The Child in Each of Us.

(click on poster to watch trailer )

      I recognize myself on the face of lost children—sad children, with eyes that beg an answer to unanswerable questions: Why am I here? Where are you, mother? Why did you leave me here so alone? I am two years old, four, five, ten, twelve, fifty-nine. 

The questions are still there, reverberating through the years, but now I am certain that there isn't an answer—or maybe there is, but it is not what I expected. 

     There is no rhyme or reason for anything that happens to us except for the magical explanations we created to make this life bearable. Desperate to feel nothing disturbing, others of my kind invented positive thinking, telling me sometimes: " I like to deal with positive people." I just smile. "I know," I think, but I say nothing in response. 

     It hurts feeling life to its fullest so they need all the help they can get: alcohol, drugs, sugar, bread, coffee, positivity, visualization, God. 

     I hear, see, and read in comments throughout the fabric of social media. The "hurting ones" professing God's power and benevolence as the Los Angeles streets fill with tents and trash and homeless people. We have so much in common with the children of the documentary " A House Made of Splinters trying to make sense of their place in the world while every wall surrounding you reminds one of how immense life is. Children need to be socialized into the standard magical narrative of the community in which they live, but orphan children learn only about reality.  

     I sit in a European café and watch people come and go, so sure of themselves, creating their Shangri-las—some young, some old. 

     I watch them and ponder whether they believe it will hold for a lifetime, the thin, brittle magic veil of delusion they wear to keep life at bay. 

                                                    

The Religion Experiment

     

     Enough is enough; how many human beings will the world allow Israel to kill before we call it for what it is: genocide.

     And for my Jewish readers, you are not the chosen people; I know that to be a fact because there's no such thing as a God of any kind. All religion is a made up story to help people deal with the fear of death. (Read Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death) 

     The rest of us, non-religious people, live our lives ignoring the insanity of all religions until you step over the line. Who gave the Israeli army permission to just bombard a city filled with civilians? How is this different than the insane people who flew planes into the World Trade Center?

     You don't get to make up your own God, establish a set of rules and traditions to yourselves and then expect everyone to fall in line praising you for your misguided devotion. Same goes to all religions. We are sharing this planet, as human beings, we are prone to the same diseases, to the pain of watching our loved ones leave this earth, hopefully after many years of living. 

     Yet, all of you, God people, decide on a whim that you have been offended and that killing each other is the answer. And fictitious God forbid anyone else with common sense speak against it, that is when you evoke the words you have crafted to allow you to continue to kill each other. Somehow, we have allowed you to get away with this behavior for centuries.

     Antisemitic is the most used term ascribed to anyone who disagrees with your actions concerning the Palestinian people, whom you have put in an open-air prison for many, many years. Every once in awhile, you kill thousands of them and expect the world to look the other way. I think that finally we see this for what it is, under the bright lights of your bombs, it reveals itself as a concentration camp. A place you have built it to keep all the Palestinians, to obey all your rules, or be sentenced to death.

     The Jewish people were victims of an inexcusable crime by the German and Japanese governments; spend a week in any city in Germany and you will see how serious the German government is in preventing that level of madness to ever be repeated. 

     In the meantime, the Japanese government chose collective amnesia as a way to avoid the shame they deserve to feel for their participation in the heinous, systematic killing of so many jews.

     And now, the descendants of the millions of innocent exterminated became the perpetrators of violence against Palestinians. Are Jews claiming Palestinians to be all the same, violent people that need to be exterminated? 

     This sort of conflict is nothing new; on January 30th, 1972, British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland. That is still a stain of shame in the history of that country. 

     The Israeli army killed almost 100,000 people in one year, thousands upon thousands of children. You can call yourselves "the chosen ones" if that makes you feel better and helps you navigate life's perils; but we have our beliefs. 

     My beliefs are very simple: 

There is no God. I'm alone in this world. Life is hard and way too short, and sprinkled with ephemeral happiness now and then. 

Don't drink. Don't smoke. 

Don't do any drugs. ( Yes. Sugar is a drug. A venom. Toxic to the body.) 

Choose one person to share life with and don't cheat on that person. 

Wake up. Exercise. Meditate. Practice Omad. 

Pray if it brings you solace. I do, sometimes. It brings me closer to my mother and grandmother and calms my soul.

     Follow those guidelines to maintain your body's health while you find artistic endeavors to strengthen your soul. Life will give you the pain you need to grow.

     What you don't do with all that pain is call yourselves "chosen ones" and oppress another community for years and years. Native Americans believed all land was sacred; the American military exterminated them all and took the land. 

     Jews are doing the same, you have taken the land you call sacred and prevented another community from enjoying it. You call yourselves "chosen" and now you have engaged in Nazism. All in the name of a fictitious God. I don't dislike religion, just don't believe in it, but I respect people's rights to exercise it, but politicians I despise. And hypocrisy. 

     The bellic arsenal you use against your vocal critics is to evoke antisemitism. So, let me be even more precise: all religions are fiction, and since I'm a storyteller, they are beautiful to read. But when you begin killing people in the name of your particular fairytale; that's when the world needs to get together and stop you.

     My guess is that the entire world is waiting until you, "the chosen people" kill millions of Palestinians; the exact number the Nazi regime killed. Then we will put an end to this nonsense.

     My partner and I drive often through a community in Los Angeles where many Hasidic Jews live. We watch families cross the street in front of us while we are at a stop sign, and it is beautiful and a bit poignant, as if we were missing something. The children, boys and girls, are nicely dressed, and the mother and father walk in front. It always makes me think of how nice it must be to believe in something—a being out there looking out for us. 

     The families always looked so content and calm; one can see that their religion and faith have given them peace. A tranquility I certainly don't have. I don't comprehend that kind of faith, but seeing it is beautiful. It is disrespectful to those families when the Israeli government goes around killing Palestinians in the name of their religion. And so is for all the other religions that engage in violence against another.

     

     

      

     This is just an excerpt of a CNN report on the genocide committed this week by a group of people who should know better. 

     These are two sites destroyed in the name of God.

 (What is left of a hospital in Gaza. A functional hospital with civilians inside )

 (What is left of the World Trade Center. A functional building with civilians inside )

This is actor Mark Ruffalo, back in 2019, apologizing for calling what the Israeli government is doing for what it is: genocide.

Unless he is also going to apologize for calling President George Bush a war criminal, there's no difference between what the US did in Iraq and what Israel is doing in Gaza. Calling genocide for what it is, it's not hyperbole, it is a necessity to prevent the murder of civilians and children. He apologized and the Zionists of La La land kept him busy with one movie after another, which I have not seen and never will. 

If the price you pay for protesting the killing of children is that you never make another movie; then you never make another movie.  But you don't get to be vocal only with the crowd that agrees and when it is convenient and costs you nothing. 

You should advocate for peace, freedom of religion, expression, and sanctity of human life. Your voice should raise in protest to any group that decides to kill another in the name of their particular fairytale.

We should imagine a new world where we respect the fragility, the brevity of life.