Speaking Out – Page 2 – Shoshana Kessock

The Women’s March On Washington: The View From A Wheelchair

January 23, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Not Ready To Make Nice, Speaking Out

7AM. I hate getting up at 7AM. Especially when I’ve been up all night writing. What’s more, I hate getting up at 7AM on a weekend. But lo, on Saturday January 21st, my alarm went off at 7AM and I peeled my eyes open. I’d been asleep for an hour and fifteen minutes, having stayed up all night to finish writing deadlines. But it was all worth it. It would be worth it.

I stared around my largely unimpressive motel room and listened to my roommate Nico snore in the other bed. He’d be up in a minute and we’d be out the door in less than fifteen. We’d pack up our meager gear, make sure we weren’t carrying anything we weren’t supposed to. See, we had instructions. Carry everything in a clear plastic backpack or bag. No other bags allowed. Bring lots of water and snacks. Wear warm and comfortable clothes.

Oh, and bring milk or liquid antacid t0 help counteract the effects of tear gas or pepper spray. And write the number for the National Lawyer’s Guild on your arm in sharpie. You know, just in case you get arrested.

The things one has to think about on the way to a protest. But this wasn’t just any protest. This was the Women’s March on Washington. And we were ready.

When I heard about the Women’s March on Washington, it was early in its inception. There were posts all over my Facebook wall, calling it a Million Woman March. In the face of the madness of the recent election and what can only be called the slow, horrifying slide of America into a conservative, regressive spiral, activists and organizers were planning to take to the streets and bring women from all over the country to protest in Washington DC. I’d seen protest planning before and thought perhaps calling it a Million Women March was presumptive, if a little coopting (there had already been a Million Women March in October 1997 in Philadelphia focusing on bringing attention to the plight of African American women).

Still, there was almost immediately a sense that this march was going to be historic. The day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as our next president, women would take to the streets to protest the state of our nation and women’s rights. Of course, I had to be there.

It took me until the week before the protest to figure out an attendance plan. Being a woman in a wheelchair with serious chronic health issues, one always has to attend these things with planning and consideration. I enlisted the help of my friend and fellow game designer, Nicolas Hornyak, to get to the protest. Nico has acted as my wingman before and we’d been on a few protest excursions, including two protests during the Eric Garner case in New York. Those protests had been hectic affairs, full of some close calls with cops. We were once nearly run down by a police motorcycle while marching onto the FDR Drive. The cops charged the protest line in Time Square and we nearly got trampled. We sat in to block the Lincoln Tunnel when the cops wouldn’t let us get to Time Square in the first place. That time, sitting in my wheelchair in front of a giant Greyhound bus with the cops nearby pulling out zip tie handcuffs, I was sure we were going to be arrested. Still, each time, we’d been fine. But of course, people I knew had concerns.

“This is Trump’s America,” a friend of mine said, “I don’t trust how cops are going to handle this. You should be careful.” My mom was worried. Friends offered bail money.

We were careful. We made plans. We packed everything we thought we might need: first aid kit, spare food, extra water, spare doses of my medication in case of arrest or getting stuck somewhere, camera for recording any incidents, liquid antacid for dealing with tear gas or pepper spray. We downloaded the March guide and printed it in case our phones lost power. We set up friends with contact information and the numbers for legal aid in case we were arrested. I brought extra socks (“my feet get cold”) and told my mom the signal to pick up the phone on the Sabbath in case I was arrested (“three rings means you pick up the phone”).

We drove down the night before to a motel outside the Baltimore airport. We’d be parking at a friend of mine’s place on the outskirts of DC, then heading into the protest by Metro.

5877b18a1700008501929b45 — artist: Jennifer Maravillas

When we left the motel, I stuffed extra muffins in my pocket along with beef jerky and power bars. I had with me two signs I printed from Staples. I got them laminated in case of rain. One was a poster provided by artist Jennifer Maravillas for this march saying “Our Bodies. Our Minds. Our Power.” Another I had made myself. It proclaimed: “I am alive today because of Obamacare. Save women’s lives. Protect the ACA.”

Of all the issues I wanted to put across, protection of the ACA and the 30 million Americans who would lose healthcare immediately if Obamacare was repealed was paramount to me. Obamacare saved my life when I was first diagnosed with Cushing’s Disease and had to remove a pituitary tumor we nicknamed Larry, and it’s kept me alive ever since. So obviously, it was an issue near and dear to my heart.

Signs in hand, I was ready for the protest. We drove through a hazy, grey morning, chugging along through thick traffic outside of DC, surrounded by other cars full of women heading to the march. Stuck between charter buses, we blasted Fall Out Boy (one of my defiantly guilty pleasures) and chanted along to the catchy, if slightly teen-angsty lyrics.

“You are a brick tied to me that’s dragging me down
Strike a match and I’ll burn you to the ground
We are the jack-o-lanterns in July setting fire to the sky
Here, here comes this rising tide, so come on.”

A car passed us on the right with an older woman driving, a young woman by her side, three teen girls in the back. All were wearing Pussy hats.

We were heading in the right direction.

After parking the car at a friend’s house (thank you, Shalom!), we headed for the Metro. I’d never taken the Metro, but being from New York I figured I knew how subways worked. Yeah, okay. It took ten minutes to figure out which Metro station subway card to get, then we headed down into the station. And faced the harrowing issue of getting a wheelchair onto a train so packed you could barely see individual bodies anymore. Ever see videos of station officials stuffing people onto trains in Japan? Yeah, this was just like that. Only maybe worse, since we had a damn wheelchair.

It took eight trains going by and some serious stress, but we got on. I stood for two stops before my leg went out from under me, then I was back in the chair, squished between a cranky family with kids and a helpful pair of protestors from (of all places) Brooklyn. We transferred at Metro Central and it took a National Guardsman helping to get us on the next train, it was so full. He stood in the way, cleared folks out, and got us some space. Only then we hear our stop is being bypassed. “Too full at L’Enfant,” someone said, “and Federal SW is closed too. Smithsonian is your stop.”

At Smithsonian, a helpful station manager got us into the accessibility elevator and we got above ground. And that’s when we first saw the protest and realized the enormity of what we were in for.

16231519_10212142859476119_2031876434_o — That’s a lot of Pussy hats.

Independence Avenue was packed for something like fifteen blocks. We had come up at the very back of the marchers, packing in to hear the speeches at the main stage all the way down. We could hear cheering echoing along the canyon of DC buildings, all the greyer in the drizzle. Still, the crowd was lively, chanting, marching, buying T-shirts. A woman with a shopping cart sold giant pretzels and water. There were families, huge groups with banners from colleges, people of all ages. And they were everywhere. Up on stairs, railings, high walls, trees. There were guys selling t-shirts and I grabbed one with the Million Woman March logo on it. I wanted to commemorate the day.

We passed a giant screen broadcasting the speeches. Gloria Steinem was there, in all her glory, rallying the troops. I was a little awed. I man, Gloria Steinam. She was only, you know, a dozen blocks and a hundred thousand people away. And she was talking to all of us about women’s rights. I was jazzed, inspired, and a little overwhelmed.

That feeling of overwhelmed continued to grow as I realized we had about eight blocks to go if we wanted to get to the Disability Caucus tent. They had a safe area for wheelchairs to congregate near the medical tent, and I knew with my health concerns it was the best place to be. The trouble was, they were eight blocks away. And there was a sea of humanity in the way. So I did what any good girl brought up in Brooklyn would do: I got a little loud. Polite of course, but loud. There was a lot of “excuse me, pardon me, sorry, watch your toes, sorry, gotta get through” but we started the process forward. Within half a block, I was already exhausted and frustrated, and the crowd only got thicker. Then, out of nowhere, two women came to help: Hana, an ADA compliance consultant for the Seattle Metro, and Katie. The two offered to act as blockers in front of me so we could get the wheelchair through. Together, our little squad swam upstream from 14th Street to 6th and Independence where the Disability tent stood.

I can’t describe the feeling of working our way through that crowd. We passed down canyons of people squished together so tight you couldn’t see light between them. From down in my wheelchair, I felt like an X-Wing making the canyon run to destroy the Death Star. I apologized a million times, clutching my laminated sign about Obamacare to my chest, hoping to the gods we didn’t run over a million toes on the way.

We passed literally thousands of people who backed up, squished in, and shuffled over to make way for a wheelchair. Not a single person complained, or said a harsh word. In fact, most of the time people stopped and smiled. They thanked me for coming. And while sometimes it seemed a little patronizing (thanking the disabled person for just showing up? why was I any different than anyone else?), and some folks patted me on the shoulder in that ‘go you!’ kind of way (rule of thumb: no touching unless someone gives you permission), the whole experience was a humbling, anxiety-inducing, but amazing one.

I joked more than once, “If we can do this, Trump can stop being a shmuck” to ringing laughter. Hundreds upon hundreds of people read my sign. And we made it to the Disability Caucus tent.

I was immediately greeted by volunteers who offered us water and snacks and a place to rest. I got out my CVS sandwich and tried very hard not to cry. Outside, Ashley Judd recited the poem “Nasty Woman” by 19-year-old poet Nina Donovan on the jumbo screen outside. A group of deaf marchers signed rapidly to one another with the help of an interpreter. Outside, the crowd stood shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, and listened, cheered, shared in the joy. No cops in sight, no tension, just celebrating the cause.

I’d like to say the march went off for me without a hitch. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.

It began with a simple question. “Where’s the bathroom?” Yes, some things are more important than immediate activism.

Now, you’d think someone would have put some bathrooms behind the Disability Caucus tent for, y’know, the folks with disabilities who’d have a hard time getting around in the crush of humanity. But the porta-johns were a block away and about seven or eight thousand bodies packed in like sardines were between us and the gross little boxes. The National Air and Space museum however was right across the street, and they had bathrooms. Except between us was, again, about a metric ton of bodies. I decided to lead the charge for myself and two other wheelchair-bound folk to the loo. I had confidence in my New York voice and people’s good graces. We were joined by a somewhat befuddled march volunteer and there we went, attempting to cross the River Jordan – I mean, Independence Avenue.

Well, there was no ramp for the wheelchairs on our side of Independence Avenue, turns out, so we had to go all the way around the building. Half an hour later, we were swimming upstream against the crowd while the volunteer helpfully announced to anyone who could hear, “Step aside, three wheelchairs, trying to go to the bathroom!” I would have been mortified had I not spent the entire time calling after the gentleman. “Sir? Sir. We don’t need to announce that we need to go to the bathroom. Sir?” People laughed with me. I had to laugh. It was all so absurd. But everyone helped us along. It was pure kindness and magic.

It took forty five minutes to reach the porta-johns on the Mall between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument, where only one day before Trump supporters had lined up to watch the inauguration. I wouldn’t know it until later but the Women’s March had already blown the doors off the inauguration attendance numbers. Nico and I took refuge up on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum and looked out from our vantage point on a sea of pink hats and all kinds of signs. The marchers weren’t just on Independence, but every street we could see. Across the way, cheering people sat on the steps of the National Gallery. The whole area was shut down, no cars in sight.

“They’re saying there’s 700,000+ people here,” a helpful woman told me. She’d flown in from Seattle with her friends the day before and like us had stayed outside of town. Around us flowed a sea of pink Pussy Hats. Both Nico and I promised we’d buy a couple if we could find anyone selling them.

Amid the ocean of pink, we spotted a few red caps emblazoned with the preposterous “Make America Great Again.” I thought it took particular chutzpa to walk around wearing those hats, the mark of Trump supporters everywhere, during the protest. But there was no heckling. Maybe some snark, but nothing mean said that I could see. As we figured out how to get down into the march, I saw a bunch of Trump supporters readying to go into the museum. To them, it was a sightseeing day, and the march was giving them plenty to see.

The trouble started when we tried to go back down into the crowd. I stopped when I started getting massive pain in my leg. Nico pulled aside while the pain shot up my leg, into my hip, went up into my chest, and arm. Sounds bad? It was. I couldn’t take a deep breath. We were petting someone’s gigantic golden lab (the thing could have been ridden into battle) when I started to get woozy. I don’t remember all of what happened next, but it was clear I was in need of medical help. It wasn’t the first time I’d had episodes like this. Cushing’s Disease means I’m supposed to be careful about my stress levels and, well, a protest on so little sleep, in the cold, when I’m anxious in crowds? It was a recipe for problems.

The march was about to start in earnest, heading towards the White House. I had the map in my pocket but when I tried to pull it out, my hands shook. We got out into the flow of traffic heading back towards Independence, but there was no movement. With people pushing in on all sides, I suddenly couldn’t breath. Have I mentioned I’m claustrophobic? Hyperventilating, I told Nico we had to get back up to the stairs. He did one better and got me to the security guards inside the Air and Space Museum.

The next thing I know, I’m being whisked downstairs into the bowels of the museum to their nurse’s office. Yes, the museum has a nurse’s office. And it is better stocked than some doctor’s offices I’ve been to. There, a rather harried man whose name I cannot remember took one look at me and said he wanted to call EMTs. Oh goodie, I thought, what a way to spend a march.

Well, they called EMTs all right. But you know what happens when every block in every direction is shut down? No ambulances can get through. Twenty minutes passed. A half an hour. Dizzy, nauseous, a little incoherent, I sat in the office with a woman who had fallen and dislocated her shoulder and a woman with rheumatoid arthritis who had been overcome from standing too long. We waited. No EMTs came. Security got on the overhead PA and asked for any doctors to please come to the security desk.

Ten minutes later, a skinny middle-aged guy with a blue biker’s shirt and a tan showed up. He had a southern drawl and a good ol’ boy kind of attitude. He was an ER doctor up from Daytona, and he had volunteered to help after the PA announcement. He got me on oxygen and asked me about my medical history. He was kind. He was attentive. And more than that, he took me seriously. He was concerned about the EMTs being unable to get to us. He stayed with me while we talked out what to do. Gradually, the oxygen helped. We figured it was just a bad anxiety attack coupled with some trouble from my wacky endocrine system.

I thanked the man profusely for his help through the oxygen mask. He reached out, patted my arm, and said seriously, “Of course, it’s no problem. After all, I’m a Trump supporter.”

And folks, I nearly swallowed my own tongue. While we chatted some more, I couldn’t get his response out of my head. After all, I’m a Trump supporter. Here was a guy who’d come up for the Inauguration to support the man I seriously believe will screw our country into the floor. And he had been maybe one of the kindest, most attentive doctors I’ve ever seen in my life. He never once dismissed me, or gaslit me. He had taken time out of his day just being a tourist to come down and help me out. I almost cried.

Well, the EMTs never came. After an hour, the nurse came in and asked how I was feeling. We figured I was safe to move, symptoms having subsided. I took my regular medication, started to feel better, and me and Nico moved on. Crisis averted. As we left, I saw another group going by in their red “Make America Great” hats and I thought, you don’t have to wear those, some of you Trump supporters are already doing it, one act of kindness at a time.

Outside, the march had already moved on without us. I told Nico I wanted to catch up. We still had our signs, though so many folks had apparently abandoned theirs. They were lying all over the place, up against the building, against trees. We saw this one as we turned to head towards Constitution and the march route.

Just as we were taking this picture, I heard it: the first harsh voice I’d heard all day, raised over a bullhorn. Uh oh, I thought. We headed for the voice around where we’d left the man with his giant dog. The guy and dog were long gone. In his place was a bearded man standing on top of the refrigerators next to a closed McDonald’s kiosk. He held a giant sign and was yelling into a bullhorn. On his sign were giant block letters screaming, REPENT, and quoting scriptures. The man kept yelling about turning away from sin to accept Jesus as your savior. He called folks sinners, sodomites, told them they’d burn in hell. REPENT was the message, REPENT NOW.

I was furious. I was going to roll over there and give the guy a piece of my mind. But as we approached, I saw a group of young men and women around the man. They were holding up protest signs. They chanted over the man, raising their voices when he did. They shouted, “LOVE IS LOVE” over and over. One young woman stood right in front of the man and held up a sign supporting Planned Parenthood in one hand and a hand written sign saying “CHOOSE LOVE NOT HATE” in the other.

They turned their back on the hateful preacher and chanted louder, and louder, until he finally gave up. I started to cheer, and so did the dozen or so other people who had stopped to support the anti-hate chanters.

Then, a strange thing happened. The preacher started to get down off the refrigerator. He stopped, then reached down and asked the chanters if anyone had lost a water bottle. He held up a blue bottle, and they each said they hadn’t. One of the girls politely asked him if they’d left a sign up there (they hadn’t). Then, one of the guys politely asked the preacher if he needed a hand down so he wouldn’t fall with his sign and megaphone to juggle. The preacher, who had a moment before been preaching for them all to REPENT, took the offered hand and jumped down. Then, they all went their separate ways.

As they went by, I thanked the chanters. Two of the girls went by with tears in their eyes, but the rest were smiling. And by the end of it, so was I.

Nico and I went onto the mall and talked to some folks. A few people stopped me to ask about my sign, ask me about my story. In fact tons of people did over the course of the day. A lot of people snapped my picture. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with that, not sure where it would be used. A couple of them kind of gave me the creeps, to be honest. But most were there to document the amazing signs and the people of the day.

Nico took this one of me in front of the Capitol. I was there to spread my message, a message of one woman who lived because the Affordable Care Act existed. I thought back to recently, when I’d received a letter from the White House. I’d gone on the White House website and sent a thank you letter to President Obama for his tireless work defending healthcare. I said in my letter that I figured he didn’t hear enough thank yous in his job, so I wanted to simply say mine.

A month later, I received a letter back with a message from the White House, thanking me for my note. It was certainly a form letter and signed by the presidential auto-pen, but it had still made me tear up. Someone in the White House had read my letter and had the thought to respond. I framed the dang thing to hang on my wall.

Only days after getting that note, auto-signed with President Barack Obama’s name only a few weeks before he’d leave office for good, I sat on the Mall with the Capitol building in the distance and held up my sign, thanking the now former President once more in the only way I could.

As we walked down Constitution to rejoin the protest, a woman stopped me. “I’m so glad Obamacare could help you,” she said, tears in her eyes. “It was one year too late to save my sister.”

Across the way, a group of protestors called the Daughters of Liberty blasted Beyonce’s “Formation” and danced under protest signs with a cop car flashing its lights only a few feet away. I saw protestors taking selfies with the cops. One cop had on a pink Pussy Hat. It was all too fucking surreal.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the main body of the protest. The cops had cut off a single block because a bleachers had collapsed and ambulances were treating those hurt. It meant that the straggling marchers like us were funneled east instead of west. Some broke off and headed back to the Capitol, while Nico and I rolled on north, trying to find the rest of the march. The sun was going down, but people were still hype. We rolled through the unfamiliar city among thousands of people wandering, talking to one another, holding up their signs.

We ended up so far north we hit Chinatown. There, we bought a pair of newspapers commemorating the march. A photographer stopped us and asked to take our picture. I held up my sign and he snapped a bunch of shots. When he gave me my card, he told me I’d made his march. I shook my head, a little flustered, and we rolled on.

We spotted this sign, and I made Nico take a picture of it. It was the feeling I always had when issues of women’s rights came up, that nagging sigh of exhaustion in the back of my throat when I thought about how long this battle was going on and how much longer it would take to win. If it could ever be won.

Tired, hungry, in need of a break, we found shelter in a – no kidding – Hooters. There we gulped down wings and beer pretzels at the bar and drank some soda. I took medication, and we recovered a little. The sun went down. Outside, traffic had started back up again. On TV behind us, CNN was reporting on the marches worldwide. When Elizabeth Warren came on screen, the entire restaurant exploded in celebration. Video of giant crowds from dozens of cities flashed on screen, waves of pink Pussy Hats and signs from New York to Los Angeles and across the world. Three hundred marches across the US and the globe. And most of them looked a lot like this.

Bodily exhausted, mentally overwhelmed, I realized we had to call it a day. I could barely keep myself upright, forget keep my eyes open. The trouble with chronic illness is knowing when to throw in the towel. I wanted to go back out, to rejoin the protestors, to head to the Capitol building and hold my sign up high and remind anyone watching that this protestor, this disabled woman, was alive because of a bill Donald Trump and the Republicans wanted to destroy. But I also could barely sit up straight.

We had to Uber our way out of the area, the trains were too crowded. As the SUV pulled up and we piled in, people in pink hats with signs still streamed thru the area, looking for the protest, or a train station, or a place to catch a meal. People talked, chatted. I never once saw a cop being untoward. In fact, I barely ever saw cops at all. We rolled through the city, north, heading back towards our car and eventually, after a four hour drive, home.

In the car, before I fell asleep against the window, I opened the Etsy app and looked up pink Pussy Hats. I never wear pink, but for this, I’d make the exception.

Before the Women’s March on Washington, I’d sat down with some friends and had a serious talk about the future. What I believed Trump’s America might look like, what kind of damage the Republicans could do to our basic civil liberties, to the laws the previous administration had fought so hard to put in place. Queer rights, healthcare, protection for Muslim Americans, worker’s rights, protection for the poor, violence against people of color. Everything was up in the air, uncertain, dangerously out of control. I talked about what would happen to my healthcare if they repealed the ACA. I talked about the real option of going broke trying to afford my doctor’s bills and medicine, of leaving the US in search of somewhere I could afford medical coverage. And as I talked, I realized how little hope I had for our future.

After the March, when I got home, I sat in the same spot as I had when we talked about that dire America, a future full of rebranded neo-Nazis and their apologists, Republican millionaires destroying our country, and Donald Trump in his golden tower, overseeing it all with his ‘alternative facts.’

But after the March, I returned home feeling something I hadn’t in a while: hope. I found myself reciting Jyn Erso’s quickly becoming iconic line: “Rebellions are built on hope.” I thought of the signs boasting pictures of recently passed Carrie Fischer as Princess Leia telling women to rebel. I thought of the Hamilton quotes telling people to Rise Up. And I thought of those thousands of people in those silly pink hats, all moving out of the way to let a woman in a wheelchair go by, smiling and joking, helping one another out.

Rebellions are built on hope. And thanks to this march, I had found mine again.

The Future Is Not Yours

November 2, 2016 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Not Ready To Make Nice, Personal, Politics, Speaking Out

I wrote this post a few months back, then didn’t push the publish button. I suppose I’d run afoul of one too many articles this political season that made me mad or upset and I didn’t want to add to the noise. But in light of the escalation of the events at the Dakota Pipeline and the election now less than a week away, I think it’s worth revisiting. So when you read this, know a) it’s a post about politics again, so you’re forewarned, and b) the news articles and events mentioned at the beginning are from a month or so back. From there, enjoy.

I woke up this morning restless. It’s been a problem lately for me, an inability to sleep that’s had me feeling tired all day and irritable. I’ve stayed away from reading the news, which only seems to be making it worse. Only this morning, I woke up and turned on a video by Keith Olbermann cataloguing the myriad offenses by Donald J. Trump since his rise to the candidacy for president. If there’s anything to get irritable about, it’s Trump. But the video helped lock into perspective a lot of things that have been plaguing me for the last few months.

I’m a writer. Connecting points to make a cohesive narrative is what I do for a living. So when I look at today’s media reports, I often look for a coherent narrative to give me a view on the world. It’s what we all do for context of our lives. So I looked at my items in my feed the last few days and try to contextualize.

Item: Donald J. Trump leads one of the most bigoted campaigns in history to staggering approval from right wing Republicans. His candidacy brings out those who previously hid prejudiced ideas, uniting them under his banner in their rush to blame every ‘other’ group they can for their plight in life. All while ignoring the dangerous, uniformed, erratic, terrifying behavior of the man they support for the highest seat in the land.

Item: A pipeline is being created through Native American territory in the Dakotas, drawing protestors from across the world attempting to save sacred ground holding the bones of native ancestors. While many stand with the protestors, the media at large has remained silent on the unfolding issues, including the mauling of protestors by dogs.

Item: Recent Hugo awards winner N.K. Jemisin faces racist responses after winning for her novel, The Fifth Season. Hers is only one story in a continuing narrative of barely veiled hatred aimed at progressive storytelling in the science fiction and fantasy genres, led by conservative factions that wish to return to a time when fiction was less diverse in subject material and in creators.

Item: Stories trickle in from various media outlets about “alleged” rapists like Brock Turner receiving absurdly lenient sentences after being convicted in a court of law. Comparable crimes being perpetuated by people of color get more aggressive punishments, while white male defendants are often let off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. The most recent unfolding case involves a man having sex on video with a toddler. While people outcry these deplorable cases, politicians still make statements about rape victims “just keeping their knees together.”

Item: A game organization issues a statement about not including potentially triggering content about sexual assault and rape in their game’s plots. This practice, while already standard in many organization’s policies (including my own), draws fire for constituting censorship and sparks bitter, often vicious debates, across the internet and convention spaces. The conversations become so embattled as to require admonishing posts asking people to remember that the person on the other side of the keyboard is a human being and not an invisible punching bag. This hallmarks a disturbing trend of harassment of creators for content that steps over the line from critique and conversation to bullying, exemplified by recent harassment by fans of a Steven Universe creator for supposed “queer baiting” in the show.

Item: A football star chooses to protest the rampant murder of black people by police by taking a knee during the National Anthem before a game. The incident draws a maelstrom of controversy wherein pundits and media alike try to paint the protest as unpatriotic, as an affront to our military and veterans, as worthy of sanction. They refuse to engage with the heart of the protest, namely the rampant trend of police brutality and violence against minorities across the country.

Item: Articles abound calling millennials lazy and directionless, citing their habits as killing everything from the housing market to our country’s competitive job market. Meanwhile, studies show most millennials face absurd financial burdens from student loans in an economy flooded with workers from a previous generation that has not retired. The narrative remains the same: the young are weak and directionless and ruining the world. The dialogue across generational lines goes on.

I could keep giving examples from the news. Yet here’s one from everyday life.

I was waiting on line for a prescription and chatting with my roommate. I point out how absurd it is that Hillary Clinton is being criticized for developing pneumonia while still going out on the campaign trail. I indicate how sexist the arguments against her have gotten, and how her behavior is indicative of so many women forced to work through their illnesses to survive in a male-dominated world. A man on line turns to agree with me and bemoans the chance of Trump getting into office. Yet when my roommate walks away, the man steps closer to add that Trump does have one thing correct: immigrants are stealing all our jobs, he says. When I protest that our country is made of immigrants, the man indicates his family come from immigrants too. But that “these Russians and Syrians” are the ones he means. Not every immigrant is bad. Just those.

And I’m left staring at him, as I often stare at my computer screen or at someone who tells me yet another example of unbridled prejudice running rampant in our society. From rape culture to the profiling of people of color as criminals, the blaming of millennials for society’s ills to the desecration of native people’s holy lands, to the hatred aimed at both Israelis and Palestinians from various sides, the list of things I simply boggle at is overwhelming. Because I often wonder… didn’t people grow up knowing this shit is WRONG?

I watched a lot of TV and movies as a kid, and read a lot of books. For that reason, I grew up with a lot of those media tropes we all know and love: Be a good person. Share. Love your neighbor. Stand up for what you believe in. Be yourself. Love others. Stand up to bullies. Eat healthy food. Friendship is magic. You know, all the good stuff. And what’s more, I believed it because these messages created a framework that backed up what I believed about the world: that being a good person, not just a ‘nice’ person but a person striving to do good, is what a person is supposed to do. Not only that, looking at the heroes of both fiction and the real world, they all are remembered for striving for better goals. Advancement of the world, it seems, has come from aiming for ideas like acceptance, fairness, equality, peace, courage, and empowerment.

And then I grew up and realized maybe some folks didn’t get the same programs when they were kids. Maybe they looked around and said “this is malarky” and looked for someone to blame, to other, over their problems. Maybe they rejected the narratives of tolerance for something else, a darker look at the world where the dog eat dog mentality is the only way to survive. Their narrative is so different to me it boggles the imagination. The future they envision is not mine.

I watched a lot of Star Trek growing up. And for all its flaws (and there are many), Star Trek presented a view of the future where people of all kinds existed side by side. Where people strive for a higher goal. Star Wars presented us with a narrative of people fighting for freedom against tyranny in a galaxy far, far away. Lord of the Rings showed a band of people unlike one another gathering to fight against a terrifying despot. X-Men battle not only despots but bigots willing to murder those unlike them. Harry Potter fights the wizarding form of white supremacy along with Voldemort. Katniss Everdeen fights a regime that represses the poor for the enjoyment of the rich.

The list goes on but the fiction of my life has carried the thru-line of people fighting for a future that involved equality, freedom, peace, and acceptance.

So it boggles me when I look at the world, at people, who can imagine a world where these are not the watchwords for their future. Where their peace and security comes at the expense of the hope of others.

Theirs is not my future.

“But Shoshana,” you may say, “these fictions aren’t real! They’re just stories, and things are easier in stories! Being the kind of good guy you’re talking about is hard and in a complex world-”

Not to paraphrase Kanye, but I’m gonna stop you there for a second. First off, isn’t part of the reason we create narratives like these to inspire us? To bring us to new heights and give us examples of better things, better times, heroes that point us to the better parts of our nature and say, “See, this is possible!” We aren’t going to be Gandalf in this world and hopefully we’re never going to be tossed into a child fighting ring on national television like Katniss, but we have choices in our lives we need to make and narratives like those I mentioned help can help us aspire to do better, be better, even in the face of hardships.

Also, and I’m going to say this with all due respect: who said choices to be good were meant to be easy? Or binary? Sure, in the books it’s simple. The bad guys wear dark colored hats and everyone knows Sauron is the bad guy while we root for the scrappy little Hobbits. Everyone knows making the right choices in life is harder. But just because it’s harder doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aim for it, aspire to it. Fight for it.

There’s a concept I’ve heard before: being on the wrong side of history. It presupposes, and rightly so, that history is written by the victors in any conflict and though context will remain part of a more complex narrative, events are remembered through the lens of the dominant viewpoint that survives. Anyone studying history realizes that historical time periods are washed in the context of who survived to take dominance during that time. So I often wonder, when we look back, what this decade and our current time will reflect. And I realize it entirely depends on whose ideals take root going forward.

Whose future will survive?

I grew up on Star Wars, on super heroes, on Harry Potter. I grew up the child of a thousand stories about how the world can be made a better place if we all come together in peace. The world outside is a far more complicated place than those stories, with nuance and difficulties so complex as to be nearly Gordian in their knotting. The impulse to throw up your hands and state that the ideals of our fictions cannot be applied to the muddled, gargantuan issues of our realities is strong. Yet history shows evidence of time periods where regression led the dominant narrative, and saw the backslide of civilizations and societies. Is that the story we want people to see when they look back at this time period? Is that the future we want to build?

I’m just a writer. I don’t make world policy, or social policy, or any policy at all. What I do is tell stories. I make games for people to live in through role-play, and spin fiction for people to enjoy. And I know in my own way, I have a limited impact on what the future will look like. But I think about how I can perpetuate the ideals I hold so dear. So I pledge to try and be conscientious in my creation. I will continue to strive to create fiction that reflects the kind of world I hope to see. I will push aside concerns about being labeled ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ or (heaven forfend) a ‘social justice warrior’ and instead recognize that everyone has an agenda in creating, and mine is to continue forward the ideas that drove me to believe in a better world when I was little.

I will acknowledge that we are all fallible. And we always have more to learn, and ways to improve, even if we think of ourselves as on the side of progressiveness and equality. I will recognize that one can make a choice that is progressive one day and then make a decision the next that harms another, even unintentionally. I pledge to try and learn from my mistakes, to listen to those around me, and to acknowledge and make amends when I’m in error or do harm.

I am fallible, but I pledge to try.

Nobody can tell me what my narrative will be after I’m gone, when it has become the future and my actions now are the past. As a favorite musical of mine laments, you don’t get to choose “who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” But I know that in a world seemingly at tug-of-war over acceptance, peace, and equality, I want to create towards a better, more equal tomorrow.

So I can say to those who perpetuate intolerance and bigotry and hate and fear: The future isn’t yours. The fate of this country, this world, belongs to all of us, together. And that is the exact opposite of your beliefs. The future isn’t yours, because your selfish ideas don’t believe in a future that includes others, and that selfishness is the opposite of what is good and true. I know it because even conservative views say so: be charitable, be welcoming, treat others as you’d like to be treated, love thy neighbor, etc. Except when those beliefs become tinged, tainted, corrupted, by intolerance do they become conditional and become the things we must fight against. When they become, “Love thy neighbor, except if thy neighbor isn’t like you.” Except.

That future of exceptions isn’t mine. It doesn’t belong to so many out there who stand as the exceptions to conservative, myopic rules. And since we have as much right to the world as anyone else (sorry, we do!), then your future doesn’t get to overrule ours. Your future isn’t ours and cannot hold sway for us to exist. Because you can’t wish people out of existence and your hatred cannot drive our world. Good people won’t let it happen. We can’t. And those views will only put you on the wrong side of history and resign you to a life in conflict.

And hey, I know even the most bigoted, intolerant person isn’t some mustache twirling villain. They’re people with concerns and fears and the earnest right to life, liberty, and all that… as long as that pursuit of happiness doesn’t try to snuff out that happiness for others. Once you step over that line, then we got some problems. I don’t have to be tolerant of intolerance as an ideal, because by its very nature, intolerance does not afford the same allowance to others. I don’t need to accept bigotry as an ideology because it doesn’t respect my right to exist. And that is where I draw the line and say to the bigots, the intolerant: think about how things go in the stories with the best happy endings and wonder, where did the bigots end up? Do you want to be Harry Potter, or a Death Eater? Folks might think evil is a little cool in stories, but in reality, it means harming others by your choices, your actions, your beliefs. Do you choose to bring harm into this world, or strive for a higher standard for yourself and others? You get to choose.

To quote Hamilton once more: “History has its eyes on you.” On us. On what we build as our legacy, especially right now.

And if you need any evidence that such fights can be won, look at the struggles progression has won over the years. Happy endings to battles aren’t like they are in the movies, because the struggle for a better world doesn’t end. It’s just little wins, stacking up into a better tomorrow.

This is our eye of the hurricane. We stand in it every day. And the question is left to all of us, in our own lives, in our individual arenas: what will you help make the future?

End note: We’re six days to what might be the biggest elections in our nation’s recent history. And history has its eyes on all of us now. Go out and vote, and consider what you’d like our future to look like. It really is in each of our hands.

Our Hateful America

June 12, 2016 by Shoshana, posted in Not Ready To Make Nice, Politics, Speaking Out

This post originally began as a Facebook update after I woke up to the news about the mass shooting at Pulse in Orlando, Florida. It came as the first response I had to the tragedy, and I’m adding to it now. This is part of my Not Ready To Make Nice series, and the raw response of someone horrified by the devastating tragedy of last night.

460x — The scene outside Pulse on June 11 2016 (photo by AP)

There are no words.

I don’t have them, folks. I’m a writer, and a storyteller, and for once I’m out of words. Last night a man walked into a gay club called Pulse in Orlando, Florida, and shot over one hundred people, killing 53 as of the time of this writing. It’s being declared today the worst mass shooting in American history.

The worst mass shooting in American history. Isn’t that what they said last time? And the time before that? The numbers just keep growing. And every time we think that the toll can’t get worse, it’s another place where we can have our innocence shattered. A school? A college campus? A nightclub with your friends? These are our new battlefields, where we don’t take ground for some obscure cause like nationalism, but where we stand our ground to fight for our freedom to be who we are just by showing up. Where we hope a fun night out with our friends won’t end with a slur, a punch, a bullet.

Go out into the world today in America, and you see more people standing tall then ever to be who they truly are. And yet for every time that happens, you see a tragedy. Just this week, someone set a pipe bomb in the bathroom of a store that support letting people pee in peace. And a man is able to buy assault rifles legally to walk into a nightclub where people were celebrating Pride, and murdered forty people. Because of his ignorance. His hate.

Their ignorance. Their hate.

Because he’s not alone. No matter what people will say later, he’s not a ‘lone wolf’ shooting people. He’s part of an infection of ideology that lets small people try to make themselves large by turning their hate into violence. It’s a tale as old as time. A person feels small in their own life, so they hook into an ideology, one full of hate and blame for everything that’s wrong with today. And they look at someone else, someone different, and say, “They’re wrong and they must die.” They want their pain to mean something. They make it mean gravestones and tears, and suffering in the heart of our country. We remember their names when the names of the victims fall by the wayside. In a way, they win. They are the faces of the plague of hatred that has infected America, and is eating it alive from the inside out.

Only an infection denotes a sickness, something you suffer from. Hatred, bigotry, is a choice. And these people chose to end lives with their hatred. They chose to be the poster children for the worst that humans can be.

I won’t share their faces. I won’t share their names. They are small people. They are a symptom of the larger disease, the only disease you opt into and then pass on with bullets, and explosives, and excuses about rights (to guns, to religious ideas) while ignoring the basic right to life that others have. These men don’t deserve to be remembered.

These are the photos I will remember. This is the face of what needs to be held onto in the wake of such tragedy.

theorlandosentinel — Photo by: The Orlando Sentinel

There’s a line from The West Wing that was given after a terror attack on the show, and the speech its from is oddly prescient, so I’m linking to it below. But as I read about pride performers climbing out of air conditioner ducts to save their own lives while their friends hide in dressing rooms, praying not to be murdered, while patrons who came to their show lie dead on the club floor behind them, I remember this quote. “The streets of heaven are too full of angels tonight.” And its our hateful America, not religion, or belief, but the hate of men, that sent them there. Our hateful America, that which renders what could be a great country so low. We are not Great when such hatred exists.

The streets of heaven are too full of angels today. And our hateful America sent them there.

Update: Buzzfeed is compiling a list of the victims of the shooting, including messages from family and friends as well as photos. Let us remember them during this time and strike from memory the man who did this. Let us remember the victims, not the shooter.

You’re Breaking My Immersion! Or, How To Inadvertently Enable Ableism

March 4, 2016 by Shoshana, posted in Body Positivity, Game Design, LARP Discussion and Theory, Speaking Out

SupernaturalLARPdisability — Image from: Supernatural, Season 8 Episode 11, “LARP and the Real Girl”

In just a few days, I’ll be shipping over to Europe to get on a boat and join the hundreds of other LARPers heading to this year’s Nordic LARP conference, Solmukohta. This is my fourth year in attendance, completing my first progression of attending the conferences in all four Nordic LARP countries – Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. It’s been my pleasure to get a chance to meet LARPers from all over and spend time learning about LARP practices not only from around the United States, but from across the world.

As I’m preparing for the conference, and a couple of talks I’ll be giving there, I ran across an article on LARPING.org that gave me pause. I’m preparing a talk on exclusionary practices in LARP, and this article highlighted one of my pet peeves when discussing LARP accessibility. I’m a big proponent of games being as accessible to people of all kinds, and finding design choices that can enable a game to be more open to everyone. Challenges to accessibility include tackling difficult social issues, economic inequalities and class differences, LARP culture barriers between communities, or even issues of physical accessibility. It’s that last one that I’d like to talk about briefly today.

The article in question that brought this issue up is called LARP Rules! A Mechanics Spotlight, which attempts to deconstruct the mechanization of actions within LARPs and how complex large-scale rules systems can become. The thesis of this article is that there is a tension between the narrative that is being developed in LARPs and the rules sets, since the narratives develop through the diegetic interactions between players while they are immersed in scene. The more complex the rules set, the article suggests, the more difficult it becomes to remain immersed in the narrative and the more disruptive the rules are to play. The article states this idea in what it’s calling the LARP Core Tenants, which looks startlingly like yet another definition of what is a LARP, ala the ad nauseum discussions of ‘what is a game’ that plague game studies conversations the world over.

Meaningful, consequential role-play and immersion is the means and the end. The story is secondary and is the organic, waste byproduct of interactions between players, be it through combat, in game skills, social mechanics, or otherwise. As such, any rules system, being that which defines and dictates actions in a game, should seek to put up as low a barrier as possible to this end, it being understood that a rule designed to represent an action is not the action. This represents a departure from play, and therefore to immersion. This departure is anathema to this end and as such should be as limited in scope as possible.

Aside from the fact that I find the reference to narrative developed by players as a “waste byproduct” a little distasteful, the last part is where I mean to put my focus. Namely, the idea that anything that breaks immersion is “anathema” to play and immersive narrative development between players because, as the quote states, “a rule designed to represent an action is not the action.”

This is further explained later in the article when an example is provided from the NERO rulebook. The article cites a skill called Parry, which is often included in many boffer/live combat rules systems that have skill calls. The text of Parry states that it allows a player to block an oncoming attack by vocalizing the word “Parry” and then goes on to lay out and explain the exact ways in which Parry is used (what kinds of attacks can be blocked by Parry, in what circumstances, etc). In critiquing the skill Parry, the article states that constant vocalization of unneeded skills which can simply be accomplished by physical action breaks immersion further. The article goes on to say:

Parry, on the other hand is one of those effects plaguing LARP rules systems that seek to reproduce an action people are able to safely execute themselves. Remember, the goal here is to impede immersion as little as possible, so in effect, you’re telling someone you dodged an attack that you didn’t actually dodge.

The idea then is that since people can simply dodge an attack with their physical weapon, a skill like Parry is then superfluous. And here is where I disagree, because this is not the first time I have heard this argument against skill calls within live combat/boffer games. The argument goes that if you’re playing a game where immersion is the intent, then using vocalizations to simply say you’re doing something instead of actually doing it breaks the believability of the world. If you’re following this line of logic, as stated above, and “a rule designed to represent an action is not the action” then simply calling out Parry impedes play and should be removed.

Except games with skill calls provide a vital resource to people who do not come out to games prepared to let their entire play experience depend on their actual physical capability. Skill calls allow, through representational game design, for players of different ability levels and physical capabilities to play characters that may be more physically capable then they are in the real world. To put it plainly: skill calls level the playing field and give those who are differently abled the chance to still play the kickass warrior, the powerful paladin, at a comparable capability as a player who comes in more physically able.

This representational aspect of the game, while it does require players to exert their imagination to count a vocalized word the same way they might a whack on the arm, allows the game that includes them to be more accessible to more players. This includes people who might not be as physically fit as the most active, agile, powerful warriors in the game. It compensates for nearly every ability and capability level (barring those who lack the ability or have difficulty speaking). And for those who are disabled, it allows for a game that uses the human body in what is considered its “normal, physically whole state” as the game vector by which you engage with the play space to enter play with simulated tools to put them on the same level as more physically able players.

I find the discussions of how skill can be disruptive a disturbing double standard in the discussion of what is or is not immersion breaking. In a game medium that requires me to look at a person wearing plastic costume elf ears and accept that they are, indeed, elven royalty, or expects me to acknowledge that a human dressed in a nice suit is a vampire prince, others are unwilling to acknowledge that a word spoken is the same as an action taken. Apparently a word is one step too far to stretch the imagination, even if it allows the game to include more people fairly.

Now, the entirety of the article’s discussion about rules being disruptive to narrative play, is not a new one. Game studies thinkers have been publishing articles about this in regards to video games for years (see: Patrick Crogan’s “Blade Runners: Speculation on Narrative and Interactivity”* or Jesper Juul’s “Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives“** for further reading). Yet the conversation takes on an entirely more insidious direction when we discuss that tension in regards to representational actions and skills in LARPs. While a narrative may suffer for the limitations and intrusions of mechanics within a video game, the game itself is presumably still playable and the player still capable of interacting with the play space if they are differently abled (the difficulty of controller use and video game medium usage for the disabled aside, as that is an entirely different topic). Yet in the race to provide more immersive, WYSIWYG narrative experiences for LARPs, it seems the proponents for skill-less systems are willing to sacrifice accessibility on the altar of some purist notion of seamless play rather than consider what representational rules do provide for players.

Full disclosure: I am a disabled LARPer who plays in the game mentioned in the article, Dystopia Rising. And thanks to skill calls within that game, I am capable as a disabled woman (who alternates between having difficulty walking and using a wheelchair) to attend game and still participate in combat situations. I utilize skill calls to augment my physical differences to allow me to be an effective combatant, capable of being a part of the play just like any able-bodied player. It’s for this reason that I speak from a perspective informed by experience, and concern for the future of my favorite game medium.

10644554_10100384372745893_4077298588222454517_o — Can’t run from a bad guy because I’m physically disabled, a skill in Dystopia Rising allow me to call “Escape!” and take steps away from combat unimpeded to simulate what I cannot do. (Photo by Katherine Chartier, Dystopia Rising: New Jersey).

The above article (though in a rather arched and unforgiving tone) offers forth the notion that early LARP design suffered from a complexity born of simulationist roots that should have been outgrown in the race for new and better ways to embrace immersive live play. Yet in the process of advocating for stripped-down systems, this argument and those like it postulate play spaces that restrict interaction rather than make it more available to all, and that are prejudicial to those more physically capable than others. If that is the evolution of LARP, the vaulted future so often lauded, I’m afraid that LARP will not gain more players or become more open to a wider audience (an aim lauded by the article as a much-needed community goal). Instead it will become an even more rarified space, accessible to fewer based on the physical capability of the LARPers medium of play: their human body.

* Crogan, Patrick. “Blade Runners: Speculation on Narrative and Interactivity.” The South Atlantic Quarterly. 101.3 (2002): 639-57.

** Juul, Jesper “Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives.” Game Studies 1.1 (2001).

Fat Shaming Is Indeed ‘A Thing’, Nicole Arbour: A ‘Dear Fat People’ Response

September 12, 2015 by Shoshana, posted in Body Positivity, Criticism, Personal, Speaking Out

2C0C7AE100000578-3225342-image-m-2_1441642006347 — Nicole Arbour in ‘Dear Fat People’

This past week, a video has gone around by YouTuber and comedian Nicole Arbour, whose past hits include such titles as “Dear Instagram Models”, “Why Girls Are Crazy” and “Why You Really Got Divorced.” In this video, entitled “Dear Fat People” the wannabe shock-vlogger decided to go after her new target, which was pretty much anyone who is fat.

I won’t link to the video, or pretty much any of her other videos, because I refuse to assist in her channel getting further hits. However, here’s some of the glorious highlights of that 6-minute hate fest.

‘Fat shaming is not a thing. Fat people made that up,’ she says. ‘That’s the race card with no race. “Yeah, but I couldn’t fit into a store. That’s discrimination”. Uh no. That means you are too fat, and you should stop eating.’

‘If we offend you so much that you lose weight, I’m okay with that,’ she says. ‘You are killing yourself. I’ll sleep at night. Maybe I am jealous that you get to eat whatever you want.’

‘Obesity is a disease?’ she asks. ‘Yeah, so is being a shopaholic – but I don’t get a f***king parking pass. It would make a lot of sense if I did. I am the one with all of the bags.’

‘I am not saying all of this to be an a**hole. I am saying this because your friends should be saying it to you.’

Actually Nicole, you’re just being an asshole.

So let’s start with the facts: fat shaming is a thing. Fat shaming and other forms of body shaming are a way for people to impose society standards and their own upon you and your body. It is a type of discrimination that is rendered against those who are considered overweight, and especially those who are considered obese in our world. It comes in many forms, from advertisements that tell you to lose weight so you’ll be happier (‘just shed those pounds and you’ll be frolicking in this field like me!’) to the poor media representations of obese people, to blatant and outright hatred like that expressed by Arbour above. Fat shaming exists. It also doesn’t work.

This, from Professor Jane Wardle, director of the Cancer Research Health Behavior Center at UCL:

“Our study clearly shows that weight discrimination is part of the obesity problem and not the solution. Weight bias has been documented not only among the general public but also among health professionals; and many obese patients report being treated disrespectfully by doctors because of their weight. Everyone, including doctors, should stop blaming and shaming people for their weight and offer support, and where appropriate, treatment.”

Yup, that’s a scientific study, Nicole. Stick your fingers in your ears all you want, but the science and years of experience from plenty of fat people out there says that fat shaming does not work. Getting on YouTube and supporting fat shaming in defiance of the scientific evidence puts you right up there with anti-vaccers and climate-change deniers, people so intent on supporting their own bogus viewpoint that they won’t pay attention to actual facts. Fat shaming fits every definition of bullying and does not work.

In fact it has the opposite effect. People who experience body shaming are prone to have more problems, like depression and anxiety, eating disorder issues, body dysmorphia, etc. And to me, that’s a no brainer moment. I don’t have to sit here and think hard about the fact that shaming someone doesn’t increase their overall life quality. That’s not a stumper. The part that gets me is how other people don’t see that.

The good part is, plenty of people did in the case of Nicole Arbour. Her video was pulled from YouTube for violating terms of service, for which Arbour screamed censorship. Next, blogs all across the internet responded with articles blasting the hateful video, and YouTubers began tossing out their own response videos decrying the fat shaming Arbour espouses. My favorite video comes from Whitney Thore of My Big Fat Fabulous Life, whose whole video I’m going to link here at the bottom. But Thore tells it like it is about what it’s like to live as a woman being fat after gaining weight from poycystic ovarian, stating, “You can’t see a person’s health by looking at them.”

Tess Holiday, the fabulous plus sized model had a fantastically dismissive response:

And that’s where I stand on Arbour and her kind too. Yes, her kind. Everyone’s met one in their lifetime. The self-righteous, hateful kind who hold to the idea that they have a right to shame another human being for how they look. That they can judge someone for how many pounds they are, or what they look like in clothing. You’d think Arbour would have seen one or two after school specials growing up to know that bullying isn’t okay, but clearly the lesson didn’t take.

Arbour says she’s just telling it like it is, and it’s no secret that shock comedians have been doing this kind of thing for a long time. What Arbour and many others still seem to be missing is that the age of ‘all press is good press’ is coming to (if not already at) an end. It’s no longer a game online of just getting your name known. Now people can just Google your work and see what you’ve said, and make their own judgements. Case in point, what happened to Arbour after she posted up this video.

You see, Arbour was relying on the out of line content of her six minute bit to get her attention. And it did. She was fired from a movie after director Pat Mills saw her ‘Dear Fat People Video’ because – wait for it – the movie was about young dancers discovering body positivity! Way to shoot yourself in the foot there. And it’s the response by director Pat Mills of Don’t Call Irene (which I’m going to be checking out in response to this move) that makes me feel like maybe, finally, folks are getting the point.

Arbour certainly didn’t. She responded by defending her video, saying she wasn’t really shaming people. That it was all an act.

“I don’t shame people. It was an act. It was one bit and I do a new bit every single week. I don’t hate anyone. I don’t shame anyone. I don’t actually believe in bullying at all.”

“The video was about obese people. I was very specific that it’s not the average guy with some cushion for the pushin’. [The message is that] we really care about them and we want them to be healthy because I’m selfish and I want them to be around,” she told BBC. “I don’t think it’s a cheap laugh. Twenty million views isn’t that cheap. I’m an equal-opportunity offender and it all goes back to comedy.”

Oh, so it was just acting. And besides, it was about obese people, not regular people who have some “cushion for the pushin'” (which is just the worst term ever, please stop using it right now, this instant). Fact is, if you don’t think that what you said is shaming, Nicole Arbour, I don’t think the word means you think it means. And just because it’s comedy doesn’t mean that people won’t think you’re awful for what you’ve said. There’s a clap back headed your way from a lot of people, Nicole, and it’s pretty awesome.

There’s no denying that this issue is a personal one for me. As a woman who has been fat all my life, having hit about two hundred pounds at the age of twelve, I have literally spent twenty years of my life dealing with the stigma of being overweight. I’ve had the unfortunately not so unique experience of enduring callous, hateful, disgusting, often terrifying comments thrown my way. I’ve had people tell me I should kill myself for being fat. I’ve had kids chase me in the subway, snorting at me and screaming ‘fatty!’ while others looked on.

I’ve had people I respect, trust, and love tell me such heartbreaking things that, I’m sure, they thought were just helping. Things like:

“When I look at you, I see the beautiful person trapped inside all that fat, waiting to get out.”
“If you don’t lose weight, no man will ever want to marry you. Then you’ll never have children, and die alone.”
“There’s nothing beautiful about being fat, it’s all just a mess that makes me sad to look at.”
“You don’t need to wear a nice dress, nobody’s looking.”
“God, I look so bad today. But at least I’m not fat. If I was fat, I’d just kill myself.”
And this, when I asked a guy out and he turned me down: “You know how some people don’t like some kinds of porn? I don’t like fat people porn.”

These are all quotes said to me, each by people I know: family members, friends, co-workers. The last was a guy I knew in college that I wanted to date. And you can bet that I remember his name, all right. I remember he was a funny, skinny nerd guy who wrote video game music and lamented about the way he was bullied for being a nerd in high school. I remember him as the guy I never spoke to again, whose name is now synonymous with hypocrisy.

So when I say I’ve heard this all my life, that I didn’t need the science to explain to me that fat shaming doesn’t work, you can trust in my experience. And that this article comes with no small amount of happiness to see the responses

Fat bodies in our society are reviled, belittled, hated, and fetishized. Those who are overweight are ignored, demeaned and shunned. We are expected to accept vile bullying because society still accepts that fat is one of the worst things a person can be. Fat shaming is expressed in every part of our culture, in every place people build communities, even those that are meant to be accepting, inclusive, and safe. And it’s because people still perpetuate the notion that fat is the worst thing that you can be.

But there’s a silver lining in this story. If you google Nicole Arbour now, all the articles that come up as the top searches aren’t about her, exactly. It’s about how she was fired from a movie because of her hate-filled little video. And if you look at nearly all the comments responding to this nonsense, you see people calling out her video for what it is: jealous, narcissistic hatred. Hatred from a woman so trapped within the rat race of societally acceptable beauty that she would turn against other human beings and mock what they look like for the sake of five minutes of fame.

Well, she’s famous now, all right. Only the tide has started to turn, maybe, just a little. And the same #bodypositivity folks Arbour was so prepared to mock might just have a louder voice than she does. Because love of yourself and others does have a louder voice than hate. Afor once, maybe we’re seeing an example of it.

Announcing ‘Not Ready To Make Nice’

May 14, 2015 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Not Ready To Make Nice, Speaking Out, Writing Update

I recently ran into a situation where a friend on Facebook approached me and asked when I was going to “calm down.” She said that I must get tired being “up in arms” about issues all the time, and that I can’t possibly care about so many issues at once. The fact is, as I’m quite capable of balancing many ideas inside my head at once, I do care about many important issues. And along with being a writer and a game designer, I believe being a person who is literate about and critical of the world around me makes me a contributor to my community at large.

To that end, I’m creating here an ongoing set of articles I’m calling Not Ready To Make Nice. It’s named after the Dixie Chicks song of the same name, which was written after the Dixie Chicks received death threats for speaking out against President George W. Bush. For those who want to just hear me talk about games, or comics, or LARP, I’ll still be posting about that. But I’ll be marking some articles under the NRTMN heading. And I’ll be letting fly with what I feel. In my eyes, the fictional work I do and the game design I do is just a piece of the ways I converse with the world at large.

I believe that the hallmark of a generation is marked by the ability and the willingness for people to be aware of the issues around them and to talk about them in the open. There are places in the world and time periods in the world where the mere discussion of dissent would send people to prison or to their deaths, and yet having opinions and writing about them, speaking out about them, even in the most casual sense has become taboo again in many ways. People don’t want to be bothered. People don’t want to deal with “the drama.” And those who do speak up often have to deal with unspeakable repercussions like threats, harassment, and stalking. People get fatigued, burn out, go quiet.

I was raised with the idea that a person should always learn, study, and become more aware of the world around them to have an opinion. That if you can, ask questions and have conversations to learn more and come to new understandings. And in that way, I am passionate about speaking about important issues that I feel strongly about.

I am passionate about ideas. Not upset. Not furious. I don’t need to calm down. Because passion, unlike is often the case with rage, drives from a place of earnest communication and interest in exploring ideas.

That’s what these articles will be about. I can’t promise they’ll always be nice. I will avoid personal attacks where I can and judgement when possible. I’ll even post trigger warnings and research material where I can about the issue. But I will be pointing a finger at things I find curious or interesting, from politics to media to social issues. It’s whatever strikes me because, hey, this is my blog. And in doing that, I am calm, but certainly not ready to stop writing.

The Black Widow Controversy, Criticism, And How We Are Failing Our Creators

May 6, 2015 by Shoshana, posted in Comics, Film, Geek Culture, Speaking Out

It’s getting harder every day to be a creator in the age of the internet.

It’s never been an easy thing to put your work out in public, at least not for most people I know. Sure, maybe there’s some folks out there, funny humans with indomitable wills and stomachs of iron, who aren’t petrified by the notion of getting their work in front of an audience. Maybe there are some folks who don’t publish a piece of work, or a blog post, and get that tightness in their tummies, that shortness of breath, that little flop sweat that says, “Please, this is my work, don’t judge it too harshly.” Most people I’ve ever spoken to have some degree of anxiety sharing what they’ve created though, and never has it been harder than in the age of the internet.

Over the last few years, however, it seems like more than ever sharing your work with the world has become a minefield. Put something out for public consumption and be prepared for a tidal wave of backlash, ranging from cutting comments and blog posts to threats of violence and rape. Take a moment to process that. A person creating something today needs to be worried about threats of violence ranging from beatings to home invasion, rape to swatting. They can be doxxed and have bomb threats sent against them. We’re a hell of a distance away from someone throwing a rotten tomato.

Take this week’s latest controversy. Avengers: Age of Ultron debuted this past weekend to stellar numbers in the box office. The movie was a huge success financially, but received some critical responses regarding its pacing and the coherence of some parts of the plot. Overwhelmingly, however, the biggest noise about the film has been regarding the treatment of its heroine, Black Widow.

Critics and fans of the film were vocal about the way the MCU’s biggest heroine at the moment was relegated to the role of love interest opposite Bruce Banner in the film as part of her personal subplot. While other members of the Avengers explored complex issues of guilt and past mistakes through flashbacks and interactions with one another, Natasha was given the love plot as her major character development throughout the film and issues with mommyhood instead. When she was also kidnapped by the villain halfway through the film and turned into a damsel in distress (albeit briefly), this raised the eyebrow of some fans. Those criticisms, along with Marvel’s unwillingness to support the women of Marvel with any action figures or merchandise of the women characters in the film, build a solid backbone for a conversation about Marvel’s difficulty understanding or serving its women characters and therefore their fans.

evansrenner — Correct face, Chris Evans. Not funny.

All of these, in my opinion, are valid criticisms. A discussion in my eyes ought to be had about the necessity of these plot points included in the film, and the inherent issue that comes from every film pigeon-holing their main woman character as a love interest or sex object. I think there’s validity to fans getting angry over casual comments by actor Jeremy Renner and Chris Evans when, during an interview about the film, they called Black Widow a “slut” and a “whore.” (Renner later doubled down on the mess after Evans apologized, which was even worse). I think its all indicative of a way that women characters are seen in Hollywood and within comic book films, and that there is a real discussion to be had about how to tackle diversification of roles for women in the action film genre. All of these are thoughts I’ve had, that I support, and I’d love to explore further.

What I do not support is threats. Which is not something I should have to say, it’s kind of obvious.

Joss Whedon, director of Age of Ultron, faced a firestorm on Twitter that included threats of beatings and murder for the way he portrayed Black Widow in the film. Though the fact is the film went through revisions based on input from Hollywood execs and worked around Black Widow’s pregnancy, despite the fact that Whedon doesn’t control all the aspects of the film, Whedon became the face of the anger many fans felt over Black Widow’s portrayal, and they got aggressive. Articles published streams of Tweets (many since deleted) aimed at Whedon threatening to “beat his ass” for the direction of the film.

It’s not like this is anything new. We live in a world today when creators can be the targets of the worst kind of hate when consumers disagree with their work. This has become especially true when issues of social justice are involved, or when those creators or speakers are people from marginalized backgrounds. Anita Sarkeesian has received years now of the worst kind of hatred because of her work on Feminist Frequency and her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games web series. Women game developers like Brianna Wu have been targeted by this kind of harassment for the inclusion of more diverse content in their material at the hands of the Gamergate movement. This hate movement has spread to other parts of the geek media world where fiction authors, comic creators, and television creators have received harassment for their work as well.

The list of those affected include those on both sides of issues, from progressives to conservatives. The stances may be different but the tactics are the same. And while I do not believe in the equivalency of ideas (meaning, I do believe that in some arguments one side is more right than the other), I believe that the kind of harassment and bullying creators now face online has got to stop.

Why should it stop? We can start from the top by saying because it’s just wrong!

There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. Harassment of another person, on the internet or otherwise, is just wrong. You can have differences of opinions all you like, but the moment you threaten another person with violence, the moment that you step over the line into belligerent bullying behavior, you are now at best a vulgar nuisance and at worst a criminal. You become part of the screaming mass of people on the internet who believe that anonymity behind a keyboard makes them powerful and drives them to say anything they wish, believing there are no repercussions. Let me say it one more time: Harassment on the internet for any reason is wrong. End of line, no further discussion needed, period.

But okay, maybe there’s one more reason why this needs to stop. And that’s because of the state of criticism itself in the world.

The arts and criticism have always had a tense, contentious relationship to begin with. Artists would live in mortal fear of waking up to read bad reviews of their plays or art shows or books. People would sniff and make snide comments about how “those who can’t create become critics.” As someone who is both an artist and a critic, I’ll tell you that’s bullshit. Sure, anyone can sit down behind a computer screen and type out a screed about how they hated a piece of television. But there are people who actively study media, the history and execution and presentation and social context, and who are capable of presenting valid media criticism from a place of education and experience.

I went to school and got my degree in film studies so that I could produce not only better works of art in the future based on knowledge I gleaned from studying film as a medium, but also so I would have context for criticism I provided. True criticism isn’t about simply emotional response but contextual understanding of an art form, of the society in which it is created and the manner by which it is executed. It takes understanding and in depth consideration. It does not, however, require high-brow consumption and snooty reviews. And it certainly doesn’t require threats.

The era of mass threats to creators, however, has begun to drown out real criticism in the field. Creators can’t hear legitimate conversation when inundated with a barrage of hate-filled noise, and that kind of ratio of good critical content to nightmarish abuse can make a person shut down to any input. Criticism serves a purpose, folks: to respond to media, discuss ideas put forward, and help creators learn from their work and perhaps improve or choose differently in the future. It is not meant as an opportunity to abuse those who have put their hearts into their work, no matter how much you dislike or disagree with them. Hate filled terrorizing of creators is counterproductive and shows no respect for them as a producer of content or as human beings. It also defeats the purpose of trying to get yourself heard, because you won’t be. And neither will anyone else.

What suffers alongside our creators at the hands of these hate mobs is our ability to have discourse about anything relevant. Issues of representation, content, or execution are pushed to the wayside, drowned out by the threats of beatings, the instances of doxxings and swattings, and the bomb and death threats. You have creators afraid to put their work forward, for fear of what might happen to them or their loved ones. Their creative cycles are eaten up by the stress of dealing with such hate-filled sound, and their inability to engage with their fans is damaged. And our world becomes just a little less capable of learning from one another in an age when we are so much more capable of reaching one another then ever before.

We are not bystanders in this issue. Everyone who is a fan, who reads or posts commentary online, who engages in social media, is complicit in this ecology of hatefulness, if not as contributors then as witnesses. We say “don’t feed the trolls” or “don’t read the comments,” telling us to keep our heads down, don’t encourage them, and maybe they’ll go away. But the fact is, they don’t, and the silence only encourages a lack of repercussions and an allowance for bad behavior to continue. By staying silent when we see such behavior, we are allowing ourselves to stay safe while our creators twist in the wind and endure these hate-filled tidal waves alone. We don’t want to attract the attention of the mob, so we hope if we ignore it, it’ll go away. It won’t. They won’t.

You may not have the bandwidth in your life to always engage. I’m not saying you should all the time. That’s how burnout occurs, how you get consumed by the hatefulness and negativity that surges around the internet these days. What I’m suggesting is that we must all take little steps, as we see fit, to combat this environment of hatred. We may not agree with the ideas or creations we fight over, but we can at least agree that threats of violence and hate-mobs against someone are wrong. Right folks? Right? I sincerely hope so.

“But Censorship!” Screams Echo Over Redacted Batgirl Cover

March 17, 2015 by Shoshana, posted in Comics, Speaking Out

(Warning: discussion of fictional sexual violence ahead.)

It’s that time again. The time when the internet rings with screams of people crying ‘censorship’ over a pulled comic book cover that showcased the victimization of a beloved super-heroine for literally no good reason.

This week saw another comic book cover controversy spin up over a variant cover designed for DC Comics’ Batgirl #41. The cover by renowned comic artist Rafael Abuquerque (of Mondo Urbano and American Vampire fame) depicts the Joker and Batgirl in a creeper-victim pose reminiscent of the 1988 one-shot Batman story called The Killing Joke by Alan Moore. The comic is part of a promotional event going on during the month of June, where variant covers depicting the Joker would appear across DC comic lines. The event is similar to their ‘classic movie poster’ event that went on recently… except this event showcased a comic moment that still haunts Batgirl’s history to this day.

Hailed as one of the definitive Batman and Joker stories ever written, the comic became a pivotal moment for Barbara Gordon aka Batgirl when the Joker shoots her in an attempt to drive her father Commissioner Gordon insane. Barbara Gordon suffers spinal damage and ends up in a wheelchair, but perseveres and continues her crime-fighting career as Oracle, and later upon recovery of the use of her legs as Batgirl once again. Yet a more disturbing element always haunted the Killing Joke, and that’s the implied sexual violence that Barbara Gordon received at the hands of the Joker. Commissioner Gordon is stripped and tied to a chair and forced to look at photos of his daughter, naked, screaming in pain, photos that imply sexual violence. While many have said it’s unclear if rape was involved, later released edited pages by artist Brian Bolland show an even further sexualized Barbara, taking away much of the ‘implied’ nature of the violence she sustained. (Images of that redacted art under this link – warning: NSFW and TRIGGERING for sexual violence).

Many criticized the events of the Killing Joke and the violence done to Barbara Gordon as one step too far. Even Alan Moore was later interviewed and said he regretted going that far with the storyline. This is quoted directly from the wikipedia entry about the comic:

While the quote is disturbing, it is sadly unsurprising. Though comic book fans have called out victimization of women characters for years, it’s only in recent days when those call-outs seem to be making much traction. DC Comics is, in fact, the origin of the term ‘women in refrigerators’, so named for the time in Green Lantern comics that Kyle Raynor’s girlfriend was murdered, chopped up, and stuffed in his fridge all for an emotional plot-point for Kyle. So when a comic cover like this hit the internet, it received a lot of friction very fast.

The issue 41 cover is no question a throw-back cover to the Killing Joke days. The Joker is dressed much as he was in that comic, with his hands all over Batgirl as she stares at the reader with tears in her eyes. In an homage to the ‘why so serious?’ of the Batman movie series, the Joker paints a ragged smile across Barbara’s terrified face, a gun hanging loosely in his hand as he drapes his arms over her. The cover is uncomfortable, victimizing and vulnerable, and nowhere near the kick-ass, positive Batgirl we’d come to see in the previously established run of Batgirl. In fact, Cameron Stewart and the recent Batgirl team have received positive press for their reimagination of Batgirl’s costume and her new story lines. Their helming of Batgirl has brought in more readers, including and especially a younger demographic of girls that seem to enjoy Batgirl’s new style. The art in the book has reflected that shift, including and especially in their covers. Here are some examples, including one by Rafael Abuquerque (who made the above Killing Joke variant) for the upcoming Batgirl: Endgame #1:

These covers showcase Batgirl as an ass-kicking fun super heroine, fully in charge of her own story and her choices. When shown in contrast with this:

…it’s no surprise that fans went bananas.

So it’s to the credit of the Batgirl creative team that the decision was made so quickly to pull the variant cover. Writer and artist Cameron Stewart responded on Twitter, saying:

https://twitter.com/cameronMstewart/status/577639370502574081

https://twitter.com/cameronMstewart/status/577639515227078657

https://twitter.com/cameronMstewart/status/577639735788711936

https://twitter.com/cameronMstewart/status/577640016245075968

https://twitter.com/cameronMstewart/status/577640395980607488

For this sensitivity from both Abuquerque and Stewart, Stewart was besieged on Twitter by people berating him for ‘caving into censorship’ even after Stewart pointed out that Abuquerque pulled the piece himself of his own free will. The situation further escalated when DC Comics made a statement saying that those who spoke out about the comic cover were harassed. Stewart added:

https://twitter.com/cameronMstewart/status/577656291839119362

So to be clear: the people who stood up and said that the cover should be pulled, not the artist, were the ones threatened. Because that’s the world we live in now: where when people bring up objections to the further exploitation of the image of victimized women, THEY get harassed and told they’re supporting the bad kind of censorship. Even after the artist pulls down the piece of his own accord, and the creative team on the book calls for it to be pulled down themselves.

And that’s where I began to feel something like this:

I got into several discussions about the cover and the decision for its removal, and received mostly positive responses. Yet a theme sliding around on Twitter and Facebook that disturbed me was the always-present comments of: I hate political correctness! It’s censoring art! A favorite of mine (name not shared for obvious reasons) was, “We give too much power to people like this [ie: those that complain] when we give in to their complaints. Everything is a potential trigger.”

And sadly, all I hear is “I don’t see why you’re so upset, I want what I want, blah blah censorship.”

First: WE didn’t give anything. The creative team behind the comic made a creative decision that they stand behind of their own free will. They had the same sense that plenty of other people had and said no to a poor artistic choice. The artist himself made that choice. You, the armchair quarterback of comic book art, had nothing to do with it.

Second: People like this is such an infuriating term. Do you mean people who spoke up about yet another example of a popular woman character being depicted in a victimized way on the cover of her own book? Of the returned reference to her sexualization and victimization in an old comic that the writer of said comic even openly admits regretting? If by ‘people like this’ you mean folks who are tired of seeing constant depictions of women characters as disempowered victims in comics for the sake of selling books, for the sake of getting attention, then yes. There are people like this out there. They’re called fans, tired of seeing their favorite women super heroes treated like damsels in distress.

I posit a test that is upsetting to me to even posit. Consider a variant comic book cover. Superman is behind held by Lex Luthor. He stares pleadingly at the reader from the pages of the cover, tears streaming down his cheeks. Luthor stares out, a creepy, proprietary smile on his lips as he puts one arm over Superman’s shoulder and dangles a hand right over Superman’s chest with a Kryptonite ring on. With the other hand, he strokes his finger over Superman’s cheeks. Creeped out yet? Kind of uncomfortable? Yeah, that’s kind of the point. Maybe now you’re getting it. And even that example isn’t a good analogy because most readers will probably fall back on a hetero-normative view of those characters, in which Superman wouldn’t be in danger of sexual violence from Luthor. But in this cover, the history of the Killing Joke that is being called up by the costume and the set-up of the piece of art clearly points directly to the previous history of sexual violence and the sexualized danger to Batgirl. The piece of art posed Batgirl with her attacker.

Do you get it yet? Do you see why this is a problem?

If not, I don’t know quite what to say to you. How to convince you that harkening back to a history of sexual violence on the cover of a comic whose audience includes kids is uncomfortable and unnecessary. How there are a million other ways to depict characters like the Joker and Batgirl that are not victimizing to the main character of her own book. How the cover is only a variant and therefore not really there to impact the story or the book run, but only to appeal to collectors as part of a marketing stunt, and how that fact makes the problem even worse. But more than that, I cannot figure out how to say to people who don’t see the problems here: just because you can do something for art doesn’t mean that it’s a good decision, in good taste, or that you should in the first place. Yes, art is free, but art without common sense and decency and thought about your audience is just a whole lot of mess. And maybe the place for a piece of art depicting a terrorized sexual violence victim is not on the place of a widely read comic book for kids and adults.

I fully support this cover being pulled, and give a well done to Rafael Abuquerque for seeing the problem and responding so graciously. I give a hearty thank you to Cameron Stewart for having the vision to call for the removal of the cover, and for his understanding as to why it was a problem.

Under Our Noses: The Rising Anti-Semitism In Our World

January 17, 2015 by Shoshana, posted in Speaking Out

A man went to the store the other day to pick up challah for the Sabbath. Challah is the traditional bread Jews eat for the Sabbath, and pretty much any other time you can get away with it because the stuff is delicious. Families cut up the braided bread and share it together as part of the end of the week Sabbath and holidays. Mothers make it with their children, a tradition passed down for generations. Or else if you don’t make it in your kitchen, which is (as my mother would say in Yiddish) a lot of potchka (annoying planning and trouble), you go and buy it from a store.

So a guy was running to a store to get his Friday groceries. He got everything he needed and rushed out of the store, and got to his car before he realized he forgot his challah. He ran back to the store only to find a woman shuttering up the windows and locking the door. He begged her to let him back in to get his challah, but she warned him away. Then from inside, a voice ordered the man into the store. That’s where the man was confronted by a hostage taker, who took him into the store and shot him dead on the spot. Because he was looking to pick up his challah for the Sabbath.

This is a story I read online after the tragic events that took place at the Hyper Casher kosher supermarket two weeks ago. The article did not attribute which of the hostage taker’s four victims was the origin of this story. Was it 22-year-old Yohan Cohen? No, he was reported to have tried to stop the hostage taker by trying to get the man’s gun away from him and was shot in the process. So, it couldn’t have been him. Maybe it was Yoav Hattab, 21, the son of the chief rabbi of Tunnis. Or perhaps it was Philippe Braham, 40, or Françoise-Michel Saada, a man in his 60’s. Whichever of the four men were killed for leaving behind their challah, they were all killed for another reason they had in common.

They could all say #JeSuisJuif – “I am a Jew.”

Except saying that, identifying as a Jew in Europe, has never been more dangerous. The attack on the kosher supermarket is being reported as just as deadly as the 2012 Otzar HaTorah school in Toulouse, which killed 4. Amazing how it is that we have statistics now of which attacks are more deadly, they happen so often. We have one horror to compare another horror to, as if this was some kind of competition. It’s no wonder that out of the 600,000 French Jews, 7,000 left France to live in Israel with another 50,000 having made inquiries as to how to make aliya (immigrating to Israel). That number is staggering when you think about it. 50,000 people are willing to uproot their lives in France to get out and head for Israel, a place they see as safer for Jews. And they’re not alone.

The Anti Defamation League claims that of those surveyed in 100 countries between July 2013 and February 2014, 26% indicated anti-semitic leanings. (Their findings can be found at ADL Global 100). And while they are the leading research group on Anti-Semitism, their conflation of numbers (listing more than 1 Billion people being extrapolated as Anti-Semetic based on their small sample survey? Er, not sure I’m behind THAT) makes me suspect to take their word for it. So how about this FBI chart that tracked anti-Semitic attacks from 2002-2012 (source: BBC). They indicate that in certain places, attacks are in the thousands while elsewhere (Sweden) we’re talking lower numbers every year.

Still, thousands of attacks? Can’t really wrap your head around it? Neither could I. I grew up and live in New York, where being Jewish is sort of a badge of pride. Everyone knows New York is the largest enclave of Jews living anywhere outside of Israel. And even in New York I’ve run across people who were anti-Semitic. You run into preachers on the subway, jerks on the street, and even folks at your college who want to tell you to convert, who want to tell you that you need saving, that you have no soul, that they’d beat you to death if they could. I’ve run afoul of each one of those anti-Semitic asshole examples myself. But I’ve never been on the receiving end of a beating, a stabbing, a bullet. I’m lucky. Other people, elsewhere in the world, are not. Now thousands of Jews are considering fleeing their home country to go to Israel, a place rife with political strife, because in the end it’s better there where Jews are accepted than in a place where you wonder if you’re going to get knifed-

Oh wait. People get knifed in Israel for being Jews all the time. Or blown up. Or shot.

Hang on, and that happens in the US too.

Attacks in the past year have been reported in Belgium, Russia, Canada, the United States, England, and Germany to name just a few. In other countries, community centers and synagogues have been attacked or shot at, and individuals have been harassed with nazi graffiti and slurs. It seems it’s not a great time to be Jewish anywhere. But then honestly, when has that NOT been the case.

I grew up an Orthodox Jewish girl and then woman in a religious household. My family was rife on my mother’s side with people who fled the Holocaust, and the ghosts of those who did not escape the genocide of Europe followed them to Brooklyn. There wasn’t a time when I wasn’t aware that my grandmother’s family had lost so many, that she herself escaped Auschwitz to marry my grandfather, who had lost two children and a wife to the gas chambers. My grandmother would not speak of the Holocaust to me much until the end of her life, even though she practically raised me after school while my parents both worked. I grew up in her house not knowing why she’d hide money away everywhere, or why she convinced me that it was important that I stay in good health. I one day plucked up all my courage to ask. She looked at me with this haunted, serious face and said, “Because you never know when you’re going to have to run.” When she passed away, there were hundreds of dollars in rolled up bills found all over the house. She was ready, in case someone came for her again.

Sounds paranoid, right? But does it sound any more paranoid then thinking you’ll go shopping in your neighborhood grocery store and have a man bust in with a gun to shoot you dead for being a Jew? It’s scary to think what the mindset of Jews must be like living under that kind of threat. In New York, you might get spat at every once in a while, called a kike, or a dirty Jew, but at least you’re usually safe. Right?

Y’know, until someone busts into your synagogue where you’re minding your own business and stabs you while you’re just trying to study Torah. That happened in Brooklyn, at 770 Eastern Parkway, the seat of Chabad-Lubavitch Judiasm around the world. If you’re not familiar with the Chabad organization or the Lubavitch sect, I’ll just say that they’re all about helping people out and celebrating God in joy and happiness. No joke. They’re a religious sect who are all about helping Jews by opening up kosher kitchens and accommodations around the world so that Jews can have food and housing along their travels. They’re fucking harmless.

Dude walked in and tried to stab ’em to death, tossing around anti-Semitic slurs. Cops shot that guy dead.

But hey, synagogues are going to attract the worst attacks. How about this one, at Temple University? Where there have been reports of anti-semitic issues for ages, and a kid was attacked. I got a few more but I think you’re getting my point.

Can I ask a simple question?

What the HELL is going on here?

The world has been rough on everyone for the last few years. We look around and for every victory, there seems to be another hardship, another war, another economic depression, no jobs, no upturn, and less hope than there ever was. And yet so many spend their time fighting for safer spaces, safer words, more equality, better times ahead. So I wonder now: when do our better times begin? When can Jews stop being afraid? Will we only be safe when we’ve hidden away our Judaism, made ourselves the same as everyone else, homogenized into popular culture so as to be inoffensive, indistinguishable? Will Jews then be safe from hatred lurking out there?

Hate to tell you. It ain’t lurking. It’s out there for all the world to see.

It sounds paranoid. People say “anti-Semitism isn’t still a problem, you’re making a big deal out of nothing.” But only one look at the statistics, at the events going on around the world, and you can tell that it is ignorance to minimize the affect anti-semitism has had on Jews the world over. And just because it’s not comfortable to talk about hatred against Jews doesn’t mean that it’s going away. Just the opposite in fact. Just because it’s not politic to talk about anti-Semitism at cocktail parties doesn’t mean it’s going to go away by itself.

My grandmother used to tell me that nothing would change in this world for Jews. That Israel was the only place where Jews would be able to live in safety. Of course we know that the situation there is complex, that safety there is not assured for Jews at all and never has been. But I used to tell my grandmother that I didn’t believe that the world was such a dangerous place for Jews. I believed that as we got older, we would strive as a world to combat the bigotries and hatreds we had to build a future where we could all be safe. And she’d look at me with that same haunted, dark look that said she knew better. I never wanted to believe her. I still don’t entirely believe her. And yet. And yet. Let’s look at the last few years and say, ‘and yet.’

The politics of Israel have been sited as a reason for the rise in anti-Semitism around the world. Driven by the rage at what has happened to the people of Gaza and the West Bank, rallies around the world have spoken up for the Palestinian cause and in solidarity for the civilians whose lives have been so horribly harmed by the violence in Israel. Yet often those very discussions are couched in language that holds anti-Semitism side by side with Palestinian freedom, that blames Jews overall for what has happened and not a political regime in Israel in an unbelievably complex situation. It’s unfathomable to me how people could blame all Jews the world over for the actions of a political party in command of a country where most of us do not live, whether we support Israel or no. It boggles me how we can all be tossed in the same pot, ready to be boiled alive by the hate flowing around in the name of people who have been maimed and hurt and disenfranchised. People marry the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the identity of Jews everywhere and, in doing so, erase all nuance to the conversation and link anti-Semitic hatred to the battle for national identity for two warring groups.

Jews are not combatants. We are people living our lives the world over, with as much right as anyone to our freedoms. We are not ‘Christ killers’ or people whose souls need to be saved. We are not second class or less than. We are not part of some ridiculous secret plan to control the dollar, or Hollywood, or the world economy. We are not the heart of your conspiracy theories or your political gripes. We’re people going to work, trying to create lives for ourselves.

We’re a guy going to the store on a Friday to get challah for the Sabbath. We are people who want to be able to say #JeSuisJuif and not be afraid for our lives, like our ancestors had to be in countless countries and countless eras.

I am a Jew. I say that proudly. And I watched my grandmother be afraid all her life that someone was going to come and kill her family. And suddenly, today, I don’t think it’s that paranoid after all. And how fucking sad is that?

UPDATE: The article was adjusted after more research into the ADL Global website survey indicated that the more than 1 Billion people number indicated on their page is an extrapolation based on their actual survey data. In other words, it’s not actual hard data and very misleading. The problem is bad enough, we don’t need to make it seem THAT much worse.

A Freedom Worth Fighting For

January 8, 2015 by Shoshana, posted in Speaking Out

Back in 2011, the offices of a French satirical magazine called Charlie Hebdo was firebombed. The picture above is of the magazine’s editor, Stéphane Charbonnier aka Charb, holding the reason for the attack: a cartoon they decided to print that depicted the Prophet Muhammad. By the laws of Islam, it is religiously prohibited to create a likeness of the Prophet in any way, and so the cartoon was considered sacrilege. The cartoonist, as well as any associated with the project, received death threats. The offices were fire bombed. And yet the cartoon was published anyway. It was joined in subsequent years by numerous other cartoons of Muhammad, each compiling the rage aimed at the Paris-based magazine.

After publishing the comic, Charb was quoted in 2012 as saying, “I would rather die standing than live on my knees.”

Well, Charb is dead now. He was shot dead in the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris on January 7th. He was murdered alongside eleven others, including three of the other cartoonists who helped found Charlie Hebdo – Cabu, Tignous, and Wolinski. Eleven others were injured in the attack, four critically. Of the twelve killed, eight were journalists and two were police officers.

The alleged murderers were caught on camera walking into the building all in black. They executed a police officer first, then went up to the office and started shooting. Reports state that they called out the names of those they were going to kill, then executed them. This came from the mouth of one of the suspects, who just before the beginning of my writing this surrendered himself to police. Eighteen-year-old Hamyd Mourad is in custody while the other killers, Said and Cherif Koachi, are both at large. At the time of this writing, so much is still unknown about what happened, about the whereabouts of the two other suspects. But one thing is clear to anyone who is paying attention:

Twelve people lost their lives in Paris on January 7th over the art they created.

From the moment this horrible event happened, people have been jumping to politicize the tragedy. Newspapers across the world trotted out the “Behold, the true and horrible face of Islam!” garbage. (And it is garbage, please, because radicals are radicals and not representative of a whole religion, so let’s not dance that dance, okay?) Donald Trump climbed out of the woodwork to post on Twitter that the victims of this tragedy would have been better off if they’d had guns to protect themselves (yeah, Captain Hairpiece, like the cops didn’t have those – oh why do I bother). Still others wanted to use this to talk about immigration into European countries. Agendas by the armload. Agendas from the rooftops, across blogs and social media and pundit pieces galore. But if you stop listening to the politics for two seconds- close your ears to it and shut your eyes- you’ll hear another rumbling going on across the internet from creators of art everywhere. They’re all asking:

Is this the new standard? When did creating art become so dangerous?

charb — Stéphane Charbonnier aka Charb, 2012.

The truth is, it always was. Painters, writers, musicians, poets, illustrators, comic book makers, dancers – all have expressed their ideas in countries across the world and been subject to censure. Some has been subtle, and some has been overt, and a lot of times it’s come down to violence. Because in plenty of places, the freedom of expression, the freedom to create, has not and does not come free.

But today, in 2014, we take for granted that we have the freedom in the western world to create in safety. Our right to freedom of expression is unassailable, inalienable.

Until someone walks into a magazine headquarters and murders people for making cartoons.

It would almost sound absurd if it wasn’t so horrifying. Cartoons of a religious figure made some people angry enough that they picked up guns, walked into a Paris building, and executed other human beings.

Do you shudder at that? I do. It shakes me down to the core.

I’ve written in my time about being considerate with the content of your creative work, about being sure that when you produce art that you are trying to do right by your readership in terms of representation, inclusivity, and sensitivity. And there are battles in our media constantly about content, things that make people angry, things that are meant to shock and are sensational and that trigger and that offend. But at the core of these arguments is always the same (sometimes uncomfortable) ending to the conversation: people should have the right to create what they wish. And when we shrug our shoulders and shake our heads at that, we are glossing over the importance of that saying.

We live in a world where people should have the right to create what they wish.

People lived, fought, worked, and even died to make the freedom to create a right. In some parts of the world, parts far away from the safety of our western lives, they are fighting for that right today in real and bloody ways against open threats we can’t imagine. That right says that for the world to grow and expand and evolve, we as human beings have the right to express ourselves through our speech, our artwork, our writing, all of it. And while we might disagree with someone else’s creations, we are all part of the glorious tapestry of things that are made and things that are expressed. In other words: you might not like it, but you’re not the arbiter of what gets to be created. You are not the arbiter of freedom.

Until someone decides they are. And they pull out some guns. And they go to an office one day in January.

B6wZOY8CMAA_b6v.jpg-large — By: David Pope

To say that the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo is an attack on freedom of expression is not an attempt to politicize a tragedy, but a solid conclusion. It was the choice of three men to take their grievance over their own religious outrage and turn it into violence. They didn’t choose to make a piece of art slamming Charlie Hebdo. They didn’t make a speech or write a column or make a documentary or any number of proactive ways to express their opinions. They instead decided that they were the arbiters of freedom of expression. Their beliefs trumped another’s right to make things, to express, and ultimately to live.

Does that sound dramatic? Sure. Does that make you nervous? I hope it does. It should.

The right to create is not unassailable. It can be assailed. And when it is assailed, we all feel that shudder as everyone looks around and wonders: should I speak my mind? Should I open my mouth? Make that art? Write that piece? Because in the end, could I be next?

Fear lives in those moments, when you duck your head and wonder if the angry face across from you when you speak your mind will punch you in the face. When those angry comments on the internet will lead to a credible threat on your person. When the credible threat might turn into that one in a thousand, one in a million, that might send you to the hospital, or worse.

That’s fear, right there. That’s what it tastes like. Makes you nervous? Yeah, me too.

And I say to that fear: Fuck. You.

I can’t believe I’m going to quote a Broadway musical, but in Rent one of the lyrics goes: “The opposite of war isn’t peace – its creation.” Sounds easy to say, right? But when there are legitimately people being shot for their creations, its not hard to see the correlation. Peace sounds nice, very solemn and simple and a space made of rest after a conflict, settled and silent and still.

I’m not interested in just being peaceful. I’m interested in creating, so better days can lie ahead besides ones ruled with gun and bomb and threat and repression. I’m interested in sharing ideas, in shaking things up, in making jokes and games and stories and songs. In hearing and seeing and experiencing that which makes the world a brighter, louder, more vibrant place. And with harm to none, I say this: we have to keep creating, no matter the fear. Because we don’t choose guns to share our ideas but words and pictures and music that proves stronger than any bullet at making a point. And in those creations, we celebrate that right and we fight to make sure it doesn’t die out. We create so we can stand up too.

Charb said he wanted to die standing, and he did. And tonight, the cops are hunting halfway across the world for people who chose to destroy his work, who decided to kill him and the other victims of this massacre, over a cartoon.

Does that bother you? It bothers me. It sure as hell does.

By Buzzfeed's Nathan W. Pyle, Loryn Brantz, and Will Varner. — By Buzzfeed’s Nathan W. Pyle, Loryn Brantz, and Will Varner.