This is the first year I am finally not writing about my Christmas envy. That boat sailed. And resailed and docked and crossed every ocean, and on the return trip this passenger continued to whine and cry and moan about poor Jewish me. No tree, no gifts, no tinsel, no Midnight Mass with friends. But at last, that’s over.
Each December, being a writer and all, I wrote about a jillion pieces all starting with the same first sentence, “Whadja get, whadja get” –– my “poor me” mantra. And off I would go with my sad tale of being the only one in the world who didn’t get presents under the tree, who didn’t even get a tree, didn’t get to hang a stocking by the chimney, with or without care.
But for the first time, Christmas and all its beauty and holiness are not what I’m thinking about this time of year. I feel liberated on the one hand, but on the other, I’m sad about what I am thinking about.
President Trump said on his first day in office that he was going to end the Ukraine war. Now we are in the fourth year, and it’s winter over there. Those poor people are freezing and losing. And I can’t do anything to help them.
The violent images on TV of ICE are making me think it’s 1933, and as a Jewish person I am questioning why I am still here. When I ask my husband if he thinks we should be leaving the country, he answers (and I know he’s partially serious and partially joking), “Who wants two old Jews with no money?” When he says it in front of people, he gets a laugh. But I’m not laughing.
I’m constantly worried about my Brazilian friends on the Vineyard who are shaking in their boots. And I don’t know what I can do to help them. The Israeli hostages got released, but we’re still killing innocent people, children even! I don’t know what I can do to help. Now we’re bombing Venezuela for their oil and rare-earth metals like colton, pretending it’s about drugs, and I am helpless once again.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who thinks there are space lasers and implies Jews financed them, is anti-choice, anti-immigration, anti-gun-control, and has publicly stated that the Republican Party should be a party of Christian nationalists, and a whole bunch of things I don’t agree with. She has broken ranks with her hero, and I’m worried that now she’s going to be thought of as a hero.
Trump canceled STEM, and I am appalled. I am angry. I am blown away that anyone with a heart would take the little some people have away from folks who are struggling in the first place. But once again, I am unable to do anything that would affect anything.
Warren Buffet, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, and others keep warning that our economic system is going to collapse and everything is going to be the Trump meme coin, and United States Treasury money will be useless. I picture gathering hundreds of dollars in a wheelbarrow to buy a loaf of bread at Stop & Shop.
No one seemed to talk about COP30 this year. The United States, one of the biggest polluters, didn’t even attend.
I get at least 15 emails (not counting political requests) every day begging for money: Doctors Without Borders, Wounded Warriors Veterans, Feed the Hungry, UNICEF, the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, World Central Kitchen, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the Salvation Army, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, World Wildlife, the Trevor Project, Black Women’s Health Imperative, Sierra Club, and then locally –– OMG, you know how long that list is. I want to give a lot to everyone. But that’s impossible.
It’s clear that I have been shaped by the Holocaust and the Great Depression and my lefty socialist parents. And mostly, I am not immobilized by my inability to make a difference. I still have fun with friends, go to dinners, and am thrilled as I watch my amaryllis open. But at the same time, I am on a weird kind of high alert. I’m aware this could all be paranoia –– except my grandmother’s entire family who weren’t on high alert all died in Auschwitz.
I have addressed postcards, stood at Five Corners, called my representatives, and donated meagre amounts to various charities. But I think everything I’ve done is a piss hole in an 80-foot-high snowbank.
I’ve just reread what I’ve written and I think I’ll hit delete and start a new piece. The question is, how would I start? I know; it’s always worked before. How about: Whadja get, whadja get?
