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I didn’t know what to write so I tried to write it all

Some potpourri of the mind

Forgive me, dear reader, but I’m having a little trouble focusing my thoughts at the moment. Lucky for you, I decided to share, well, all of them. You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

I want to write about VP Kamala Harris saying on the Call Her Daddy podcast that “some women don’t aspire to be humble.” I want to talk about how it was revelatory in its simplicity and gave me permission I didn’t know I needed. I wouldn’t say I’ve consciously aspired to exercise humility, but rather it was something I was societally trained to feel bad about when I wasn’t practicing it. One byproduct of being out on my own is that I have to talk up my own work a LOT, and it makes me feel squeamish (even though I feel pretty damn good about what I write). Harris’s comment got me wondering whether my discomfort was real or learned? For example, did I apologize the other day about constantly promoting my work on social media because I was genuinely ashamed or did I think the appearance of feeling ashamed would reflect better on my character?

I want to write about Harris’s plan to have Medicare cover long-term home health care and how important it is not just to the sick and elderly, but also to the younger people who are in charge of their care now and in the future. How it’s transformative for people to be able to separate the fear of loved ones aging and dying from fear of going into devastating debt. It’s also got me thinking about how Donald Trump is still treated as a serious candidate despite the fact that he has never, not once, released a coherent plan of any variety. It’s been a month since the one and only presidential debate in which Trump said he had “a concept of a plan” for replacing Obamacare and that he’d have a bonafide one in the “not too distant future.” Other members of the media ask “how does Harris plan to pay for her plan???” while neglecting to ask why none of Trump’s plans have materialized or why he can’t string together even the most basic sentence without driving into a cognitive cul-de-sac.

I also want to write about Monday’s anniversary of the October 7th Hamas massacre of Jews in Israel and how I expected to be flooded with emotion but mainly felt numb. I scrolled through Instagram posts commemorating the day, decrying never again, and trying to square those messages with the ongoing carnage in Gaza. When Iran rained down missiles on Israel last week, I sat glued to my TV, listening to reporters on the ground saying they’d never seen anything like it while huge flashes burst in the distance. I cried and frantically messaged my cousin in Israel to make sure she and her family were safe, and was relieved to hear they were fine, albeit scared. She asked me to pray for them and I said I would. 

I want to write about how haunted I am by the story of drones shooting random Palestinians as they tried to evacuate their homes. How Mohammad Sultan, 28, told CNN, “Drones were firing at everyone passing by on the road. Three people were shot right in front of me. My brother and I tried to help the injured get to the hospitals, but a little girl was shot in the neck, and her father was also injured.” It made me think of the piece I published in 2021 in which I made public for the first time my horror at what the Zionist project had wrought. As I wrote then, the piece was partly prompted by a story I’d read about parents being murdered by an Israeli drone as they arrived at their son’s house for the end of Ramadan. “For many American Jews who were raised to see Palestinians as the enemy, it might come as a shock to recognize the Israeli military as the aggressor in this situation, or to mourn the victims of that strike,” I wrote at the time. “But this week, I mourn.” And this week I continue mourning: for what Sultan and his brother saw; for the little girl shot in the neck; for the 13 children Dr. Feroze Sidhwa said came into the hospital with gunshots to the head or chest during the two weeks he worked in a Gaza hospital last spring.

I want to write about author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates and the way he was treated by CBS Morning News anchor Tony Dokoupil. How Coates came on the show to promote his new non-fiction book of essays The Message, which is partly about his experience visiting Israel and the West Bank, and how Dokoupil said the essay, stripped of all context, “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” Dokoupil, a convert to Judaism and the father of two Jewish children who live in Israel with his ex-wife, skewered Coates, a Black public intellectual whose book also follows him along emotional trips to Senegal and South Carolina, for unequivocally stating that what he witnessed in the West Bank is apartheid. CBS News then found Dokoupil’s interview was not up to its editorial standards, and Dokoupil’s defenders are claiming he’s being punished for simply doing his job. It’s made me wonder yet again who gets the privilege of being considered objective.

I want to write about the truly undecided voter I met this past weekend during my reporting trip to Pittsburgh—a trip which I will be writing about in its entirety in the coming days—and how he broke my brain.

I want to write about this devastating hurricane season that has destroyed so many communities in the southeast and how the latest storm, Milton, is poised to destroy the Tampa area. How many jail and prison officials are refusing to evacuate their facilities located squarely in the evacuation zone—the very same zone of which Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said “If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.” I imagine these incarcerated people like those on the lower decks of the Titanic. A sobering reminder that most of this country treats these people as subhuman and undeserving of life. I don’t find this distinction particularly meaningful because I oppose the death penalty in any situation, but perhaps it will help put things in perspective for some: Jails are largely where people are held before they’ve been convicted of any crime, versus prisons where people are held post-conviction. So there are people in Florida jails right now who may be committed to death without ever being tried by a jury.

But really I want to write about Moo-Deng, the baby pygmy hippo in Thailand who has bewitched the entire internet, but me especially. I am now the blissful recipient of all Moo-Deng content from friends and internet strangers alike who know just how much photos and videos of her delight me. She is a sweet spot in a wicked world.

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