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Crusading against evil since ...
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Hopped on with my fellow Gen Xers, and this morning to rant about the host of shitty things the Trump regime has done in just the last week. From Nazis to mass murder to the dumbest kind of fascism, it’s been one fucked up week.
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You may not have heard about 6 7, and if not, your life is not the worse for it. Also, you probably don't have contact with young humans.
6 7 is just the latest nonsense meatworld meme. You don't need to rush to figure it out because now that Wikipedia has a page about it, Miriam Webster has an entry, and the Wall Street Journal just ran an explainer (calling it "this fall's most obnoxious classmate"), all of which means it's nearly played out.
But in the meantime, it is one more test of teachers' patience (particularly on the elementary level).
These tests are always there (skibidi toilet, anyone?) because young humans love them some nonsense. And 6 7 is relatively harmless-- not violent or sexual or intended to offend. As nonsense goes, it's better than average. But this brand of nonsense represents a fundamental challenge for teachers.
Some teachers are not meeting the challenge well, with nonsense behavior being met with nonsense rules. But it's not great for a classroom to model principles like "I don't like that, and I have the power here, so I'm just going to forbid it." That includes silly ideas like "I'm going to fine you fifteen cents every time you say that stupid thing, because I'm fed up." It is tempting, as a teacher, to just get out your big stick; after all, this is just nonsense, and not important talk.
As we live through a time marked by the muscle flexing of a wanna-be authoritarian regime, teachers need to ask themselves what form of governance they want to model in their classroom, and I sure hope they arrive at "non-authoritarian" as the answer.
I am not (as any of my former students would tell you) a fan of classroom anarchy. You can be an authority without being an authoritarian. Teachers are hired to be the responsible adult in a room filled with non-adults. That can mean many different things, but what it should not mean that the classroom is governed by the teacher's personal preferences or whims rather than being governed by actual rules and principles.
I've seen classrooms run by a teacher's personal edict. I still remember the shock of hearing teacher say, speaking of home room elections for 7th grade student council representatives, "They picked the wrong kid, so I made them elect the right one." What a lesson for students about how elections work.
If we're going to grow adults who understand the Rule of Law rather than the Rule of Me, then classrooms and schools have to model it.
That means, for instance, the administrators need to follow the actual rulebook for the district rather than a modified version in which different people get different consequences depending on who they are.
And classroom teachers need to set and follow rules based on something other than their mood or the newest irritant of the day. Students need to soak in a subtext other than "People who have power get to make other people do what the powerful wants."
This was always true, but it's especially true now. You want to push back against authoritarian tyranny? What would be better than helping to raise a generation of humans who understand in their bones that there are other, better ways to be.
So when 6 7 gets on your last nerve, or the next bit of nonsense reveals itself, reach for some reaction other than "I am so sick of this and I have the power to shut this noise down, so I'm going to use all the power at my disposal to stomp it out." Because we know right now what that looks like when applied in the grown up world on a national stage. More than ever, classrooms need to be built to look like the country in which we want to live. If you want No Kings in America, be careful about crowning yourself in your classroom.
There are currently several pending lawsuits against Walters. Thompson said the department is reviewing them and will address them as quickly as possible. They’re also examining several policy statements made by Walters to require action in schools.
“We need to review all of those mandates and provide clarity to schools moving forward,” she said.
In other words, it appears that the department might actually get back to helping teachers do their jobs. It's Oklahoma, so I don't imagine the department is going to turn all squishy liberal any time soon. But it sure seems like the atmosphere has changed considerably.
Walters was on Twitter expressing his big sad that he "could not be more disappointed" in the decision. "The war on Christianity is real," he wrote in his trademark hyperbole disconnected from reality. He's speaking this weekend at the Moms For Liberty summit, on a panel with Aaron Withe (his boss from Freedom Foundation) and Corey DeAngelis about how the evil unions took over schools. That summit is in Florida, putting him far far away from Oklahoma, which seems like what is best for Oklahoma's schools.
The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)
I was not going to write a regular article today. Thursdays are for doing the post-edit clean-up of the podcast, putting together the summary and links, and then doing other stuff. But then I saw this headline from Chris Cillizza’s execrable substack, “So What”:1
The second I saw it, I knew deep down on a molecular level what he was going to say. I was SO FUCKING SURE that I almost didn’t even bother clicking the link because why do that to myself? I could see the entire thing in my head, which was already straining at the seams in anger. But I did anyway, and now you have to read my head explosion.
Hey, if I have to suffer, so do you.
In case you somehow missed it, all of this has to do with the Young Republican group chats that got “leaked” by another Young Republican, happily setting his fellow pieces of shit on fire for personal gain.
In those group chats, a whole bunch of up-and-coming fascists spewed the ugliest kind of hate. Here are some of them and some of what they said:
Racism. Homophobia. Misogyny. Antisemitism. Literal Nazi shit.
This is about as ugly as it gets, short of them screaming “DEATH TO ALL THE FUCKING JEWS/GAYS/BLACKS/etc.!!!” It’s a damning look into the mind of the Republican Party. It validates every single thing we’ve been saying about them for decades. They are the monsters we’ve always known them to be.
And that’s a problem because if that becomes the accepted view of the GOP, it becomes impossible for the legacy press to shield them. Which is where lying filthpigs like Chris Cillizza come in:
The immediate reaction I saw from the left on social media (and Substack) went something like this: See! This is how ALL Republicans are! This is what they really think! Racists! Anti-Semites!
I think that is a HUGE generalization. And overly facile.
Got that? We got a good look under the pointy white hood of the leaders of the next generation of Republicans and found…actual real-life Nazis. But, hey, don’t rush to judge! They’re young and stupid!
That said, I think extrapolating the online messaging of a group of 20-something (mostly) men as reflective of the broader views of an entire political party is a major mistake.
Having been a 20-something male, I can attest that they are idiots — especially in groups. And especially when they are trying to one-up one another in outrageous statements. (To be clear: I never talked like this in my 20s.)
Stop. Stop talking. No, you mewling shitgibbon. We are NOT fucking doing this. Two points:
They are NOT a group of “20-somethings.”
27 is closer to 30 than it is to 20. You don’t get to be “20-something” anymore when you’re pushing three decades. At least two of them are in their 30s, so get the fuck out of here with your “20-something” bullshit.” That leads us to…
Even people in their fucking 20s are not “kids” and we shouldn’t treat them like it. It’s condescending, but it’s also a neat little sleight of hand the legacy press loves to pull when white people, ESPECIALLY white men, are involved.
A 16-year-old Black kid can be gunned down by the cops because he was pretty much the same thing as an adult. 15? 20? Is there really a difference when the police are afraid for their life?
White men, though, get to live this extended Peter Pan childhood, where they’re not really responsible for their actions because they just haven’t grown up yet. 25? 26? 29? They’re still just a kid! Give’em a break! You don’t want to ruin their whole lives over one little misstep, do you?🥺🥺🥺
Cillizza goes on because of course he fucking does:
Because over the last decade there has been a rise in what I would refer to as “toxic masculinity” — the veneration of men who are tough and speak their minds and take no bullshit (or whatever). Think of Andrew Tate as the Platonic ideal of this sort of culture.
Donald Trump didn’t create that re-defining of what it means to be a male in modern American society. But he did super-charge it.
His repeated assertions that law enforcement needs to be tougher on protesters. His embrace of the UFC culture. (I mean, there is going to be an MMA fight this summer on the White House grounds!) Donald Trump Jr’s. aggressive online masculinity. You get the idea.
Got that? This isn’t Republicans being racist pieces of shit! This is just toxic masculinity! Which it sounds like a term Cillizza just invented! Isn’t he sooooo cool?! And, really, all of this nonsense is because of Donald Trump. Things didn’t used to be this bad.
Really?
How do I phrase this politely? Oh, wait, I’m a toxic male Ogre. I don’t have to be polite:
Chris Cillizza is a lying sack of shit. That, or he is the single dumbest fuck in the media today. Honestly, the two are not at all mutually exclusive because this is such a stupid fucking lie, I don’t know who the hell he thinks he’s trying to fool with this bullshit.
Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*****”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, n*****.”
That was Lee Atwater in 1981, explaining how Richard Nixon used the Southern Strategy to appeal to racist white people.
“I don’t know a thing about it,” said Press Secretary Speakes. The reporter noted that one in three people who have contracted AIDS have died from what had been called “the gay plague”—and the press pool, in turn, erupted into laughter.
“I don’t have it,” said Speakes, as the crowd laughed. “Do you?”
The next year, the death toll from AIDS would nearly triple. Kinsolving would continue to ask the same question in press conferences over the course of the next three years—to the same mocking and laughter. (At one point, Speakes called out his “abiding interest” in “fairies.”)
That was the Reagan administration, which sat back and let HIV spread until it became a global scourge. They could have stopped it easily. But it was killing the gays and drug users, so who cared?
That was the, for the time, jaw-droppingly racist Willie Horton ad George H.W. Bush ran in 1988.
The George W. Bush White House led a literal “Holy Crusade” in the Middle East that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians and ran a campaign of terror against Muslims at home.
When Obama won in 2008, the racism was so undeniable, people like Chris Cillizza had to redefine what racism was so they could pretend it didn’t exist. Telling the first Black president to go back to Africa wasn’t racist! He was Kenyan, wasn’t he?! Questioning if he was really an American citizen wasn’t racist, either! Those questions about his birth certificate were 100% legitimate and not at all motivated by race!
The first Trump regime put immigrant children in cages and laughed about it. Trump cheered on neo-Nazis marching and called them “good people.” Trump’s second time in office has been so explicitly marked by white nationalism; literally no one was surprised to discover that the next wave of Republican leaders spewed that kind of hate. Except, apparently, Chris fucking Cillizza.
At the same time he was shocked, SHOCKED to hear about this, and insisting we shouldn’t hold the entire Republican Party responsible, this happened:
What’s this all about? Well, one of Super MAGA Rep. Dave Taylor’s (R-Sieg Heil) aides was on a video call and someone noticed the flag behind him had been altered:
Call me crazy, but in no universe would I NOT notice that the flag on my cubicle wall had a fucking swastika on it all of a sudden. What’s the story they’re going to go with? Antifa snuck in and did it with no one noticing? Get the fuck out of here. That little shit did it himself, and everyone in the fucking office knew about it because it’s impossible to miss. This aide was just so goddamn stupid, he forgot it would also be visible on a video call.
Fascists are a lot of things: Lazy, angry, boring, weak, etc. No one ever said they were smart.2
“Not all Republicans?” Bish, please. Cillizza is a propagandist delivering the lies the GOP needs to keep being literal Nazis. He’ll say I’m still overreacting. Cool. He can eat shit and let me explain why I know he’s a liar from personal experience.
I JUST told this story on this week’s podcast, but let me get into it again.
In 1992,3 before I knew anything at all about politics, I took a road trip with the Young Republicans of Nassau Community College. I, myself, was not a Young Republican. I wasn’t anything at the time. But a friend of mine, little 5’1” Jen Gorman, asked me to go and “keep her out of trouble.” I interpreted that to mean she didn’t want to get drunk and hook up with anyone. Everyone else on the trip was male, and 3-4 of them were testosterone-laden ROTC.
Jen had previously hooked up with my brother, which made her a leper to me, and she knew it. No matter how drunk we got, nothing would ever happen between us in a million years. Ew. Gross. So we slept in the same bed, her against the wall and me on the outside.
It wasn’t until many MANY years later that I realized I was not there to keep Jen from doing something, I was there to keep her from getting raped. Since I was significantly bigger than all of the other people on the trip, including the ROTC muscleheads, I was a literal wall between Jen and sexual assault.
So that’s how I ended up on a political trip when I was apolitical at the time.
Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:
On this trip, the Young Republicans (and me) met with older Republicans, and this is when I learned who and what Republicans were. I frequently mention that I am a Puerto Rican Jew, but my genetics kind of canceled out, so I just look generically white. And most people who only know me causally either don’t know I’m a Puerto Rican Jew or forget about it because literally nothing about me suggests either.
That meant I was “one of the guys” when we met with these Republicans, and no one thought twice about taking off their masks. We were all buddies, right? All white people working to save America from the n***** and immigrants and whatnot. Fortunately, no one got around to complaining about “The Jews,” or I would have waited until we got back to the hotel before smashing a bottle of Jack Daniels over their head.
Well, maybe. 19-year-old Ogre was not the “I don’t give a fuck what you think about me” Ogre of today.
Still, I did will myself to be invisible, and so, to her credit, did Jen. We never talked about it but I don’t remember her joining in.
It was the 90s, though, right? It was a different time!
Well, yes and no. I had grown up in a working-class Italian neighborhood, and the racism was thick as fuck. None of us were saints, certainly not 10-year-old me discovering the fun of cursing. But it was never cruel or mean. It was habitual. It was still real, though. When the first couple of Black families moved onto our block, I got to witness White Flight long before I knew the phrase existed. Racism is racism, no matter how routine.
But this? What I saw with the Young Republicans? That was something else. Something uglier and darker and deeper. There was a mean edge to it I was not used to, and I was used to a LOT.
It looked and sounded an awful lot like the group chat Chris Cillizza is trying to play off as a recent development.
But he knows it’s not. Cillizza has been in political writing (he’s not a journalist any more than I am) since the mid-90s. That’s a full decade before I started paying close attention and started writing about politics. And yet, somehow, in all that time, Cillizza never quite seemed to notice the rampant racism in the Republican Party.
Which is weird, because you would have to be blind not to see it. From space. Cillizza’s got some thick-ass glasses, but I’m fairly certain he can still see a fucking Nazi seig heiling right in front of him.
When I started writing 15 years ago, I spent an awful lot of time trawling through the filth of the far right to understand who these people were. I frantically jumped up and down that white Christian nationalism was the fringe and the fringe wouldn’t stay that way for long. Once they mainstreamed that, I looked at the right’s fringe again and saw the Manosphere and a horde of pedophiles. I said years ago that this was coming.
And here we are. Chris Cillizza is telling us that it’s just so sad that toxic masculinity is driving dumb “20-somethings” to say outrageous stuff, but, hey, what are ya gonna do? And the entire Republican Party is protecting an international pedophile ring while starting to talk about how 15-year-old children are old enough for grown men to fuck.
How could I, some stay-at-home schmuck without Cillizza’s expensive education and fat rolodex of connections, have noticed such fundamental aspects of the GOP when Cillizza couldn’t?
Then again…
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
Cillizza has made a very lucrative career lying to protect the Republican Party, shielding the public from noticing who and what they are. He gives others in the legacy press a fig leaf to hide the truth behind so none need speak the obvious truth: The Republican Party is the home of American Nazis, traitors, and monsters.
Must be nice to get paid so well to run interference for the worst people this country has ever produced. I wonder if Cillizza thinks his money and connections will be enough to protect him in the fascist hellscape he’s deliberately helping to build. A lot of rich people think they’ll be immune when everything falls apart. History tells us otherwise. But keep selling those lies, you fucking shill. I’m sure the money helps you sleep at night.
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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!
The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 18 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.
I don’t know why he calls his newsletter “So What.” As a Gen Xer, there’s a possibility this is a nod to one of Ministry’s greatest songs, and it pains me to think this mealy-mouthed cockweasel is a fan. If you are, Cillizza, please understand that they fucking hate you and everything you stand for. But not as much as I do.
Well, fascists say they’re smart but they also think they’re manly and tough while needing to carry a gun everywhere because it’s a big, scary world out there.
I said 1993 on the podcast, but it had to be ‘92 because Bush was still president.
This week, POLITICO broke the story of a Young Republican group chat that was rife with racism, sexism, and antisemitism: calling Black people “monkeys;” calling rape “epic;” fantasizing about sending political opponents to the gas chambers; literally saying “I love Hitler.”
Vice President JD Vance defended them.
“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”
He’s right that a kid’s life shouldn’t be ruined by telling a stupid joke. But the “young boys” in question here are, in fact, adult men, many in positions of power. All members of the Young Republicans are between the ages of 18 and 40. The “I love Hitler” guy (who also called Black people monkeys) is Peter Giunta, a man in his 30s and chief of staff to New York state Assemblymember Mike Reilly. I can’t find the age of Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans, but he was recently touted by his organization as “a veteran GOP strategist from Albany.” Samuel Douglass, a Vermont state senator, joined in a conversation in which Walker mocked a friend who “dated this very obese Indian woman for a period of time;” Douglass added, “she just didn’t bathe very often.” When he noted a procedural error made by a Jewish colleague, his wife Brianna Douglass — who sits on the national committee of the Vermont Young Republicans — chimed in to say, “I was about to say you’re giving nationals to [sic] much credit and expecting the Jew to be honest.”
Many of the participants in this group chat are older than the recent college grads who staffed up DOGE and dismantled the federal government. Many of them are older and certainly in greater positions of power and influence than the random people making rude comments on social media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder — but when it came to those people, Vance and the broader right argued they should face serious consequences, from losing their jobs to being expelled from school to being refused visas to the US to being deported.
There are two issue here. One is that the MAGA right has a legitimate Nazi problem. The second is that the MAGA right believes there are two standards: The ultra-permissive one that applies to them and their followers within which there are zero consequences for even the worst behavior, and the far stricter one that applies to liberals or any other perceived political opponents. And they’re willing to use the full force of government to punish their opponents and create maximal permissiveness for themselves.
This goes beyond speech. The most obvious and egregious example at the moment might be Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar who was under FBI investigation for accepting a bag filled with $50,000 in cash in what seemed to be a bribery scheme… until Trump came into power and his FBI suddenly dropped the investigation. In the meantime, the administration has pursued mortgage fraud and other trumped-up cases against Democratic leaders, calling in unqualified ideologues who have never tried a single criminal case because the evidence is so thin the normal attorneys at DOJ won’t try to prosecute.
Trump has accepted an airplane from the Qataris. His entire crypto scheme is little more than blatant pay-to-play. There aren’t even two different standards when it comes to enforcing laws. There is one side that blatantly flouts the law, and then makes up specious criminal accusations against the other.
The same holds true when it comes to ugly speech and the fomenting of political violence. “Hypocrisy” doesn’t even begin to cut it. It is absolutely true that some people on the left have engaged in acts of political violence, and that those acts are ugly, and that some people on social media cheered. That’s all disgusting and shameful.
But right-wing political violence remains more common than left-wing political violence. Conservatives currently claim that calling them “fascists” or “Nazis” promotes actual violence; they have pledged to crack down on that kind of speech, and to investigate what they claim are networks of left-wing organizations that do things like riot at protests. Ted Cruz just introduced legislation targeting the upcoming No Kings protests, which he claims “may well turn into riots” and says are possibly funded by George Soros, the perpetual bogeyman to authoritarian regimes across the globe. Never mind that the Jan. 6 protests claiming the election was stolen from Trump actually did turn into a riot that injured and killed several people, and those who committed acts of serious violence were pardoned by the president and cheered as heroes by his followers. This is not both sides doing the same thing. This is one side acting far more egregiously, and then bringing the full power of the state down on its opponents for doing far less.
It is had to overstate how much Trump and the MAGA movement have coarsened American discourse, gutted American morality, and generally turned our country into an uglier, less decent place. More than anything else, this is an administration of impunity: Personal impunity for Trump and his family, but also impunity for those who support him to behave in the vilest of ways with no consequences — including seeing no consequences for using their positions to target their political enemies, and to kneecap any political opposition to their cause. Young conservatives who support Trump and the MAGA movement do so because of this culture of impunity, not in spite of it. This is a movement that revels in cruelty and glorifies hurting people — in laughing at children who are sobbing because their parents were taken away by ICE, laughing at people who die thanks to USAID cuts. Online, young conservatives now relish how far they can go. The president, after all, invited one of the country’s most notorious white supremacist Holocaust-denying Nazi sympathizers to dinner. He is reportedly considering revamping the refugee resettlement program to give preference to white people.
Being “edgy” by being super racist, misogynist, and antisemitic is standard now among young Republicans. That’s not just because they’re young and dumb. It’s because they’re taking their cues from their elders.
JD Vance seems to think that because identifying as a Nazi is increasingly common among young people in his party, there shouldn’t be consequences for it. A better question might be: Why is the MAGA movement such a draw for people who say they love Nazis and Hitler?
xx Jill
Thinking that I would write about the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas over Gaza, the working title for this column until a few moments ago was, “Does land matter more than people’s lives, or do lives matter more than the land?” And then I read a story about Hamas coming out of the tunnels after the ceasefire, and the first thing they did, according to the account I read, was hunt down and arrest people whom they had identified as traitors and execute them.
This, of course, followed the attack almost exactly two years ago by Hamas fighters on Israeli settlements and a music festival near the border with Gaza, when they killed more than a thousand Israelis and took over two hundred people hostage and escaped back into Gaza. Then came the two years of war between Israel and Hamas, which consisted, in the main, of Israel bombing Gaza towns nearly flat in an attempt to root out and destroy Hamas, causing the deaths of at least 67,000 Palestinians and the wounding of another 170,000, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Over two years, 80 percent of the buildings that stood in Gaza before the war have been either severely damaged or flattened entirely. Nine out of ten homes have been destroyed. Now that the fighting has stopped, aerial photos show almost unknowable destruction, seemingly nothing left of the place 2.1 million people called home.
While a meeting of international leaders yesterday discussed how the place may be rebuilt, Gazans streamed north from camps in South Gaza, returning to their destroyed homes in towns from which they had been banished. Gaza, largely in rubble, is still their home.
Sitting here in a country that is about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding, what is to explain the attachment of people to this ancient land that has been fought over for nearly three millennia? Jerusalem, the capital of what is now Israel, was ruled over by a series of ancient civilizations, beginning with the Israelites, more than 1,000 years BC -- Before Christ, as historians have agreed that ancient and modern time is measured. Then came the Assyrians, who ruled for a couple hundred years before being conquered by the Babylonians, followed in quick measure by the Persians. Another couple hundred years would pass before Alexander brought his Greek army to run the Persians out. The Romans were next, followed by the Byzantines, and then several hundred years of Muslim rule before the Crusaders invaded from Europe and controlled things until the Ottomans arrived around 1500 and took over Jerusalem and all of what is now Israel until the 20th Century brought modern wars and partition by Great Britain, followed by World War II and soon thereafter, Jews displaced the British and a whole lot of Palestinians and established modern Israel.
All of this over a piece of land about the size of New Jersey at the time Israel declared its independence.
I wrote a sentence above about “civilizations” controlling Jerusalem and what is now Israel. Civilization is just a word for the people who went to war against other people and won the right to say they controlled that land. It’s hard reading history or even studying the history of war as I did at West Point, to see what we’re talking about. I was in Israel and Lebanon in 1974-75 to write about terrorism, and during that time, I visited the Old City of Jerusalem and went to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount. There was a large plaza that you crossed to reach the Western Wall at that time. To the left of the Wall, an archaeological dig was in progress. You could pass through an opening in a wall and look down into a hole in the ground and see the progress of the dig, lit by electric lights. There was a footpath that crossed another footpath about fifty feet down.
A few years later, I was in Jerusalem on another story and visited the Old City again. This time, they had dug up the plaza in front of the Western Wall and exposed the history of the place. At the bottom of the dig, you could see some of ancient Jerusalem, from the time of the First Temple. Rooms of a house, made of stone and mud, were visible, and a little to the right of those rooms, about 20 feet higher, was the vaulted bedroom of a Roman home. You could clearly see that one civilization – one conquering people – had built their homes on the ruins of the homes occupied by people who predated them by hundreds of years.
Today, the plaza is flat again, but you can visit the rooms of the ancient city underground. They have uncovered a ritual Jewish bath from Herodian times that was supplied with water carried by an ancient aqueduct from Bethlehem, miles away from Jerusalem. The same aqueduct was the primary source of water for Jerusalem until the British Mandate 2,000 years later.
That is how long Jerusalem, and other parts of the Middle East, have been fought over. For centuries and centuries, towns were built and destroyed and rebuilt, just as Jerusalem was. Invaders came in from tribes that lived along the Tigris River in what is now Iraq. They came from the town of Aleppo in what is now Syria – thus, the Assyrians. The people of Ur, south of Babylon, conquered the people of Aleppo, and then they headed south and went through what is now Syria and Lebanon to Jerusalem. They were conquering each other, and enslaving one another, for centuries. It was always the same. One ruler wanted what the other ruler had, so they made armies and went after each other’s land.
Their armies were their people. They spent the lives of their people to take the land of the rulers they considered their enemies. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands died in these wars that went from before the time history was recorded, right on through recorded history, continuing for two thousand years more, with pagan religions being formed and then supplanted by religions with leaders such as Christ and Muhammed, and still in modern times an army calling itself Isis, in attempting a new caliphate, set out to conquer people in Iraq called the Yazidis, who live along a mountain range near the Syrian border, simply because they do not follow the Muslim faith.
It’s still going on, the lusting after land, the willingness to kill people because they occupy land you want, or they follow a different god than you do, or they follow no god at all, or all three.
When I was in Israel and Lebanon in the mid-70’s, I got into discussions with Israelis and Palestinians about the most recent struggle over the land I was visiting. Everyone on one side was right. Everyone on the other side was wrong. There were stories and there were myths and there was history, and no matter who told the stories or believed in the myths or recounted the history of the place, both recent and ancient, the argument, which went back more than 2,000 years, sought to explain who was right and who was wrong.
But it didn’t work. If it worked, there would not be almost three millennia of wars and death over the same pieces of land for which wars are still being fought today. Every once in a while, usually when I was talking to someone from either side who was smart and inquisitive and well read, I would start a sentence with, “Have you ever thought of it this way…” or I would say, “What if they did this, and you did that, and wouldn’t that…”
But it wouldn’t. I heard a word all the time back in the 70’s that I heard this morning on NPR when a guy from the Arab League was being interviewed, but he could have been a guy from the Israeli government, or from an Israeli university, or from a Palestinian faction in Lebanon or he could have been a Sunni or a Shiite or a Christian, because it didn’t really matter who he was. It didn’t matter because the word was the always same for everyone: Conditions. If conditions were understood, or if conditions were met, or if conditions were taken into consideration, or if conditions were different. Always conditions, because conditions are what keeps the whole thing going.
It doesn’t make any more sense if you call it hate or intolerance, because it’s always the same. There are always lands and there are always people and there are always leaders who are willing to sacrifice people for land, to kill their own people so they can take over the other guy’s land. Putin is doing it right now in Ukraine. According to something called the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law, there are more than 100 armed conflicts going on in the world at this moment: 45 in the Middle East and North Africa; 35 in Africa; seven in Europe; 21 in Asia; and six in Latin America. I was scrolling through my newsfeed yesterday when I came across a story about fighting breaking out on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It’s an argument over whose land on the border is whose, naturally. That’s a new one not even mentioned in the Geneva report.
Nobody wishes for death; nobody in their right mind, anyway. Today here in Milford, we attended the funeral and burial of a good friend’s husband, a veteran of Vietnam who died from complications of being exposed to Agent Orange. The Army sent a two-man team to pay last respects to the veteran of one of our nation’s wars. I would say “one of our nation’s tragic wars,” but they’re all tragic, aren’t they? One of the soldiers blew “Taps,” and then they removed the American flag from the casket at the gravesite and folded it and handed the flag to the widow, our friend.
It was both sad and beautiful. The day was overcast. The Milford Cemetery runs up the side of a small mountain called The Knob that overlooks the town. The cemetery is hilly and crowded with graves and serene. As we stood there listening to the mournful notes of “Taps,” I thought of the body of our friend’s husband who had fought one of our wars and ended up paying for his service with his life, and I thought of his body going into the Pennsylvania ground.
Thousands of years of bodies and millions of graves, marked and unmarked, and all the destruction that lies atop and under the earth, as it does in Jerusalem and all around the world where history has exacted its price in the blood of human beings whose lives were spent in the name of land, anybody’s land, anywhere, it doesn’t matter where, or why, it is always bodies and it is always land and it always means that someone, a lot of someones, must perish.
I’m sure that as a species we are not born with a death wish, but we have lived our lives for thousands of years as if we are, and that characteristic of human beings is a real tragedy.
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