The Future of this Blog (Part 2)

 I am going to try to resurrect this blog. I need to have more confidence that I do have a unique voice. My publishing contract should be evidence of that. The post I made a few weeks ago seemed to nuke my readership and I obviously need to get them back or attract new readers.

I will write about politics but I cannot write anything about Charlie Kirk because I want to keep my job. Apparently this is career-death so as  I have nothing positive to say about the man, I will be silent.

I do notice a pattern though of disaffected Republicans going after right wing demagogues and then being branded as "extreme leftists." Which is very, very annoying. But predictable. 

And people murdered by the state have been smeared. Also predictable.

My frenemy, Dr. Silverman, found an old video of me warning about the separation of church and state collapsing and criticizing the "illegal war" (Iraq). I told him how right I was. There is hardly separation of church and state left, and there is another illegal war (Iran)! He called me "Cassandra," which I am.

In 2007-2011 I wrote a novel predicting, basically, MAGA. It was a "first' novel. Not fit for publication. It had a lot of old ideas I have discarded. Ideologies I shed. But it was quite predictive. It predicted Occupy. It predicted billionaires in the president's inner circle. It predicted the rounding up and killing of immigrants.

I will continue to make predictions.

A Note on Israel-Palestine

On October 7th, I cried all day. I cried for the Israeli victims, and I cried for what I knew would be the future Gazan victims of an asymmetrical war that risked turning into a genocide.

That was my first week at my current job. I cried every day, reading the news, as the death toll in Gaza mounted

I am a Jew. A secular Jew, humanist, atheist, but a Jew nonetheless.

I have never been to Israel-Palestine. Here is why:

When I was 9, my parents made me attend Hebrew School on Sundays at the Jewish Community Center. I didn't want to go and was very resistant. Didn't want to spend time with kids who made fun of me on Sundays. Didn't want to learn Hebrew.

My teacher, a young guy closer to my age than my parents', showed us a video of himself as a teen, planting trees in the desert.

"Trees in the desert."

I didn't know those trees were being planted over bulldozed Palestinian homes, but I knew Israel was a place of conflict, and no one was dying over trees. I didn't trust this Hebrew school teacher, and when I did learn about the conflict there, as a slightly older kid, my sympathies were with the Palestinians.

I refused Birthright because I didn't want to go to a country where I had more rights than someone who was born there. 

I believe in a one-state solution. A secular. pluralistic state. This is the position of most of If Now Now, the Jewish peace and anti-occupation organization I belong to. 

At least until we can have a no-state solution. That would be my ultimate preference.

I believe Jews and Arabs both have a claim and a right to the land. Government doesn't. You should be able to live anywhere you want. You shouldn't be able to enforce a government. Governments don't have rights. People do.

And people are not their governments. Hamas is a terroristic organization, and the IDF practices state terrorism. But there are civilians on both sides who only want peace and equity.

I hope for peace. I hope to visit Israel-Palestine one day. But I cannot under these circumstances. If that means I never do, then so be it. I am disgusted by Israeli Apartheid. My dad says Israel was founded by trauma victims. That may be true. They seem to have not learned from the past.

Never Again. Never Fucking Again.

Update on the Tantalus II Trilogy (6/13/20206)

 

An update on the Tantalus II Trilogy and my professional life...

I am anticipating getting the editors' notes in July. I am taking another week off work on the week of my birthday to work on the novels.

It is extremely exciting.

In the meantime, I also have been given permission by the state board of social workers to register for the LCSW exam! So next comes study and a practice test.

This too is extremely exciting.

These things are within my grasp.

The Tantalus II Trilogy will see bookshelves probably next year.

And my life will totally change.

I  have also updated the links page of this blog to include my author profile at Roan and Weatherford.

In the meantime, enjoy these AI generated pictures of ships and characters.

Future of this Blog

I started this post a month ago and never finished it.

I didn't get beyond one sentence: I will be honest- I do not particularly like blogging.

In conclusion:

I prefer writing fiction. I don't like to present myself as anything like a "talking head" or an "internet personality." I despise especially the latter and have not the enthusiasm for presenting as one that it would require to succeed. Advice I get goes "You have to have a blog" as practically a prerequisite for getting published.

But I've got a contract and my novels are in the editing process. So I will get published regardless of whether or not I make another blog post. Which I will do, to promote the book, but I should explain the factors that have led to this blog being rather inactive rather than the firebrand that was promised in the beginning.

The things I would want to say on a blog, that I once could say, now have much more serious consequences, such as loss of job or federal surveillance, or court convictions. The Right Wing is extremely litigious. I don't want to lose my job (where I help a lot of people who otherwise don't have support) or by surveilled or imprisoned by the Trump Government for speaking truths that are equally as personal as they are political. I also work in a rumor mill (E.G. a hospital) where everyone finds out everything about everyone else. My job puts me in a very visible position in which I need to avoid the appearance of being "political" at all. And while my writing is certainly "political" or at least, politically charged, I prefer writing fiction because I can speak less like a know-it-all through different characters with different perspectives (which is how all three of my novels are written, with alternating perspectives).

As stated, I dislike internet personalities and social media. What social media presence I do have is going to be handled by a third party for the remainder of my career as a writer. This third party is my sister and her girlfriend. They have a head for doing that and not getting dragged down into the muck, which is an ability I lack.

It's not that I will never make another blog post again. I will plug the books. I will plug appearances. I will continue to attempt to use this blog to gain publicity for my written work. But there are a lot of reasons why I haven't been using it to go on rants about current events, and these reasons are far from apathy. I care deeply about the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, about racial and gender injustice under Trump's regime, about the dystopian rise of LLMs, the dystopian rise of Christian Nationalism, and other aspects of the "whole" material struggle for liberation. But I don't feel motivated to rant online.

I am doing what I can by trying to be the best social worker I can be (which is harder than it sounds).

Really, my day-to-day is patient-centered and while mental health is a worthy subject I will consider using this blog to discuss, most of what I deal with is covered under HIPAA and I am not able to talk about it. I also don't particularly want to get into the weeds of why things are done and how they are done at the hospital where I work, for the same reasons I don't want to, for example, make a post telling how I really feel about Charlie Kirk's assassination, for example. That falls into the job "Not wanting to lose my job" category.

And if that makes me a bad anarchist, I don't really care, because I am just trying to be the best social worker I can be, and that requires a lot of personal sacrifice. Key word there is "personal," so that's a no-go area for blogging, too, I guess.

I guess there's just not much I would want to blog about these days. There are enough other voices out there already speaking truth to power about the things I care passionately about. 

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of WHYY at work. My officemate John seems to appreciate it. That's the public broadcast news station in the Philly area. I am mourning the loss of Knowledge Fight from my life, as the Knowledge Fighters Dan and Jordan have hung up their gloves and ended their podcast. I listen to a lot of podcasts generally. Mostly comedy podcasts. I am trying to maintain a healthy media diet.

Blogs are not part of that healthy media diet. Any more than Twitter (which I refuse to call "X"), facebook, or whatever is big now. I don't really see a return to form for this blog. It's not an intentional toning down. Just, a redirection of energy.