On This Impossible Moment

A brief meditation on the anniversary of October 7, 2023 as we face futures unknown.

As a writer, I have a few rules. One of them is, if you don’t have anything new to say, then don’t strain to say anything. Take a breather. This is one of those moments, and this will be a short post. Yes, we had many problems and unresolved crises before October 7, 2023, but now everything seems worse. Broken and breaking more.

In the Middle East, Israel’s most rightwing government is escalating its war against Iran and its proxies, with the help of the United States. Iran’s fundamentalist regime is responding in kind. Wherever the red lines are that keep enemy countries from overstepping, they’re all getting erased. Tomorrow oil fields across the Persian Gulf could be on fire. None of this gets anyone any closer to resolving the existential crisis facing Palestinians and Israelis, but the ongoing confrontation has its own logic. Only a handful of people, typically relatives of those who have been murdered by the other side over the course of this conflict, have figured out that repeating the cycle of revenge only creates more pain and therefore a different path is necessary.

In the US, we are on the verge of an election that—compared to six months ago—could result in Democrats retaining the White House, but there’s little solace in that. The election will be a nail-biter. Since January 6, 2021, we’ve had more than three years to move America in a different direction, but the other side hasn’t relented either. There are many facets to the fascist tendency in our country today, but to me the fact that roughly half of Americans have decided that the single biggest problem we face is the 3-5% of our population that is darker skinned and undocumented, and that a final solution called “mass deportations” is the answer…leaves me almost speechless.

I used to wonder how Germany, a supposedly civilized country, embraced Nazism. Now I don’t anymore. Instead, I want a better strategy for defusing fascist feelings here. Social solidarity is the obvious answer, but unlike countries like France or Great Britain, which still have the muscle memory of World War II, we’re flailing. You can see glimmers of an answer in the “we’re all in this together” rhetoric of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, but then re-read what I said two paragraphs up: Democratic-led social solidarity has a big blind spot when it comes to Palestinian humanity.

That, in the end is why this anniversary is so painful. The schisms on the center-left that opened wide here after October 7 seem unresolved and unresolvable. The progressive community has been for me and I think most of the readers of The Connector the place to develop shared strategies for addressing the multiple crises we face. But starting a year ago, a lot of people lost their minds and shot off in directions that made it incredibly hard to work together. Yes, right now, facing the urgent date of November 5, most of us united around the common goal of defeating Trump. We’ve even accepted (if not welcomed) warmonger Dick Cheney into our pro-Harris coalition. But let’s not kid ourselves. What we have is a fragile moment of common purpose papering over deep divisions and confusion. I suppose that will have to do.

It is impossible to encapsulate this moment properly. No one person’s story contains the whole picture. But here’s what speaks to me right now. There were two pictures over the desk of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the young Israeli-American who was taken hostage by Hamas a year ago and murdered in Gaza a few weeks ago. One reads “Jerusalem is Everyone’s.” The other reads “Fight Racism.”

May his memory and the memory of all the innocent Israelis and Palestinians who have lost their lives needlessly to this terrible conflict be a blessing.