
  12. Nevada
  13. South Carolina
  14. Tennessee
  15. Texas
  16. Utah

are all being informed by New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to self-quarantine for 14-days upon arrival. This self-quarantine is “voluntary but compliance is expected.”

I’m sorry, what? Have they watched the news? There are people spitting on people with cancer who ask them to put a mask on because the Constitution apparently gives them the right to be goddamn disease vectors. (I tried to find a link to the article but I couldn’t because there are too many articles about people spitting on other people who ask them to put on a mask or give them space.) People in this country are monsters! Sure, most people will likely cancel travel plans to these states as some of my friends already have but as we have  seen it literally takes one person, one super spreader, to undo all the work we have done. The mantra of individualism that we bow to in the good old U. S. of A. is one that creates a society full of selfish assholes who care more about their own right to go to a fucking swimming pool than the rights of their neighbors to actually survive. This “every state for itself” bullshit doesn’t work when you have porous borders. We either have to shut down the whole country or else just resign ourselves to the fact that this will go on until there is a vaccine, as we swiftly approach flu season, while people’s money runs out. And it seems as though the government has made its choice.

So what does this mean for those of us who work in non-essential businesses that are now basically being forced to reopen during an international health crisis? It means that we don’t matter, that’s what. The federal government has essentially thrown its hands up and said “whelp, we tried!” and sent us all back out into the world. But let me remind you, that we don’t actually know that much more about this disease than we did when it first showed itself. Herd immunity could be a thing or it could not; antibodies could be helpful or they could not; blood type might be indicative of the seriousness of the virus, or it could not; this virus could form another strain and run right back through our area, or not. We know literally nothing except what has already happened – people get sick, really sick, and then they die. And so for all this talk about learning from history, we sure do have a short fucking memory. And for all this talk of American Exceptionalism, we sure are exceptionally stupid.

Maybe I am being nervous about nothing. Maybe we are safe here in New York now. But everything in my being is telling me that is not the case and we are a long, long way from where we need to be to start returning to some semblance of pre-Covid life. But, what does it matter what I think. According to the government I’m expendable. And so are you.

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Rebekah’s Pandemic Diary: Who Am I In This Moment?

1 Jun

Along with other Jewish Americans, I grew up learning about the plight of my ancestors. It’s interesting, having that early education, that knowledge that there was a point in the not-so-distant past when a movement of hate sought to prevent your existence. It’s scary to know that they almost succeeded. I think often of the lives snuffed out, all of the possibilities that never came to pass. What would this world be like if those 11 million people, Jewish folks and the other hated and marginalized groups, had been allowed to live, to flourish? I often joke that the story of the Jewish people is much like our music – it exists only in the minor scale. Full of loss, sadness and pain. Even still, some way, some how, our knuckles are white as we cling to hopefulness, to our right to live unencumbered, not hunted, not hated. I walk with this knowledge daily, the knowledge that there were, there are, folks who would have me, my family, my friends and all the Jewish folks I don’t yet know wiped off the Earth. They came close last time, why not give it another go? Our demise, in certain ways, always feels imminent.

There is something about carrying a collective trauma. It gets into your blood, your DNA. When Richard Spencer gave a hitler salute on national television in the fall of 2016, I came as close to throwing up from fear as I ever have in my life. It felt like something had shifted. They weren’t afraid anymore, they were out in the open, and the media was giving them a free platform for recruitment. Still, to this day, hearing people quote the nazis marching through Charlottesville – “Jews will not replace us,” “blood and soil” – brings tears to my eyes and makes me feel light-headed. It is a horrible thing to feel like your life, your very existence, is repulsive to so many. And yet that is a feeling that so many Americans have every single day. That is what we are seeing borne out in the streets in cities and towns across the country.

In religious school on Saturday mornings when we talked about our expulsion from Egypt, the pogroms, the Holocaust, I wondered how there could be so many people throughout history that were filled with such hate. What had we done? Why were we so repulsive? How could people march in the streets in favor of the extermination of a people? How did they find enough people to guard the camps, to starve, torture and kill innocent and helpless people? How could hate run so deep that it could corrupt a person to the core, and make them capable of such evil? On the other side, how were there people who matched that hatred with bravery, and hid Jews and members of other hunted groups in their attics and under their floor boards? How – when we hear people say that we are all the same – could what we are built of make us so incredibly different?

How do some see human filth where others see incredible value?

I’ve been asking myself these questions a lot recently. I try to educate myself about structural inequality, institutional racism, a country built on looted labor, a militarized state that takes its might out on Black bodies, knowing that at one time it was our bodies the state sought to control, to destroy. That was different, I know. Maybe it’s some deeply rooted feeling of survivors guilt, the fact that it’s been us so many times. The reality is that in this country it’s been Black people always. Even now, today, while people take to the streets to fight police brutality and our militarized police the violence is being taken out on, centered on, Black bodies. I see it. But I don’t fucking understand it.

How? How does someone have so much hate that he can place his knee on a person’s neck and remain there, hand cooly in his pocket, for 8 minutes and 46 seconds? And how do we have a country where we all know that if that video hadn’t been captured, he would have gotten away with it? And even with the video he still might? And even if he doesn’t get away with it, even if he gets convicted of these strategically watered down charges, what does that really change? In the large sense? Will those of us whose bodies aren’t on the line pat ourselves on the back and think, job well done? Or will we keep fighting? Because whether there are people on the streets protesting or not, this is still happening. It’s been happening.

I have been thinking a lot about my role. About who I am. Who I need to be. And I keep thinking back to religious school, wondering how many people refused to help the hunted? How many slammed their doors and turned their backs in the Jews’ moment of need? I remember wondering how they could be so cruel? How they couldn’t see the people before them, frightened, begging?

Right now, we are watching a militarized police force occupy cities across the country. We are seeing armored vehicles patrol the streets. Witnessing “officers of the law” violently suppress non-violent protests. Watching police forces arrest and shoot tear gas and rubber bullets at the media. It’s terrifying. But these forces have been operating in, and against, Black communities for generations. So many of us have the privilege to ignore it, to pretend it isn’t there. But that is why George Floyd and so many others are dead. White privilege killed them. And regardless of being Jewish, I benefit from white privilege. Their blood is on my hands. I have a lot of work to do.

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