Carol Bergman

Autocrats invariably target not only human rights defenders and journalists but also writers and artists. They instinctively recognize the power of words and, by extension, free and creative expression to spark imagination, kindle hope, and allow people to imagine different and better worlds built on equality, freedom, and human rights. In the absence of free expression, other freedoms are quick to die, paving the way for autocrats to write their own rules…

 

-Marilynne Robinson, "Agreeing to Our Harm,"  NYRB, 7/18/24

 

 

On a hot Saturday morning in late June, I donated another cache of books to the Elting Memorial Library in New Paltz, NY, my new small hometown, a well-read town, which also boasts many visual artists and a state university. An "elite enclave," in other words, in the distorted vision of some. Elting Library will have their 67th  library fair at the end of September.  There will be books on tables in the parking lot of the library, music, and plants for sale, a festive occasion no matter the weather. Last year it was raining  that week, I recall, but no matter. Tents protected the paper books, sales were brisk--the fair yielded about $30,000 that day according to Crystal Middleton, the new director of the library-- and the post-Covid socializing among neighbors and visitors was intense.

 

Library fairs and book sales of donated books have been a fixture in many small towns across the United States since the 19th century. Volunteers gather to do the work of sorting, lifting, pricing and selling on the day of the event. It's labor intensive work, and some libraries have shifted to smaller events to supplement state and/or local government funding. At the Stoneridge Library, due west of New Paltz, the library fair has been abandoned, but there's a new bookshop which operates year round and raises about $10,000 per year, as compared to $14,000 from the past annual book fair, according to Jody Ford, the library's director. All the books in the shop are donated and the volunteers enjoy chatting to the shop's customers, members of their community, readers one and all. "It's a great success," Ford says.

 

Up in Woodstock, the barn behind the library is still taking donations for their 83rd library fair scheduled for July 22nd. Some libraries, such as the Gardiner Library have segued to book sales rather than Library Fairs eliminating anything other than the books themselves. It's still takes a lot of organizing, volunteerism, and muscle power, but is less complicated.

 

Will library fairs and book sales continue into the fast-paced digital world, or will they slowly disappear, becoming a quaint footnote in a town's history? It's hard to say from the vantage of 2024. A community's devotion to its residents' continuing education and sense of belonging is most important, especially in an over-sized disparate nation such as ours. And for those of us who celebrate knowledge and civil discourse, books—what they contain, what they inspire—are our mental furniture and cultural legacy. It is no wonder that so-called "controversial" books have been targeted by the radical right. Organizations such as Moms of Liberty are intimidating librarians, parents and, by extension, their own offspring, homogenizing their education and reading lists with their self-righteous censoring.

 

I am haunted by the dystopian vision of the abandoned, trashed Boston Globe newsroom in the episodic adaptation of Margaret Atwood's prescient Handmaid's Tale, the hallways reverberating with June Osborne's solitary daily run as she awaits her rescue.

 

 

According to the PEN America data base, "Writers at Risk," there were 339 writers from 33 countries jailed in 2023, an increase of 62 writers compared to 2022 and 101 more than in 2019. American writers, journalists and artists are not rounded up or incarcerated, but that does not mean that pressure is not applied, or that cancellations do not happen, early signs of a despotism our "founders" would have abhorred.

 

This post is dedicated to Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter currently on trial in Russia for his reporting, Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things,  who has been charged by the Indian government under the new Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA)  for comments made in 2010 about Kashmir, and to Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi whose jail sentence in Iran may be extended.

 

 

We have the war in Gaza to remind us how suddenly horror can descend on a region, how a provocation can unleash utter disaster, and how the contending pathologies of a few men can destroy lives by the scores of thousands.

 

-Marilynne Robinson, "Agreeing to Our Harm," New York Review of Books, 7/18/24

 

 

 

I was perusing a book of paintings and drawings by the neo-Impressionist painter, Paul Signac, to distract myself from The Great Debate, when I came across the drawing I have used to illustrate this blog post. The wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine grind on, others flare constantly. Signac's minimalist rendering of war zone desolation stirred me into thinking that it might be time for me to attempt a sequel to Another Day In Paradise, my book about—and with—international humanitarian relief workers. My thoughts at the moment coalesce around domestic first responders. To that end, I profiled a firefighter this week for the local paper. 

 

Here's the link. Click off on the X to defeat the firewall.

 

https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2024/06/24/the-heart-of-a-first-responder/

 

 

I have also been talking to former soldiers and relief workers again about their experience of war, and their recovery from war. I have an untested theory that one of the many causes of PTSD is our fundamental abhorrence of harm as codified in the commandment: "Thou Shalt Not Kill." As soldiers are taught to kill, and expected to be able to kill, I believe that the brain resists, and that the resistance settles in the soldier's psyche as PTSD. Some carry the wound of war to their grave.

 

Something similar may happen to humanitarian workers. They are exposed to killing machines and dead bodies as witnesses and healers, which is exposure enough. They may be unable to re-enter "normal" life, or self-medicate, or collapse. Or, they may have the tools and resources to keep going until they retire; it's variable.

 

When war, school shootings, insurrections, and corruption overshadow our lives, and an upcoming election, we must re-engage, re-imagine, and strengthen our fundamental human and humane values, be they religious, or secular.

 

This post is dedicated to all the civilians in war zones who have been killed, or are struggling to survive.

 

 

…man, as Thomas Mann says, is a confused creature. And he becomes even more confused, we may add, when he is subjected to extreme tensions…

 

 

-Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve

 

 

 

I never understood why my mother didn't want to own Chanel #5. It was a comme il faut scent for every woman of the haut bourgeoisie when I was growing up. I envied girl friends who ransacked their mothers' stash and wore Chanel #5 to parties. Comme il faut, I coveted a bottle of my own for my 16th birthday. But it was not to be. Like much else in my growing up years in a community of refugees, explanations were limited, or non-existent. After a while, I knew to leave my elders alone especially when the dismissive, "Why do you ask?" signaled an end to the conversation. Until my first year of college when I matured into defiance, I could not answer the—why do you ask?—show stopper.  Defiance was considered  disrespectful  in my family. The punishment was a pained silence, a silence that inflamed my curiosity and my imagination. Thus is a writer and reporter born, though that took many more years of education and experience.

 

My mother died before I could ask her about her boycott of Chanel # 5 and it was only recently when I watched  the Netflix biopic about Coco Chanel, Coco Avant Chanel, that I understood: Coco was a Nazi collaborator. Why my mother chose not to reveal her legitimate disdain for Coco Chanel I do not fully understand. Certainly she knew enough about her by the time I requested that lux bottle of perfume. So, I will hypothesize about my mother's silence on this particular boycott: Dynamic, fast-paced assimilation, similar to my parents' choice of the most American names possible for their children and the epidemic of nose jobs during my high school years suggested to me as I "came of age." I didn't succumb. My resemblance to the bas reliefs of Akhenaten gave me pleasure and intrigued me more recently when a cousin invested in DNA sampling and it came back "North African." 

 

But what does any of this matter when the question "Are you Jewish?" is thrown at me unexpectedly. I know that the stranger who has dared to ask is thinking about the tragic war in the Middle East, as am I, every day. How will it end? When will it end? "Why do you ask if I am Jewish?" I might say if I have mustered enough courage, as I often am wary when someone asks. Has the stranger conflated Israeli with Jew, and Israeli with American secular Jew in particular? Is the stranger antisemitic, responding solely to my elongated North African face? Do they think I can solve the war? That I have taken a side? That I am a diplomat or a seer? To maintain my zone of safety, I answer the question about my identity, ethnicity or religion (take your pick) with the strange inversion of what my parents said to me: "Why do you ask?" Or, with emphasis, "Why do you ask?"

 

So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering… Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.

 

-Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

 

…His thoughts were unjust and inhumanely cruel…and all the way home he despised them until his head ached. And a firm conviction concerning those people took shape in his mind.

 

-Anton Chekhov, Enemies

 

 

 

Over the weekend I read my students' manuscripts, walked and talked with good friends, began reading Beverly Gage's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of J Edgar Hoover, Emma Goldman's autobiography, and Chekhov's short story, Enemies, cooked fresh vegetables into a stir fry, checked my email on my phone, skimmed the newspaper, and tried to stay off social media. I went out for a late lunch with my husband on Sunday and watched him feed the sparrows pieces of his bagel as gently as St. Augustine in that beautiful painting by Botticelli, though I might have made this up as I can't find the painting. No matter. What I want to convey here is the silence and peace that descended upon us as the sparrows flew away with their bounty, the air cooled, and the sun slipped over the Minnewaska Ridge.

 

Late, one of the weekend days, an offer came in from the New York Review of Books— $ 10 for 10 issues, print and digital—and  I could not resist. Before the weekend was over I  had read Jonathan Shulman's essay about what Israel must do to remain a viable, safe nation-state, and Aryeh Neir's essay about war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Neir is the internationally revered co-founder of Human Rights Watch and if he is contemplating changing his mind about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, so am I. He waited a long time before he used the word genocide to explain the Hamas instigated disaster, and the Israeli response. War crimes, certainly, even ethnic cleansing of the West Bank as the messianic settlers continue their nefarious actions. But this bombing of Gaza—hospitals, tent cities, schools, children—genocide loud and clear, Neir has decided. What made him change his mind was the refusal of the Israelis to permit humanitarian aid from entering the strip, famine weaponized, a breach of well-established international humanitarian law.

 

So, there it is: genocide. It's not easy for American descendants of pogroms and the Holocaust to acknowledge atrocities perpetrated by the Israelis. But they/we must.

 

If only I was a diplomat negotiating in a velvet curtained room, I might be able to remain calm and "objective."  But I cannot. I have Israeli family, Palestinian friends. I embrace them all.  I weep as I write, I work for peace.

 

 

For definitions of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide:

 

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

 

 

 

 

To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune.

To elect him yourself was a disgrace.          

   -Samuel Adams

 

 The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution."   

― Benjamin Rush

 

Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."

    ― Benjamin Franklin

 

 

 

The man approached me while I was on the elliptical. We had talked once before, but I'd hesitated giving him my card. My intuition told me not to do that, something about the insinuation of his body between the machines as he approached me, though I'd asked him not to disturb me while I am working out. Now he was doing it again. Someone had told him I am a journalist, or maybe I had. And he had a question. "When I'm done with my workout," I said firmly.

 

It's a small gym in a small town and I carry my professional profile with care. I get occasional phone calls informing me of local government corruption, or a story about an undocumented worker who has been harassed. "Off or on the record what you say to me stays with me," I always say. Trust is important, not only to get the story, but because it is important to me personally as a reporter. I abide by the NY Times ethics rules, clearly stated below every reporter's bio.

 

The man was doing his weight work in another part of the gym. I could have left without seeking him out, but decided to keep my promise. We took off our headsets and he began to talk frantically. He is distressed by all he has been reading—the degradation of the environment, wars, the dysfunction in Washington. "And why aren't reporters reporting?" he asked. The question didn't make sense. Hadn't he just told me what he'd been reading about? Then I understood: he hadn't been reading, he'd been scrolling on social media, His "stories," were just sound-bite headlines. "That's not reading," I said.

 

Now I had a job to do, and it wasn't reporting: I took out a pen and paper from my backpack and created an instant reading list for him. He calmed down and thanked me.

 

Am I any less fearful these days than this semi-literate man? Does my knowledge base protect me from feeling out of control and despairing? Absolutely. But the despair resides in me, and everyone I know, like an undertow. The only antidote for me is more reading, thinking, engaging in civil discourse, and writing.

 

Recently, I've returned to the colonial history I read at university as an American History minor, and to contemporary updates that realign the historical narrative to include the genocide of First Peoples and enslavement—egregious omissions in textbooks when I was young. This week I am reading a recent biography of Dr. Benjamin Rush by Stephen Fried. It has renewed my hope that the American "experiment" will continue apace. Raised Quaker in Philadelphia, Rush was an abolitionist, or became one as his education deepened, he traveled abroad to medical school, and  returned to America to participate in the declarations of independence and the revolutionary war.  Many of his student notebooks are available at the University of Pennsylvania library; some have been digitalized. Rush kept common books throughout his life which read more like reporters' journals, with doodles and sketches all over them. A constant student, eager and attentive, any educator would have enjoyed Rush's presence in a classroom. And if he were alive today and I could interview him, what would he say? Perhaps this:  It is not a time to relinquish hope or abstain from the struggle of an electoral emergency.

 

Doctors have always been considered non-combatants on the battlefield, tending to the wounded on both sides, as did Dr. Rush.  They step up when others opt out. They have courage, and we must have courage also. Our body politic, our citizens--all of us--are wounded. We must work to heal. Liberty lost is not easily retrieved.

 

 

Who can imagine the bitterness of a first suspicion that something in this object of complete love was not quite right?

 

         -George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

 

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it…

 

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

 

 

 

Sometimes a memoir writer can be a rascal or rapscallion, as the Brits would say, the prose pithy, the plot a romp like Catcher in the Rye,  the tone wry, until a moment arrives—and it is always unexpected—when the action stops and the reader has to either close the book to catch her breath, or return to the sentences that have made her lose her breath, sentences such as these from William Yukikazu Fellenberg's Sayonara Cowboy:

 

"Whether or not it is true is irrelevant. I accept it as part of my mother's world of the kami, the ancestor spirits who inform events that swirl into the future. She tilts my chin, so my face turns up to hers. The salt spray spumes to the heights of where we stand. Before pieces of the ocean land on your lips, you know it is delicious."

 

I met William Yukikazu (Bill) Fellenberg in a writing workshop at a local library soon after I arrived in the Mid-Hudson Valley. He read aloud from his memoir and I was intrigued. We then met for a coffee and chatted about writing and the writing life. It was obvious that Bill had been writing for a long time, had the drive to tell his unusual story, and the discipline to bring a book to completion. Nonetheless, it took him ten years to finish. Born in Yokohama, Japan during the American occupation, his mother, Sachiko, was a Japanese "shopgirl," his dad, William, a soldier in the occupation army. He brought them to America and Bill grew up in New Jersey, mostly with his paternal grandparents. He learned English quickly. "During our first spring and summer with my grandparents in Millington, my voice found words and arranged them in the American way, all by itself," he writes, understating his supple adaptation. He developed a likable, albeit mischievous persona, got into and out of trouble, loved his grandparents and was loved by them with a protective intensity, more so whenever his too young and inexperienced father wandered away, returned, and wandered away again. 

 

His mother never could adjust to life in America, and had a breakdown, it seems. Eventually, after much struggle and suffering, a decision was made: she must return to Japan. At just 8-years-old, but wise for his years, Bill was given the choice and decided to stay with his father. He felt guilt, the way a boy feels guilt, when he lied to his mother about his wish to return to Japan with her. The most heartrending passage in the book takes place on a ship in the New York harbor as Sachiko is about to sail away, leaving her husband and son behind forever.  The son writes: "Back then, I could not grasp why she left and why I stayed. Did she abandon me, or did I abandon her?" That was a child's thought. As an adult, in conversation, Bill uses the word "deserted" to describe his mother's departure.

 

"Have you ever been to Japan?" I asked him during a recent Zoom conversation.

 

"I have not and I have some regrets. I may do a pilgrimage with my son, who my wife and I adopted from Korea, and his wife, born in China."

 

At one point, a friend with Japanese connections offered to help Bill search for his mother, but to no avail. Despite this sadness and trauma--a disappearance without return--Bill retained his optimism and found  the courage to write about his complicated and challenging childhood with a strong and authentic voice. It's a book I could not put down and read in two sittings.

 

For more information visit

 

 

https://tinyurl.com/SayonaraCowboy  

 

 

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

 

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I

 

   

In the midst of book culling, reported here in March ("The Books Inside Us") piles of old photo albums and two scrapbooks surfaced. I cannot remember the last time I printed a photograph, or created a photo album, or a scrapbook, and wonder how historians will gather documents from personal clouds. Most startling as I perused one particular album from a trip to Vienna, I found a photo of my maternal grandparents' marriage certificate with my mother's handwritten note: Marriage certificate of my parents. Therefore it was legitimate.

 

I wrote the two intriguing sentences down in a notebook and have been pondering them ever since. I also texted them to my sister; she also has no idea what they mean. And so it remains a mystery, an opportunity to untangle a family secret, or a prompt for a story, a story that has been buried and cannot be unearthed other than in a writer's imagination.

 

So it is with people in photographs that cannot be identified, erased by the passage of time and distance, or the contacts in my phone if I have neglected to annotate a connection in the notes. My daughter made a beautiful scrapbook for my 60th birthday, and as I flipped the pages, each one either a letter from a friend or relative, or an artistic collage of photographs, I marveled at both the familiarity and strangeness of the images and remembered stories. The process of looking and reading evoked some sadness at the passage of time, lives lost before, during and after Covid, or the interruption of connection after a move across the country, across the ocean, and back again. But I also marveled at the life I have lived thus far and the rendering of my personality and life's work through the eyes of others. This scrapbook, an objet d'art, is a gift in many respects. And to find it again, as if for the first time, as it surfaced in the culling, was an even greater gift. I took photos of the photos and the letters with my phone, and sent them out as texts. Most recipients were grateful for the memento, thanked me, and commented in a variety of ways, adding more story to the stories. One or two texts went unanswered. That sent me to Google and Facebook to find out if the person who had attended my intimate 60th birthday party was alive, dead, overseas, or in prison. Those stories for a future story here, or elsewhere.

 

When I was working on a short biography of Mae West for Chelsea House Publishers,  a source suggested that I go to the New York Public Library Lincoln Center  Branch to search for scrapbooks Mae West's family, friends and fans had donated. It was a treasure trove and took me nearly a month to pore over, every day pleasurable and immersive. I was witness to Mae West's childhood and fascinating career in real time. I could hear her authentic voice—not her stage voice—telling me her story as the photos and memorabilia accumulated. The collection has all been digitalized for the benefit of future biographers. And though it's unlikely that anyone will be writing my biography, my 60th birthday undigitalized scrapbook, and the photo albums, are valuable to me and my family, which is value enough.

 

 

In the end, the courage of women can't be stamped out. And stories - the big ones, the true ones - can be caught but never killed.

  

― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

 

 

Of all the commentators pontificating after the first day that Stephanie A. Gregory Clifford—aka  Stormy Daniels—took the stand in a New York City courtroom, it was only Molly Jong Fast, daughter of Erica Jong, author of the iconic feminist novel, Fear of Flying, who, in my opinion, got it right: Ms. Clifford did okay, she stood up to a hectoring insulting cross examination, she's brave. In other words, let's reframe the reporting and the words we use to describe what we are witnessing here: Election interference, yes. But also an exploitative casting couch story reminiscent of Harvey Weinstein. A 20-something-year-old woman was hoping for a gig and the gangster who refused to use a condom and blocked the door, well that bully in the story is familiar by now. Think about how young Ms. Clifford was at the time, 30 years the bully's junior. Who has more power in that situation?  And, please, call her Stephanie Clifford, her given name, and stop using the now tiresome moniker "porn star." More accurately, she's a sex worker, and like every other American woman, she has rights, and is deserving of respect on the witness stand and in the media. If she cries, if she rants on, she's communicating. Listen to her.

 

By the second day on the witness stand, the pundits referred to Ms. Clifford as "impressive," "stalwart," and "admirable," her shoulders back, sitting up straight, or her body leaning forward attentively to counter aggressive questioning from the defense attorney. I consider her a heroine, and a beneficiary of the women's movement from the days of suffrage to #pro-choice to #metoo and beyond.

 

Let me affirm for the jury that I am not, nor ever have been, a sex worker, but like most women, I've had my share of inappropriate propositions over the years. Like Ms. Clifford's experience, the most egregious was firmly tied to a job offer, a job I coveted. I was called in to WNET—a PBS affiliate—for an interview with a well-known producer who insisted that we meet at a diner for breakfast, his go-to for "taking meetings," he told me. But we'd never met before and I thought the setting strange, and a bit too intimate. I don't like to eat when I am interviewing, or being interviewed. No chomping, no food dribbles, or worries about what to choose from the menu, or who will pay. A diner? Really? I ordered a cup of tea and watched the guy eat and ramble on about his life and his wife. I didn't care about any of it, but I didn't stop him, and I didn't walk away, which in retrospect, I should have once he started talking about his wife.  Once the meal was over—and  it seemed endless—too much friendly chitchat to the waiter slowed it down—we  headed across the street, up the elevator and into a secluded office, door shut. I was already worn down by the guy's self-aggrandizing chatter and felt intimidated and a bit woozy. He saw my weakness and started coming on to me with more pointed suggestive remarks. He asked about my marriage. Firmly, I told him it was none of his business and that I was leaving. For an instant I worried that the door was locked. It wasn't. Needless to say, I didn't get the job.

 

So, it isn't hard to imagine what a very young Stephanie Clifford felt like in that hotel room, or to identify with what she said to herself, "What did I get wrong to end up here?" Now she has had her day in court and did well, or well enough.

 

This post is dedicated to every woman in these United States who has been harassed, intimidated, gaslit, silenced, or refused an abortion. May we all get out to vote in November for the men and women—gay straight or trans—who  care about the future of this country, and the world.

 

 

If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free.

 

An intimacy of strangers. That's a phrase I've sometimes used to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading, that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader.

 

-Salman Rushdie, Knife

 

 

 

 

I begin my blog post today with a tribute to Salman Rushdie, his fortitude and recovery from a near-death experience. I won't reiterate the particulars here of the brutal slashing; Rushdie refuses to name his assailant in his new memoir, Knife. He's just A.

 

It saddens me that the World Voices Festival, which Rushdie was instrumental in launching, has been cancelled this year. It's a testament to how fearful and unfree writers are feeling these days. How we are taking precautions we would never have considered before. How we are self-censoring. And all of this must stop.

 

It was Rushdie's new book, and his courage, which supported my decision to accept an invitation from the Woodstock Library Forum to read from and discuss my new book, Becoming a Writer.  I hadn't planned on yet another reading. But I think it's important to get onto the library steps, so to speak, as friends of Rushdie did at the New York Public Library to support his rehab at the Rusk Institute and honor his work. His injuries were beyond even his fertile imagination. He's back home now, writing, and publishing. 

 

I will be "standing up" for him and all writers at risk at the Woodstock Library Forum on Saturday, May 4 @ 5 p.m.  Bring a notebook and free flowing pen, or an electronic device. Let us read and write together in a spirit of peace, freedom and compassion.

 

This post is dedicated to all the writers at risk throughout the world. For more information:   https://pen.org/issue/writers-at-risk/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We can't stop here, this is bat country.

 

-Hunter J Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

 

Do all men kill the things they do not love?

 

William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice

 

 

 

 

The credentialed journalists in the courtroom were writing furiously with pen and paper. Clearly, they hadn't lost the skill.  But it seemed quaint nonetheless, and telling in its retro ordinariness. The basic tools of reporting were engaged: listen, record, remain skeptical. But once in the studio these scribes let it rip with gleeful analysis and sounded almost righteous at times. Who could blame them? Who can blame any of us? We're all wrung out, waiting for the day that the man who has created such havoc in our body politic is taken away in shackles. Back in the 18th century, not that long ago in many respects, he would have been hung or drawn and quartered. Now, we are "civilized," evolved, and the rule of law presses on, albeit slow as molasses.

 

Then there is the fear factor.  A journalist on MSNBC and a juror or two expressed dismay at feeling uneasy. Let us applaud their courage and, yes, thank them for their service.

 

And I wasn't even planning to write about this today. Not at all. I was thinking of something else entirely: a bat in our apartment. The day had already been permeated with fear and loathing in the courtroom, in the Middle East, on the college campuses, and as we sat down to relax in front of the last episode of Astrid,  a delightful French detective series on Netflix, I spotted a strange swiftly moving black shape scurry into my office from the living room. It looked like a tarantula and I shrieked, a damsel in distress, my husband the knight in shining armor as he wielded a broom and I held my phone's flashlight aloft in the closet. Yikes! What was that? How did it get in here? Will it harm us?

 

We attacked it ruthlessly.

 

Then it was over. The creature was dead. We scooped it up and put it into a plastic bag without touching it. "I think it's a bat," my nature-savvy husband said. We looked up "bats," we read the word "rabies," got more freaked out. And then, remorse. We wanted to apologize to the endangered creature we had killed, a wee brown bat, so essential to our ecosystem. And the more existential question:  Why do we so mindlessly kill what we fear?

 

Self-preservation and survival is a reflex action when we are attacked or threatened unexpectedly, our sense of safety shattered, that's a given.  But why respond with obliterating force when such force is not necessary. The metaphor is obvious, I am sure. Do I have to spell it out? What would happen if we resisted animal instinct and gazed at the life form that has become our—real or imagined—enemy, in all its nakedness and vulnerability? Dear reader, can you answer this question?