Tag Archives: donald j. trump

Nazis, Am I Right?!

13 Aug

Did you guys know that after World War II Germany outlawed both Holocaust denial and the Nazi salute? It’s true. It’s almost as if Germany looked at those things and said to themselves,

Hey, maybe if we police semantics and denial of actual history we can stop the rise of dangerous ethnocentrism!

But what does Germany know about the rise of that sort of stuff, you know? It’s not like one of their former leaders stirred some percentage of the German population into a hateful frenzy that resulted in the deaths of 11 million people in concentration camps alone. Or wait, were those called Holocaust Centers? I can’t remember anymore. So much dangerous rewriting of history has happened recently that it’s almost difficult to keep track.

But really. This shit is bonkers. So as many of you know I am a Jew. Did you hear that, Nazis? A Jew. My first and middle name both come from the Old Testament, I got Bat Mitvah’d and my dad even used to work in the stock market. You know, so he could steal money from goys and advance the Jewish agenda to take over the financial system, the media and then…. THE WORLD. And you know how we can do this? Because there are just so damn many of us! I mean, go anywhere and you’re practically tripping over Jews. Here’s some information for you about how many Jews there are!

In 1939, just before World War II – which happened, by the way – the global Jewish population peaked at about 16.6 million which is twice the population of New York City. And there are lots of people in New York City. Also lots of Jews. Which is why some people call it Jew York City for laughs. Of course then the Holocaust happened (because it totally happened, there are books and photographs and everything) during which approximately 7 million Jews were killed. So let’s do some math.

16,600,000 – 7,000,000 = …? (Maybe this will be easier if I take the zeroes out.)

16.6 – 7 = 9.6 (Don’t forget to add the zeros back in now!)

That left 9,600,000 or (9.6 million of you prefer letters to numbers) Jews at the end of World War II! Still bigger than the population of modern day New York City! That’s \ a lot of Jews, friends. Plus some of us have so many babies so we should be able to rebound just in time to take over the financial system, the media and then…. THE WORLD! Hooray Jews! J-E-W-S Jews, Jews, JEWS!!!!!

Because think about it. World War II ended in 1945 and now here we are in 2017. That gave us Jews…. ugh more math… 72 whole years to regain the lost 7 million Jews plus some in order to return to our previous state of leaders of the entire world but especially all the money. According to a study published in 2015, the Jews finally reached our pre-Holocaust numbers. Phew! But wait, that study was maybe not entirely accurate! Traditionally speaking, Jewish law is actually pretty strict about who is really considered Jewish. I mean, what with all the money laundering and slum lording we can’t let any rats in our ranks, ya know what I’m saying?? Basically, your mom has to be Jewish or, if she isn’t, she has to go through a formal conversion process. Some Jews think that is too limiting a definition. Israel’s Law of Return – the legislation that allows Jews to immigrate to Israel – was amended in 1970 to include the “child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew” to enter the country and even live there. Wow, that’s really nice! But also, woah, clearly us Jews are just trying to pad our numbers so we can take over the financial system, the media and then… THE WORLD more quickly. Sneaky, right??

Here’s the thing though: the study that cited a return to pre-Holocaust numbers included the people considered Jewish under the updated Law of Return which is totally cool with me. I mean, the more the merrier. But the thing is that back in 1945 after the Holocaust – which happened big league – the people now allowed to live in Israel under the 1970 version of the Law of Return probably weren’t considered Jewish under Jewish Law. I mean, maybe the Nazis didn’t care about all that. I’d have to get some confirmation on that. Luckily for us there are lots of photos of modern day Nazis with their names, phone numbers and addresses floating around the internet. Maybe I will send one of them an inquiry. They clearly know all about Jews seeing as how they hate us so much.

Rebekah, focus!

Sorry, I just find Nazis so damn distracting!

Anyway. This professor named Sergio DellaPergola – by the way he is the most well-known expert in the world when it comes to Jewish Demographics – came up with his own number. He argues that if “we add persons who state they are partly Jewish and non-Jews who have Jewish parents, an extended global aggregate population estimate of 17,236,850 is obtained.” And in case you got confused, that is actually more than the pre-Holocaust population. The only thing, though, is that DellaPergola doesn’t think that is a very good way of measuring demographics and he says as much!  He even drew a parallel to PhDs since he is a PhD and therefore is very full of himself. I mean, that’s always the case, right? Academics are arrogant and elitist? And they silence people of differing opinions, but especially those who spew hate? How dare they. As I was saying, he said the following:

“If the United States had 6.7 million holders of a doctorate, and 1 million of these hold a doctorate partly, how many Ph.D.s are there in America?”

I don’t feel like doing the math right now because my brain is tired from all the numbers but it seems like you could measure that population in two distinctly different ways and come up with very different answers, one of them larger than the other. And that’s just what happened with Jews! If you measure only those who self-identify as Jewish you end up with 14.2 million Jews worldwide. That number is way smaller. Not only is it smaller than the 17+ million Jews that some people quote, but it is also smaller than the number of Jews worldwide before the Holocaust. Not only that, but a recent study by Pew predicts that the world’s Jewish population will rise by about 15% over the next 2.5 decades as compared to 35% for the overall population. If those estimates are correct, that means the Jewish population won’t reach pre-Holocaust numbers until 2050 when the global population is vastly higher than it was in 1945. So that means that even though there will be the same number of Jews, we will make up a smaller percentage of the population relative to overall growth.

Woah. That’s heavy. And it almost makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. I mean, we should almost be flattered by the outsize power and influence that these people think we have. Or maybe it’s just fun to beat up on the little guys (with the big noses and the penchant for being shysters – that’s Yiddish, a language spoken by Jews!). Come to think of it though, threats of genocide and actual genocide are not really very flattering at all so never mind.

For those of us who work better with pictures and stuff, it was suggested that maybe I put Jews as percentage of world population into a chart to draw some useful parallels but I didn’t feel like wrestling with Excel. Also I’m a Jew and I was taught to steal things from other people and then hoard them so instead I found this nice pie chart on the Internet. As you can see, as of 2007 the world had a lot of people but not a lot of Jews. Way less than all the other religions measured here besides the Bahai faith which is an Abrahamic religion that teaches the essential worth of all religions and the unity and equality of all people. That sounds really nice, actually. I wonder why more people aren’t Baha’is (hint: because people are fucking assholes).

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So, yeah. In all seriousness, I don’t give a shit what measure you use or whether we are talking about Jews, members of the LGBTQ community, people of color or anybody else. People are people are people. (And Nazis are Nazis are Nazis.) What is going on in this country, and around the world, is fucking disgusting. And the fact that our current president took the Oval Office riding a wave of hate that empowered the worst among us is something we should all fear and be ashamed of. This has been brewing for a long time. Trump just has no goddamn soul and doesn’t care how he gets to call himself a winner as long as he can do it. He’s a King amongst the soulless and that’s good enough for him. But it’s not good enough for the rest of us. So I don’t know. Let’s keep resisting and keep arming ourselves with information in the face of their claims of “fake news.” We know what’s real so let’s shout it from the rooftops.

And in the meantime, go out and punch a Nazi. I hear it’s good for the soul.

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How I’m Dealing

26 Jan

This has been a really rough few days, friends. Hellish, I would venture to say. And I am going to be completely and totally honest with you, as I normally am, and tell you how I have been handling it. Not well. Not well at all. Here’s a recap:

Thursday: Trained at a new job from 9am to 4:30pm. I tried to gage where all my coworkers stood on the issues by asking them some questions that I will not divulge here because I am actually afraid that some agents for the government might arrive at my door and whisk me away under the cover of night. That’s where we live now, folks. After work I headed off to a bar that my friend works at and had a few very necessary drinks in preparation for the end of the free world.

Friday: Trained again at the job. This time for 12 glorious hours. The benefit was that this allowed me to entirely miss all the fracas surrounding the inauguration of Tr*mp or, as my friend Ben suggested we call him, SCROTUS. My friends Emily and James came into town so that was great, but there was still just a very heavy gloom that hung over everything. When I got home that night I turned on The Internet, read a few things and cried myself to sleep.

Saturday: Women’s March day. I went to the march with Emily, James and Emma. I wore my “unpresidented” shirt (thanks Beth!) and we all carried signs. I would like to acknowledge here that there were some problems with the marches in general (underrepresentation of POC being high on that list and something I will get into in another post because it is way too important to be just a talking point in an overview) but overall it was nice for me to be in the company of friends and surrounded by a bunch of badass women and men who disagreed with the inauguration of SCROTUS and were just as apprehensive of what the future would likely hold. This was especially important for me seeing as how I just moved to a new city and lack the sort of support system I had in New York. Also, the South is different.

Sunday: Had to be at work to train at 8am.  At a restaurant. I know, I know. But the people must have brunch, after all. It was a really hard day. I hadn’t slept enough, but I had certainly read a lot about what all has been going on. I had the time to have conversations with a lot of good friends who feel similarly to me and it was all just crashing down. The reality of it all. Like a giant, horrible wave teeming with dead sea creatures who could no longer survive in the increasing temperature of the oceans. The shift was awful. Not because of my coworkers or the managers, who are all lovely, but because everyone is politically charged these days, and down here a lot of people voted for Tr*mp. It isn’t like in New York where those people are few and far between. They are everywhere here. Especially when you work in a restaurant that is in a highly touristed area and has a lot of domestic tourists from cities and towns that are significantly less progressive than New Orleans. There were some things said. Like the young white women who insisted that women (read: them and the white women they know) already have equal rights and what the fuck were all those idiots marching for. (I summarized.) I had to keep my mouth shut. It felt like my soul was just melting. Luckily Emily and James were still in town so I was able to run to them after work and decompress. I also called my dad and started crying on Canal Street amongst all the normal New Orleans revelers. No big deal.

Monday: I woke up crying and basically didn’t stop all day. I tried to quit my job because I felt like everything was horrible and I wanted to just hide in my house forever. My managers would’t let me quit, though. Apparently I’m okay at my job. Who knew. But in the process of trying to quit I entirely lost my shit in front of not one but TWO managers at work and, if my estimates are correct, about a third of my coworkers and now I feel sort of like a crazy person. Lots of tears, lots of eyeliner running down my face. Great first impression, Rebekah. Luckily my friend Carie is awesome and I called her and we spent the day doing fun things interspersed with me crying. By the end of the day it dawned on me: there was a good chance that, for the next four years, whenever I wasn’t otherwise occupied (or even sometimes even when I was) I would likely be crying. That seemed to me rather unsustainable.

Tuesday: Woke up still feeling like everything was totally fucked. Kept reading The Internet and panicking (but at least I wasn’t crying?). Carie and I ran some errands which helped to take my mind of our impending collective doom. I was supposed to go to running group but didn’t because I am pretty sure I had cried out the entire salt content of my body and was exhausted. I went to bed early.

So, I mean, needless to say if you are wondering how I have been handling all this the answer is, as I said before, not well. I have sat down to write about 5 different blogs in the past few days and nothing comes out how I want it to. I think that is partially because I am so overwhelmed with the onslaught of information and, honestly, an intense feeling of loss. It is like I am in mourning. And, you know what, I am. I am in mourning for the world I thought that I lived in now that I live in one that operates under a completely different set of rules, if we can even call them that. Here’s what I realized (with a lot of help from friends) and how I am going to operate going forward.

I cannot longer assume that I live in the same reality that I always have. Our government operates largely through precedent and the moral foundation of those who work within it. Regardless of whether we agree with the politics and whether we feel the person him or herself is of good moral character, there was a general area in which people operated, and that area was largely predictable and normalized. We might not agree with it, we might find the actions themselves morally bankrupt, but there was still, for lack of a better phrase, a general code of conduct within which people operated.

That is no longer the case. The code is gone.

We have been shown, throughout the campaign itself and now during these first few terrifying days, that Donald J. Tr*mp does not abide by any code outside of whatever one is guiding him in that particular moment. And for those of us, myself included, who believed that there was something codified in law that required a certain level of behavior, there is not. So all those times we scream

But how can he do this? Can he really do this?

The answer, it seems, is that he can. The rules of the game have changed. He can remove information from government websites regarding climate change and LGBTQ issues as if they no longer even exist. He can demand that the National Park Services stop tweeting from their official handles, but he cannot stop them from making a new one that is not associated with the government, and he cannot stop the 1.8 million followers and counting from supporting that action. He can appoint cabinet members with little to no relevant experience and they can somehow get questioned and confirmed regardless of the fact that many of them have not yet passed ethics screenings. He can become President of the United States of America without releasing his tax documents and he can repeatedly say that the only people who care about that information are reporters, which is patently untrue. I am not a reporter and I would like access to those documents. He can shut down the media and send us all into a tizzy with these fucking “alternative facts” which makes us doubt every single bit of information that we read. If this administration is known for one thing, it will be known for the number of synonyms for the word “lie” it uses on a regular basis to justify the man that they, and Russia, and James Comey, and all those fucking white people, empowered.

Our President, is a man who has never heard the word “no.” People have said it to him I’m certain, but he has never heard it. “No” is simply not a word that applies to Donald J. Tr*mp. And when you have a man for whom the word “no” doesn’t apply, you have a man who can not compromise, you have a man with a huge temper, you have a man with the social mentality and awareness of a 5-year-old. That is who we are living under. We are living under a 6’3″, 240-pound toddler who pouts and stamps his feet at the mere smell of any sort of negative feelings cast in his direction. And yet he is quite possibly the biggest bully to ever darken the doors of the Oval Office.

So no, this is not normal. But it is even less normal than we previously thought. There are no rules, there are no precedents, there are, it seems, no laws that can touch Donald Tr*mp. And so then the question becomes:

What do we do now?

We cannot use the normal routes, we cannot take the same actions, we cannot think this will change or our displeasure can be registered in the same ways they have always been because this is not the same reality. This country will never be the same. We will never be the same. It’s as if we have been living in a world with a ground that is made of rubber, only before we thought that it was made of steel. And he is pushing that ground, stretching it, and we are all off balance and we have to walk differently. Because you cannot walk the same way on something that moves and changes and thins out as you can on something strong and flat and secure. So again I ask,

What do we do now?

And honestly, I don’t really know. I wish I fucking knew. But for me just wrapping my head around the fact that everything is different, and that I mean that word everything to be all encompassing, is helpful. Because it means I have to open my mind and stretch it and challenge it to respond to all the changes that are coming at me, at all of us. Because we, friends, have brought knives to an unregulated gun fight. So we have to be smarter and quicker and we have to use our bodies to keep coming at them again and again and again. And honestly, as much as I loved to hear Michelle Obama say “when they go low we go high,” there is no low or high anymore. There are those with morals and those without morals and those are two completely unrelatable realities. There are those who care about the future of the world and those who care only about the immediate future of themselves.

So, what do we do? Seriously, what do we do?

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