THE PICTURE ON THE RADIO

I have 3 daughters. All 3 are now successful, amazing adults. The oldest was almost 7 when the youngest was born. My middle daughter was almost 6 then. I listen to the radio for my news because I find myself getting too emotional when I watch most news on television. Sometimes, however, the reporter on the radio paints so vivid and disturbing a picture with mere, momentarily unambiguous words that those words conjure up is more vivid than any photograph or film from the greatest of masters. No masterpiece by Diane Arbus, Robert Caps or W. Eugene Smith could be any clearer.

Where I live the day was sunny, a harbinger of early spring. Perhaps it was also like that where the father the reporter described sat. This father sat wailing on the littered ground near a hospital. He cradled in his arms 2 children, a boy of 7 years and a girl of 2. He kept trying to open his daughter's eyes in vain insistence that she remain alive. This toddler was as dead as her older brother. 

According to the war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his genocidal government, this father and his dead babies are Hamas. According to the murderous scum who currently govern the nation of Israel this father trying to reanimate his dead daughter with some impossible magic from his tears is a terrorist.

No such horror ever befell me or my daughters but once my youngest nearly died because she'd caught a flu. I woke one Saturday morning late when she was just 9 months old  because she hadn't cried for a diaper change and feeding. For a week she hadn't been able to keep anything down, not Jello water, not Coke syrup, not even Emetrol. Now she was a listless ragdoll, eyes open in a motionless body. I got her to, first, a pediatrician and then to a hospital where an IV line ending in syringe larger than her delicate arm pushed fluid and life back into her. 

I was too enfolded in frantic efforts to save my daughter to fall to falling tears. I don't remember whether I spent that night in the hospital with her or just many of the other nights during her stay but I did stay by her crib about half the nights of her stay. She is now a nurse practitioner who works in hospital Emergency Rooms. She has 3 daughters of her own. My experience is in no way commensurate with that of the father in Gaza wailing over his 2 dead children after Netanyahu's resumption of his genocide in Gaza. Still the fear and distress I felt 45 years ago came streaming back to me as I heard of this poor father on March 18th. 

I can also honestly state that we're I cradling my children murdered by a war criminal more concerned with retaining his political power than in pretending to understand the least mote of human decency, I would be a terrorist from that moment on. I would find no space in my heart for any Israeli father or mother and his or her children. The next time a terrorist act by some Palestinian parent unconscionably murders some Israeli children don't place the blame on the Palestinians but rather lay those  children's bodies on Benjamin Netanyahu's doorstep. 

For each grieving parent of Palestine should there not be a matching, grieving parent in Israel? Should there not be a tear-filled Israeli eye for each tear-blinded Palestinian eye until, as Mahatma Ghandi observed, the whole world is blind?

It should be obvious to anyone with even a small amount of human decency and commitment to logic that to stop the murders the murders must stop. People on both sides of the Gaza border must have sufficient food and water and medical care and supplies. People on both sides of the Gaza border must have the right and ability to govern themselves in a way that is responsible to themselves and to their neighbors. People on neither side of the Gaza border should be subjected to some lunatic's pipedream of a casino infested beachfront resort unless it is their own will to do so. People on neither side of the Gaza border should be required to bow down before the statue of some golden calf, especially if the statue is of a golden bullshitter.

The Netanyahu government and Bibi himself are terrorists just as surely as were those Palestinians who attacked on October 7, 2023. Eliminating the murderers of Hamas is a useful goal as long as the murders of the current Israeli government are eliminated too by shipping them to the International Criminal Court and letting them rot in prison cells. Maybe Netanyahu and his equally criminal right-wing cronies could be forced to share cells with murderous Hamas criminals so they could express their blind hatred against one another while decent Israeli and Palestinians work out how to peacefully share the land of their father, Abraham.

Finally, I want to make one other point clear:

Peacefully demonstrating opposition to any government is NOT terrorism.

If you pass through a park, quadrangle, hall or room in which someone you don't like is advocating something you dislike you and only you are responsible for your feelings. Unless those you oppose accost you in some way you have not been harmed. Seeing something or someone from a distance and disliking it is nothing to you so long as you can leave the place and no longer see it. If you are free to leave or just turn your head and not see it and you claim this item is assault, it's you who need counseling and potential removal from society rather than someone else.

If someone shouts, "From the river to the sea!" from across a college campus in your direction that might be anti-Semitism but it's not any kind of assault until and unless that someone is shouting again when you are both toe to toe and nose to nose. Unfortunately, in the United States of 2025 shouting, "Support Ukraine" could get you deported regardless of your citizenship status or your distance from some neo-fascist either home grown or from South Africa.

But, as usual, I digress.

Neither Gaza nor Israel nor the world need another grieving father holding his dead children. The clear way to stop more such horror is to stop the murdering of civilians. The clear way to stop the genocide in Gaza is to remove Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet of fascist fanatics from government. By elections would benefit everyone but removal is the imperative and I'm open to suggestions as long as the remover isn't Palestinian.

Most Basic Responsibilities: Neo-Fascists with no concept of irony.

Yesterday America's most visible embarrassment, Dubya, the putative president, signed a continuing resolution to keep Federal departments funded. He used his weekly radio address to accuse the Congress of "failing to fulfill its most basic responsibility". This comes hot on the heels of his photo opportunity in support of the ill-conceived and vastly under-funded "No Child Left Behind Act" in which he informed those gathered to celebrate education that "Childrens do learn." It also follows by a week or so Dubya's outrage at the MoveOn "General Betrayus" advertisement.

In order to be one of the current crop of neo-fascists who style themselves as "Conservatives" one must have no shame and no sense of irony. The Republicans who were appalled at the MoveOn ad most vociferously were not terribly disturbed by the farrago of John McCain's black baby at the time of South Carolina's 2000 Republican Primary. They actively participated in an advertisement in 2004 that morphed decorated Vietnam Veteran Max Cleland into Osama bin Laden and actively supported or, at least never condemned, the Swift Boat Veterans scurrilous attack on John Kerry. And subsequently they have been utterly silent as their favorite drug addict, Rush Limbaugh, has attacked John Murtha. No shame and no sense of irony.

Dubya has to have no sense of irony or else he couldn't get through any given day. And, like his father and grandfather before him, he has no sense of shame. That gene has been bred out of the Bush family for a number of generations and carefully kept from creeping in through marriage.

But the accusation that Congress or anyone has failed in their most basic responsibilities has a special stench coming from Dubya's mouth. You see, on the same day that Dubya was castigating Congress - meaning Democrats - for being unable to pass vital legislation in the face of Republican opposition and his own veto threats the Topps Meat company was notifying the public that tons of hamburger from its plant were tainted with e. coli bacteria and unsafe to eat. What has that to do with failing to fulfill basic responsibilities, you ask? Well the Food and Drug Administration is an Executive Branch agency that oversees the purity of the things that go into our bodies. Leaving aside the issues of lax testing of drugs for the moment, during the last 26 years we have had an ever increasing number of instances of contaminated food. During that same 26 years under Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, the Republican Congresses of 1995 through 2006 and Dubya the FDA has had an ever shrinking budget. Sure we can throw away a trillion or two dollars on a unjustified war that has no foreseeable ending but meat inspectors...they're one example of "big government" and "unnecessary regulation" and "interference in the private sector". Surely meat inspectors aren't necessary since the food industry can adequately police itself, right?

No.

A century ago we had an unregulated meat packing industry that Upton Sinclair exposed in The Jungle. The wholesale violation of sanitary conditions was such an outrage that that notable lefty and closet communist, Theodore Roosevelt, with the support of a Republican Congress passed legislation to regulate an industry that was killing and sickening U. S. citizens at an alarming rate. But that was a century ago. Surely the blind pursuit of profit and negligence couldn't let it happen again!

Topps Meat is not "the canary in the coal mine". It is the latest example of a system that has been intentionally dismantled by ideologues no less criminally deluded than the Soviet planners who killed millions through forced collectivization in the 1920s and 1930s. It is of a piece with the appallingly inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina that more than 2 years later has not properly housed thousands of families. It is of a piece with sending men into battle without proper equipment. It is of a piece with sitting in a Florida classroom inactive while fanatical ideologues flew airliners into buildings. It is of a piece with all of the Republican's other failures to fulfill their most basic responsibilities to protect the people of this nation. It is also of a piece with the actions of this group of neo-fascist ideologues in violating their oaths to "protect and defend the Constitution of these United States" by suspending habeus corpus, spying on American citizens without cause or warrant and other extra-legal measures.

Dubya hasn't any right to outrage over anyone's advertising and certainly hasn't any right to accuse anyone or any institution of failing to live up to their responsibilities. Without either a sense of shame or a sense of irony he will continue to to make such statements. Those of us ashamed of his shamelessness and understanding of the irony in his statements can only hope that enough of the electorate will understand and also be ashamed so that we can have a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress to begin undoing the damage.