On being the bad guy in your own head
Nobody is. But perhaps some should be.
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: I was not on the Political Cycle this week, but you can still listen to it wherever you get your podcasts (Rohan led a discussion on Israel and Iran’s war and India). And this month’s ET Ask Home is pushed back a week because all the paid issues this month are.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about Mahmoud Khalil, the story of Joseph, and why it’s bad, actually, to have a whims-based system of justice.
Like Scaachi Koul in Slate, I, too, have found myself having less fun online than I once did.
Happy new Haim day to all who observe.
This is a piece from last year on how the Department of Justice found that Andrew Cuomo had sexually harassed (including cases of unwanted physical touch) by 13 women. Just something for those of you who can vote in New York to think about!
MY VIEWS ON…
…being the bad guy in your own head
I did not go to law school, but I went to admitted students weekend at University of Michigan Law, where I thought I was going to go for a little while. A professor, whose name I do not remember, said something that I do, which is: Nobody’s the bad guy in their own head. I think about this a lot. Everyone is as real to themselves as I am to myself. We’re all the protagonists in our own movies. None of us are the villains to ourselves.
I do wonder, though, how some people continue to keep up that delusion.
Like if you are an ICE agent. You get up. You put on your mask, obscuring your face, and you go to snatch a nanny from a park, or raid a school, or arrest people trying to support their families by working at farms or hotels. What do you tell yourself? That this is good, actually? When you separate a crying child from their parents, or show up to catch someone who bothered to show up for their immigration hearing, or arrest the comptroller of New York City, do you tell yourself that this is keeping the country safer?
And when you go home in the evening and take off your mask, revealing your visage once more, and eat your dinner and kiss your children and maybe watch a show or a movie with them, what do you tell them you did all day? That you protected them by arresting and detaining people in schools and at work? Do you tell them they should be proud of you for finding a woman pushing a stroller in a park or a cart at a Home Depot and deciding she looked illegal? Do you tell them how you spent your day, or do you lie? Which is worse, do you think?
Do you spend your weekends enjoying a beer with your friends? Are you known in your circle for being the kindest and funniest? Do you repeat that to yourself as though it makes you good? And when you read stories from various points in various places in history—if indeed you do read—about prison guards who were great fathers and husbands and who disappeared into society after whatever regime they were serving was over, do you relate to them? They didn’t consider themselves the bad guys either, after all. But then, in our own heads, we never are.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
I found this Haaretz piece by Etan Nechin about Israel viewing its existential threats as coming from without instead of within quite moving.
As was this, also in Haaretz but by Linda Dayan, on people from abroad and afar treating death like a team sport.
Also from Haaretz, I thought this piece on secular hostility to Reform Judaism in Israel was interesting.
Last Haaretz offering from me this week is this editorial: “Sixty-five Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip on Saturday and another 315 were wounded, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry. It seems unlikely that any of them knew the army had announced over the weekend that Iran is now the principal theater of combat and Gaza is merely a secondary one.”
I thought this was an interesting piece on why organizers are going big when planning Jewish-themed events in New York City.
From JTA: “Police in Brookline, Massachusetts, are investigating after a brick with “Free Palestine” written in red paint was thrown through the window of a kosher grocery store. The Butcherie is one of the Boston area’s only kosher grocers, selling kosher meat and prepared foods from its home in Coolidge Corner, a hub of Jewish commercial activity in the heavily Jewish suburb of Boston.”
In New York Magazine, Suzy Hansen has a very thorough piece on Israel, Gaza, and the measurements of—and consequences for, or not—war crimes.
-ET